Party season predators

Party season might be in full swing, but lurking in the darkness, preying on the most vulnerable, is an entirely new kind of threat. Kate Pasola goes on the hunt for the UK’s nightclub predators ›

How do you know where cockblocking ends and rescuing begins? It’s not really something you can Google. I hover a second longer, unsure of what to do.

It’s 2.20am on a Sunday morning in Newcastle. Bronze street lights bounce off a woman’s waxed shins as she gurns on the concrete steps of a nightclub. She’s folding her arms so defiantly that her polka- dot dress is sliding down her chest, and her offwhite bra is slowly coming into view. A man in cheap chinos is nudging a shoulder into her armpit, nose tracing her neck. A dancefloor injury means a ribbon of blood is dribbling down her foot, a barely there stiletto undone. He has chosen not to notice.

“Do you know him?” I ask the girl from above, surprising myself. She gets a shock too.

“Help me with this!” she squawks, gesturing at her shoe. I ask again, quieter this time, squatting to fasten her tiny buckle as she wilts towards me. She tells me her name is Chloe.*

“I know what you’re thinking,” the man announces, leaning across her

cold body towards me. “I mean, I wouldn’t say no, she’s gorgeous. But I just hate to see a lady left on her own.” His smile seems sour. She shakes her head like a toddler refusing food. “I’m ffffine.” There’s stomach acid on her breath. “He’s going to look after me.”

The lurking bar staff tell me she fell asleep on the toilet. She’s shivering into this strange man’s body heat. Palms eagerly grazing her body, he can’t seem to remember whether he’s tonight’s hero or villain.

“Well, they seem to be getting on really well!” the doorman grins after materialising from inside the club. “Can you do me a favour and pull her top up for me?”

Scavenger hunt

Tonight I’m looking for a very specific type of man. You may not have heard about him, but you’ll definitely have rubbed shoulders with his kind. He belongs to a sinister ring of predators whose primary target is women like Chloe. Women dubbed Single Night Lays (SNLs) on covert internet forums. Women often thrown out of clubs and into the night alone, too intoxicated to know what they’re doing, too disoriented to judge the situation, too tired to care who they’re with.

My hometown, Newcastle – the city I’m visiting tonight – is the UK’s unofficial party capital. It was here that a 17-year- old was scooped up outside a nightclub by criminals and taken to endure a four-hour ordeal of rape and sexual assault. But this threat isn’t specific to Newcastle. Really, no city is off limits.

I’ve seen this type of man in news reports from across the UK. He was in Birmingham, part of a tag-team who found a 19-year- old outside a nightclub (she’d been kicked out after collapsing inside), abducted her in a transit van, drove her to an industrial estate and raped her. They then dropped her off at her student halls. Last year’s most famous “scavenger” was married city worker Sanjay Naker, a Londoner who was caught on CCTV piggybacking an 18-yearold to an alleyway and sexually assaulting her while she tried to flee.

Then there’s the Pick-Up Artists (PUAs) – men who gamify meeting women using abusive tactics such as “negging” (deliberately lowering the self- esteem of “targets” until they’re grateful for attention), and circulating bars sober in pursuit of SNLs. PUAs swap their tips in rotting corners of the internet, on bodybuilding forums and on the fan forum of Roosh V (a “men’s rights” activist who famously advocated to make rape legal on private property in a 2015 essay that he now refers to as a “satirical thought experiment”).

Just by Googling “guide to drunk women, Newcastle”, I come across a 101 in “hunting” for women, published by a Roosh V fan named El Conquistador (“The Conqueror”). Enthusiastically, it describes how women in Newcastle are “completely inebriated” on Friday and Saturday nights. “Loose morals here will make it fairly easy to get a SNL…” it reads. “If, that is, you can drag her away from the rest of the hen party… If you can find a girl who is not sharing a hotel room and you can pull her away from her group you’ll be money [sic].”

I wanted the scavenger not to exist. I wanted him to be an anomaly, a figment of tabloid newspaper imaginations or a keyboard warrior with no real-life manifestation. But here he is, in front of me, straining to squat in his chinos, clutching tight onto Chloe as if she’s his prize for wearing hair gel and buying shots. And he’s about to take her home.

When Niamh* moved away from home to go to university as a 17-yearold, she did what any tenacious fresher would do. She went hard on the pre- drinks. Then she headed to a bar with friends, fell asleep after vomiting in a toilet, and tried to take a tactical nap in a chair.

“I was understandably asked to leave the club,” she recounts. That’s when another man, who Niamh had never seen before, appeared. “He said he was a university Resident Assistant (RA), and that he’d take me home safely while my friends stayed in the club.” He was indeed an RA at someone’s halls of residence – just not Niamh’s. When she woke up the next day, her stomach was rumbling. It was dark outside – she’d missed all her classes. She was naked and bruised. “I remember feeling that I needed to shower… I couldn’t bring myself to get up.”

She pieced together that just hours ago, in her cold kitchen, he had forced her head towards his pelvis and masturbated using her face, shouting expletives while she struggled to speak. He’d filmed her with his phone and attempted to pull down her shirt as she tried to fight him off.

“I remember he told me I’d been ‘looking his way all night’. He went to pull at my shorts and told me, ‘You’re so wet’. I was, in fact, wet – because I had urinated myself. I was so drunk I’d lost control of my most basic bodily functions. I don’t remember anything at all from that point.”

Niamh is now 24, and has never before shared her story. She says she felt like she’d done something

“He said he worked for the university and would take me home safely…”

“deeply wrong”, feeling shame over her loss of control. “The summer before I left for uni, everyone accepted to college or university had a talk from a policeman. He told the girls, ‘If you get in trouble and you’re drunk, don’t expect us to help you’. He used his own niece’s experience of sexual assault by two men on a night out as an example. He basically said, ‘Be careful, because you can’t expect men to behave well if you put yourself in a vulnerable situation.’” She says countless instances of hearing these sentiments led her to feel disgusted and embarrassed, rather than processing the events of the evening for what they were – an opportunistic attack.

But might Niamh’s night have unravelled differently if the bouncers hadn’t kicked her out of the club? If they had properly gauged her vulnerability and prevented her from walking into the arms of her attacker?

Are clubs to blame?

One in three Cosmopolitan readers have been thrown out of clubs by themselves when drunk and 57% felt unsafe on their way home. And those girls from the news stories in Newcastle, Birmingham and London, who suffered sexual assault and rape at the hands of opportunists at night? They had all been thrown out of clubs too. It’s likely that all of these crimes could have been prevented. Because, it turns out, that’s exactly what scavengers are hunting for. Before speaking to Cosmopolitan, Niamh never made the connection between getting thrown out of the bar alone and her attack. “To me that night just made zero sense. Now it seems to have some kind of structure, because if there had been some alternative to a strange man pretending to be my RA, then this wouldn’t have happened.”

But what is the alternative? After all, clubs reserve the right to refuse service to the overly intoxicated, and that includes removing people from the venue who are causing danger to themselves or others. And anything that could pose a risk to their licence (like fighting, drugs and being dangerously drunk) is often seen as “better out than in”, with door staff under pressure to protect the reputation of their venues. What’s more, busy weekendnight bouncers are, at times, too stretched to safely eject drunk partiers. Though many of Newcastle’s door staff are ostensibly vulnerability trained, when I ask for help with Chloe from the bouncer manning the door of the club that ejected her, he tells me he’s unable to leave his posting to help her organise a safe journey home. Later, another anonymous doorman from the same agency admits to having just finished a 28-hour shift, staying awake on Red Bull and coffee. With those employed to keep clubbers safe working themselves to the bone, is it any wonder that decisions affecting the fate of women are sometimes being made all too quickly?

For The Deltic Group – which owns many UK nightclubs, like Southampton’s £6 million superclub Oceana and national chain Pryzm – the solution, introduced in 2014, is “wellness rooms”. Deltic’s Annabel Brown tells me these spaces –

“‘ If you get in trouble and you’re drunk, don’t expect us to help you,’ he said”

colloquially known as “drunk rooms” – feature in all Pryzm nightclubs where there’s space. They are a safe and quiet place, providing a solution to those who require medical assistance, help in finding their friends or are waiting for a taxi.

Brown details that Deltic’s “We Care” strategy (rolled out in 2015) means that many of its clubs also have marshals to escort clubbers into taxis, intentionally non-intimidating door staff dressed in brown tweed and flat caps, plus all of their staff are trained to look out for vulnerable customers, offer support and question anyone leaving the venue alone.

But is such an exhaustive approach too good to be true? Recent negative Facebook reviews of Oceana allege bouncers reportedly “[being] abusive”, using “excessive force” to the point of injury, “bullying vulnerable people” and allowing entry to women reportedly “stumbling… unable to hold the support barrier”. What’s more, Brown tells me Deltic faces a “struggle” making customers aware of these initiatives: “Our big challenge is customers not knowing they can ask for help.” The reviews, Brown says, “are not representative of the service we offer”. She adds, “We do not eject women on their own from our nightclubs,” before stating, “No one can be perfect… but I’m confident that we do look after our customers.”

And though Deltic’s strategies – when deployed – may be comforting in a moment of drunken crisis, should the focus be on the potential perpetrator, rather than the victim? And, if so, how?

Hoping the police might give me answers, I reach out to numerous boroughs across the UK, asking how many incidents of rape and sexual assaults, in recent years, took place near a nightclub or venue, or within eight hours of the victim being ejected. But within days, my information requests are refused. Instead, I conducted my own research, using police tools that identify where crimes take place, I found that – within a seven-month period – there had been 961 sexual or violent crimes taking place at, or near, nightclubs in 10 of the UK’s most popular student cities.

After I fasten Chloe’s shoes and subtly pull up her top, she trusts me enough to clamber to her feet. Before long, we’re triumphantly waving goodbye to the man in chinos, stumbling along the cobbles towards Newcastle’s “booze bus”, otherwise known as the Alcohol Reception Centre. A collaboration between North East Ambulance Service and St John’s Ambulance, the ARC is situated at the meeting point between The Diamond Strip and Bigg Market, two famous stretches of Geordie clubs. It takes vulnerable, ill and injured partiers off the street and fixes them up. Next door is a “Safe Haven” vehicle where, over a cup of Tetley’s, police officers can search records to call in family members for collection. Less than an hour after I drop Chloe off at the Safe Haven, I see her mother arrive in pyjama bottoms and a jacket, car keys in one hand, half furious, half relieved. I feel a pang of guilt for the bollocking Chloe will receive tomorrow – but far less guilty than if I’d left her sprawled on the pavement.

Operation Cloak

I hear whispers of plain- clothed police officers who often patrol Newcastle’s nightlife areas, watching for signs of suspicious couples, like intoxicated women with more sober men, worrying body language and any other indicators that non- consensual sex is about to ensue. Operation Cloak is Northumbria Police’s undercover work taking on potential predators. Not all superheroes wear capes, it turns out, and not all of the city’s safety measures are in plain sight.

“You’ve done well to get this story,” I’m told by Northumbria Police Chief Inspector Steve Wykes when I ask if the rumours of Operation Cloak are true. Still in development, it’s an innovative operation and the first of its kind that I’ve heard of in the UK. But why now? CI Wykes tells me that when he looked further into sexual offences in “the night-time economy” (from taxis and clubs to kebab shops and city streets), what became apparent was that sexual assault generally took place during a “moment of movement” after a “couple” met in a club.

“They either go to a hotel, a taxi, an alleyway or to a house party… and invariably information suggested that, some days later, one member of that couple was saying that things had happened that they didn’t consent to.” After spotting this pattern, CI Wykes and Northumbria Police took greater action in urging his teams to look closer. “I didn’t want my officers missing a drunk young lady maybe being put into a taxi by an older man, to be taken to a hotel where a sexual offence would potentially occur.”

Now, officers are encouraged to spot “moments of movement” and intervene. “We’d step in to say, ‘I hope you’re having a nice night. Do you mind me asking what that lad’s name is? Where are you going?’” CI Wykes explains. “If the answer is, ‘Actually, I don’t know who he is, and I don’t know where I’m going, I was just getting into this taxi, I was just going to see where I ended up’, we would suggest the safest thing to do.”

So far, the operation seems to be proving successful – CI Wykes tells me numbers of repeat offenders have decreased since interventions began. “If someone was behaving improperly last weekend, we don’t see them again this weekend,” he says. “We’re metaphorically wagging our finger at the face of the bloke.”

But, though CI Wykes admits Northumbria police have a significant role to play in preventing this type of offending, he doesn’t think the full responsibility for fixing this problem lies with enforcement. After all, it’s impossible for them to have eyes everywhere. While it’s true that Newcastle seems to be unique in its efforts to protect clubbers, it too is struggling to keep up with demand. CI Wykes tells me: “It’s common knowledge that we would advocate for greater level of resource. If I could put 20 officers out for Operation Cloak, I would, but unfortunately I can’t.”

If not the authorities, then who is responsible for keeping women safe? Some might say the clubs themselves, if profiting from drunkenness, should practise better care for their party-goers. According to Michael Kill, CEO of Night Time Industries Association, the question of where venue responsibility begins and ends is still a matter of debate. “None of the operators we represent want anything less than for everyone to return home safely [but] it is unrealistic to think that as an industry we would be able to manage or take responsibility for every person leaving a premises up until they arrive home and safe,” he told Cosmopolitan. “We work alongside the police, local government authorities, CCTV and street pastors, plus countless agencies and transport business partners to ensure that relevant provisions are made.”

But battered by dwindling interest, with many of us turning our attention to food markets, disco gym classes and nights in with Netflix, an estimated £200 million has leaked from the UK’s nightlife scene. It’s no wonder that venues may be turning to aggressive marketing and attractive drink deals to bring in profits. However, Kill assures me that public safety is a key pillar licencees are judged against and is “of paramount importance, irrelevant of financial position or business levels”. “Our systems are not infallible,” he admits, citing wider factors such as lighting as playing a part, and the hope that staff and partygoers alike will look out for each other. But, Kill asks, “Is this a societal issue that needs to be managed from grass roots?”

What next?

As for the rest of the UK – where plain- clothed police may not be patrolling and “drunk rooms” don’t exist – more often than not, the responsibility of keeping each other safe trickles down to groups of women, as they clasp hands and dance one another away from potential predators. But while building fortresses around one another might prevent ad-hoc attacks, the problem stretches wider than the arms of our female friends.

This is the kind of threat you don’t need to wander the streets at 3am to spot. Scavengers are everywhere. The

“Too many assume that the absence of ‘ no’ is permission enough”

awkward friend of a friend who tells stories of pulling “drunk chicks” in kebab shops. The secret university WhatsApp groups dedicated to rape jokes. The lonely forum- dwellers, the post-grads grinning the word “legal” to one another at freshers’ events, and the guy on a dating app making jokes about Rohypnol. Even in 2019, there are apparently still those who think consent is a spectrum to be negotiated.

Why? Because we tend to focus on the victim – what she wore, what she drank, where her friends were. But if we don’t wrap our heads around perpetrators, we can’t expect to understand their violence. There’s a huge disconnect between what we consider to be “non- consensual sex” and rape.

For this reason, rapists often don’t realise they’re rapists, and survivors often don’t realise they’ve been raped. Studies† have shown that, in surveys, people are far more likely to admit to behaviours like “coercing somebody to intercourse by holding them down”, but when asked if they had raped someone, they insisted they hadn’t, even though the phrases are identical in meaning. Similarly, more women report being victims of those coercive behaviours than of being raped. Throw the murky context of booze into the equation, and we’ve landed ourselves in a sexual minefield. The word “rape” holds so much power that we delete it from our vocabularies – but that means we also delete it from our sightline.

The solution? Education. When it comes to consent, too few people are aware of the intricacies. It’s a situational, complex issue that relies on body language, checking in and verbal communication about the mindset of everyone involved. Too many don’t realise that too much alcohol or drugs can legally impact a person’s ability to consent. Too many people assume the absence of “no” is permission enough. Too many believe consent can’t be withdrawn – but it can. Too many people assume silence isn’t worrying, it’s just convenient.

To reinforce a zero-tolerance attitude to this sort of behaviour, CI Wykes says Northumbria Police may, in the final stages of Operation Cloak, visit potential offenders a few days later, to “speak to them in a very different environment about what was happening, in an educational way”. This last step feels, to me, like a bolt of lightning. Preventive and informative, it leaves no excuse not to understand the clear- cut responsibilities that come with night- out sex.

Perhaps one day, the answer to the UK’s consent crisis won’t lie with taxi marshals, undercover cops and loyal girl gangs running military operations against perceived creepers. Maybe it will lie where it should – with the offenders, and the society that hasn’t yet taught them how to end the night right.

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If you’ve been affected by any of the issues in this article, visit Rapecrisis.org.uk