Barristers are still behaving badly…
After Joanna Hardy revealed the toxic culture of criminal justice, Harriet Tyce looks back on her own career at the Bar
When barrister Joanna Hardy spoke out last week about the lewd behaviour she had experienced at the hands of male colleagues; of their “behaving like they were on a stag do”, suggesting that she organise case dinners on account of the fact she is a woman, or “making repeated jokes about breasts and skirts”, many were shocked to hear that the profession could still be so utterly arcane. I count myself among them, finding her reports sadly similar to my years spent practising as a barrister, during which fellow female colleagues and I were forced to tolerate an endless stream of crude “banter”, which was always dismissed as a harmless by-product of the job’s work hard, play hard mentality.
In 1997, I was in my early twenties: a pupil barrister at a chambers with a serious reputation. I spent my days trekking round magistrates’ courts across the South East, ploughing through paperwork day and night for my pupil supervisor – it was no surprise that I also liked to blow off steam at the end of the day, heading downstairs to the basement of the dingy bar next door that would provide my regular dinner of a few pints of Stella and a packet of crisps.
It was as if my student days had never ended, with drinks in the college bar transferring to this pub: but I, and the barristers with whom I was drinking – some fellow pupils, and some practitioners of many years standing – were no longer able to use that excuse. From the chat around the table, the loud boasting about cases and the banter, it was indistinguishable from the evenings spent with the rugby boys at university.
Initially, I played along. I was the archetypal “cool girl”, keeping up with the boys. Nothing phased me. Nothing shocked me. Until the night I joined the group sitting round the usual table and sat down with my pint. One barrister specialising in crime was holding forth about a rape case in which he was appearing.
The defendant had compelled the victim to do lots of awful things during the course of her ordeal; details of which dripped off the barrister’s tongue in vivid detail. He was clearly animated by talking about it – especially when he described in lingering detail how she was forced to bite her own nipples. Could I do that, too? He was smiling as he asked the question, fully aware of how inappropriate it was. I don’t think there’s a cool girl in the land who could reply to that with any equanimity. Later that evening, he told me he had a rule
that he would never sleep with pupils, which he seemed to say with the expectation of my response being that rules were there to be broken.
It’s funny, the behaviour one accepts as normal. He certainly wasn’t representative of barristers generally – eventually, I was told of the rumours surrounding him. But it was made clear that it was my responsibility to avoid him, rather than anyone else’s responsibility to deal with him. When it came to inappropriate behaviour towards pupil barristers, ranks were closed. Senior female barristers would say that we female pupils had no idea we were born, so much worse had it been in the Fifties and Sixties, that we should shut up and deal with it.
I’m sure it had been worse for them. But their way of thinking seemed brutal to me, a kind of Stockholm syndrome whereby now that their torment had stopped, they had no intention of protecting any other woman in case it rebounded on them.
This was more than 20 years ago, which is why I found Hardy’s reports so troubling. A rising star of the courtroom scene, who has appeared in the Legal 500 list of leading junior criminal barristers, her comments elicited many nods of troubled acceptance from its senior male figures, such as Mark George QC, who tweeted in response to her original thread that “much needs to change”. Hardy’s posts also echoed an article written last week by Chris Henley QC, whose piece “The problem with being a woman at the criminal Bar”, written for the Criminal Bar Association, outlined the extra physical, mental and financial hardships suffered by women in the profession.
This extends to family matters, too. It was after seven years of working my way up that I left the Bar nearly 15 years ago, only realising upon becoming a mother how hard it would be to reconcile parenting and my life there. The irregular hours and unpredictable workload make childcare hard to arrange but, beyond that, consume a barrister’s life entirely. This engenders a close camaraderie between practitioners, but can all too easily become an environment in which transgressive behaviour is accepted as the norm, and everyone is complicit.
I think it was in 1998 when a senior female tenant in a different chambers leaned over a different table in the same pub and slurred: “I bet you think I’m a terrible mother.” She’d been in court in the morning and, rather than going home for the afternoon, had sought out anyone she could to join her at the pub for “lunch”, or rather for several bottles of wine. At 23, I had no view about how mothers should behave, but what I did think was that she seemed very unhappy. She was one of the few women to be still in practice despite having young children, but the pressures of the system seemed to be taking their toll.
When I wrote my novel Blood Orange about a young lawyer’s first murder case, I was concerned that the hard-drinking, macho world I was describing in fiction was no longer in existence. So much has changed in other professional worlds, after all – even graduate trainees in the City are rarely taken out to strip clubs as a rite of passage now, unlike the heady days of decades past.
Yet as Hardy highlights, these archaisms remain, noting that while “we talk a lot about retention of women at the criminal Bar. We wring our hands and shake our heads as females leave and leave and leave” – not least because the environment remains one in which jibes such as “you’re worse than my wife” are still commonplace.
It seems that if the environment is hostile, it’s hard not to become hostile oneself within it. To counter this, Hardy recommends kindness – asking that chambers consider introducing policies to support female members, which allow for mentoring, a good maternity structure and provisions for looking after elderly relatives. She suggests, too, that senior female members of the Bar should encourage those behind them, which strikes me as sad to even need to be said.
Being a barrister is an old profession, but I wish the attitudes contained within it were able to move better with the times. I wish I had not felt the need to be in the pub two decades ago, that I had been less complicit in my “cool girl” behaviour. But I wish more that the door of the Bar were shut permanently against the kind of culture that permits such toxicity; something that would surely benefit everyone.
Blood Orange by Harriet Tyce published by Headline Publishing Group RRP £12.99. Buy now for £9.99 at books. telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514
It was entirely indistinguishable from the evenings spent with rugby boys
Even City trainees are rarely taken out to strip clubs as a rite of passage now