News flash: This is not OK
WHEN I was a kid, getting flashed at was an occupational hazard of playing out. Or at least that’s how it seemed to my nine-year-old self.
It happened with monotonous regularity, either to you or your mates, and although your parents didn’t exactly dismiss it when you told them neither did they hot-foot it down to the police station to file a report.
Similarly, when it happened to me years later as a young woman, I treated the experience – at least to those I discussed it with – as a joke.
The bloke was even wearing a mac, for goodness sake.
Truth be told, it had been unpleasant and unnerving, happening as it did in the middle of the day on a quiet street. I’d felt trapped with nowhere to run so just walked on, trying to avoid his gaze.
But, just like my parents, I didn’t report it. Why?
Well, what, I reasoned, were the cops going to do? The bloke would be long gone after all.
I was also slightly afraid I’d be laughed at, not taken seriously. I hadn’t been physically harmed.
And flashing was Benny Hillfunny, wasn’t it? Not pleasant but not at the extreme end of sexual offences.
He was probably just a sad individual and no harm done, right? Right?
Wrong. As a society we now understand that flashing – indecent exposure – can be just the start for some men of a gradually escalating criminal career.
It is red flag behaviour, an act of overt sexual aggression. It is also punishable with a maximum sentence of two years’ imprisonment.
Yet despite this, all too often it is a crime dismissed by some in the police with at best a shrug and at worst a scornful eye-roll.
Women, even here in 2021, are made to feel that they’d be wasting police time in reporting an incident.
But if the numbers of anecdotes
I’ve collected over the years aren’t believed, then the statistics should be.
Data compiled by the Office for National Statistics for England and Wales reveals 10,775 indecent exposure cases were logged by police in 2020. Just 594 suspects were taken to court.
Answer me this – what other offence has a rate as low as that?
This is not OK. It wasn’t OK in the 1970s and it’s not OK now.
Neither is the 21st century version of indecent exposure where instead of a bloke on a street corner exposing himself it’s a fella in their bedroom sending unwanted pictures of their genitals.
I know – who would do such a thing? But talk to your teenage daughter or the woman in her 20s in the office. They will almost certainly have been on the receiving end of such images or know someone who has.
It is deviant behaviour. It isn’t funny or low-impact.
No police officer should be ‘too busy’ to investigate it or have better things to do.
And no woman should be embarrassed or ashamed or think it’s not important enough to report.
Zero tolerance of so-called ‘low level’ crime against women won’t stop every subsequent serious assault or rape or murder.
But it will stop some.