Wolf-whistling is just banter, not a terrible crime
ICAN’T remember the last time I got wolf-whistled. Oh yes, I can. It was last year. I turned round with a grateful smile and the blokes on the scaffolding laughed and then indicated my 18-year-old granddaughter walking beside me.
She laughed too, incidentally, but now Labour MP Melanie Onn wants wolf-whistling to be treated as a hate crime.
She’s set to argue in Parliament that a change in the law would give women the confidence to report unwanted behaviour in public.
She also wants a Nottinghamshire Police pilot, which treated misogynistic acts towards women as hate crimes, to be rolled out nationwide.
But the Ministry of Justice says a change in law is not needed because powers to enable prosecutions “already exist”. Oh for heaven’s sake, lighten up, Mel! What’s happened to the fun, the banter, the “Oops, sorry love” as you bump into someone in a doorway and both have a bit of a giggle? And how does Humphrey Bogart get hold of Lauren Bacall?
Remember her advice to him in To Have And Have Not? “You know how to whistle, dontcha? You just put your two lips together and blow.” With the implication that she would come, if not running, then sashaying to his side.
To be fair to Mel, she does also suggest that “upskirting”, the truly unpleasant act of looking up women’s skirts and sometimes taking photographs, should be classified as a hate crime. She says: “Attempting to take a photograph underneath a skirt is a gross violation of privacy and potentially an act of indecency.”
YES of course I agree. Indeed, upskirting has been an offence in Scotland since 2010 when it was listed under the broadened definition of voyeurism – a much more sensible description.
But wolf-whistling is not a misogynistic crime. It’s not in that coldly predatory category, is it? Honestly, I don’t know any more. Well, I do know – as does anyone who is able to make a judgment based on common sense and humour and not on man-hating hysteria. But not Mel. “People getting that kind