Millions of men in England and Wales pose a danger to women and children, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police has said.
Sir Mark Rowley said the figures were “eye-watering” and an “inconvenient truth” as he called for a much bigger effort, a national strategy and more money to tackle the problem.
He relied on an upcoming study produced for police chiefs nationally that says there are up to 4 million perpetrators of violence against women and children, who are mainly men, with one in 10 people being victims, who are mainly women or children.
Rowley, who is Britain’s most senior police officer, said the scale of offending by men against women and children was beyond the criminal justice system to tackle.
He told the London policing board: “When you look across violence against women and children, there are millions of offenders in the UK. Some of the numbers are eye-watering.
When both claim to be the victim…I mean, that’s basically every single case. There are signs you can look for, especially if you are trained on it, but where I’m from, the people who will be responding to it aren’t all that well-trained and sometimes the response is to provide IPV/SV resources to both parties. Which isn’t the worst option to fall back on. If you’re working with a survivor and trained, in my experience, you can usually tell pretty quickly who is the survivor and who is the abuser. But that eye is not trained into a lot of the people interacting with the situation legally, that’s for sure. And that hurts all genders. To your point: including men too because any gender can perpetrate and there is still the idea in so many places that men cannot be abused.
I will disagree with your point that self-defense doesn’t hold up if you stay for years or decades though. Leaving an abusive situation is a nightmare. The physical violence is never reported to be the worst part either; it’s the destruction of self that is the worst part. IPV is designed to make people helpless, hopeless, and reduce their access to all resources that can help. Sometimes all they feel like they have is self-defense in singular moments. I don’t think we can hold that against people.
What a shit situation, yo. I’m sorry that happened to you, and I’m glad you’re willing to call it what it was, a sexual assault. It sounds like your system largely failed you. I wish that wasn’t so often the case. Hope you’re taking care of yourself.