FIXATED BY MURDER
The TV criminologist who says women sexually harass him – because they’re . . .
SHE really didn’t look the type. She was tall, with blow-dried blonde hair, wearing a Barbour jacket and clutching a copy of my book. We were at a literary festival, the sort where every volunteer has an English Literature degree, the crowd is a sea of Burberry umbrellas and the air smells of hearty soup and expensive coffee.
If you’d asked me what she wanted, I would have said a chat about whether her son or daughter should do A-level psychology. I signed a copy of my professional memoir for her and we exchanged a few polite words. Then she asked for a selfie.
As she raised her phone with one hand, she put the other through the lapels of my tweed jacket and tweaked open the button of my white shirt. Her fingers slid inside, found my nipple and pinched it, hard. I was mortified.
‘If I had just done that to you, you’d call it sexual assault,’ I gasped. She laughed. A couple of other people nearby laughed, too. Maybe they thought I was joking. Maybe they didn’t know how to react. I can’t blame them because I didn’t either. This well-groomed, fiftysomething woman had just touched me, sexually. And she’d done it in public, safe in the knowledge she’d get away with it.
I looked around. All I could see was a queue of people patiently waiting to have their books signed, too. The festival was in full swing, the tent a hubbub of middle England chatter as it poured with rain outside. It was all so… normal. In my confusion and embarrassment, I felt I had no option but to carry on. That was several months ago. Today, without a doubt, I know I should have stopped everything and then called the police.
In the last year, in similar professional encounters, I have had my crotch groped multiple times and been i mportuned f ace- t o- f ace with the offer of an alreadybooked hotel room. At the university where I work, I regularly receive unsolicited emails trying to create a sense of intimacy and suggesting face-to-face meetings.
So far, I have brushed everything off as an occupational hazard of being a professor in the public eye. Now, for the first time, I am giving a public lecture for which I have demanded my own security. It’s in Glasgow next month. There are 450 seats in the auditorium, I estimate 90 per cent of them will be filled by women. I will have a bodyguard. I know how ludicrous this sounds for a happily married 60-year-old man who has to watch his weight and is ever so slowly losing his ever so slightly greying hair. I’m not so egotistical that I think it’s me: I blame my job as the face of true crime on television.
In recent years I have had series on BBC1, ITV1, Channel 5 and CBS and I have presented dozens of true crime documentaries. In 2017 I won a Royal Television Society
Award for Channel 4’s Interview With A Murderer about the 1978 killing of paperboy Carl Bridgewater. My Life With Murderers, the memoir I was promoting when I was assaulted, is my 15th book. My 16th is coming out next year.
Women are obsessed with this genre, true crime – both reading and watching it – much more so than men. At any given literary festival, 90 per cent of my audience will be women. When I get a breakdown of the viewing figures for one of my documentaries, it is predominantly women who are watching.
Clearly I am not talking about students in any of the incidents I have recounted here, but for every five criminology undergraduates at a lecture I give, four of them will be female.
For complex evolutionary and psychological reasons that we do not fully understand, women are fascinated by criminals and violent crime. They are drawn to the darkness. Some academics believe it’s a feminine instinct, they want to save perpetrators from themselves. Others believe it’s genetic, that they are programmed to find a mate powerful enough to protect them and their offspring.
Either way, it’s why women start relationships with men in prison, it’s why they marry monsters.
That’s the world I have inhabited as a prison governor, an academic and as a writer and broadcaster. Now, however, it seems to be colliding with a major social shift: one in which women can be more overt about what – or rather who – they want.
And unlike some other targets of their attention, I am not behind bars. Last March, for example, I was giving a public lecture in Birmingham. I was making standard small talk, sounding like a minor royal: ‘I hope you enjoyed my talk. Have you come far?’ to a woman whose book I was signing. She said she’d travelled down from Liverpool by train and I wished her a safe journey home.
She looked at me, flirting hard, and said: ‘ Oh I have booked a room here, a room with a double bed in it, that you and I can share tonight…’
I mumbled that I had ‘ other plans’ and briskly turned to the next person in the queue.
UN BELIEVABLY, having my groin touched has also become an integral part of appearing at festivals and other events. I find it degrading and shocking and make that clear to the culprits.
‘Oh I beg your pardon,’ they say as if that’ s apology enough, leaving me wondering ‘how can you have had your hand all the way down there by accident?’.
Those incidents are designed to be ambiguous. You can brush against someone without meaning to, but the nipple squeeze doesn’t come into that category. If you think it’s not a sexual assault, that I could have laughed it off as harmless fun, as one senior colleague suggested, then try reversing the roles. What if a man had stuck his hand into a woman’s bra and tweaked her breast?
Like many female victims I reflexively blamed myself and
this made me too ashamed to tell my wife, Anne, to whom I have been married for 30 years. Earlier this month I confided in our grown-up daughter who, quite rightly, mentioned it to her mother. I felt like a coward for not having told her myself and, of course, Anne was sympathetic and concerned, not accusatory.
Given my work as a criminologist and in my former role as a prison governor, she’s used to seeing me dealing with difficult and aggressive people. She knows inmates have tried to attack me and take me hostage, that they have spat at me and tried to throw their excrement at me from behind bars. She knows I have been called names unprintable in a newspaper.
She also knows I am a coper and that I have always had strategies in place to maintain my security. This applies equally to prisons and the university where everything from my room number to my office hours is published on the website. I am not hard to find for people who have what you might c a l l a n unhealthy interest in my specialist subject: serial killers.
I have been an academic for almost a quarter of a century and have plenty of experience navigating sexual politics in my working life. I have never been accused of doing or saying anything inappropriate. I just wasn’t expecting to have to transfer this vigilance i nto the unlikely surroundings of literary festivals, public lectures and book tours to deal with women who have got me as a man mixed up with what I do for my job.
The result is that I am far more self aware when I meet people, more guarded in public spaces and it goes without saying I stand a couple of feet away from any woman wanting a selfie now. I have learned to lean in rather than step closer.
I have also adopted a new policy of posting pictures of Anne and me together on social media. ‘My lovely wife enjoying the rugby at Northampton Saints,’ was one recent photo I put up on Twitter. And yes, I have always worn a wedding ring. The only time I have taken it off is when I used to play rugby myself.
PEOPLE wi l l wonder why I originally stayed quiet about the nipple tweaking and the incidents of sexual harassment which preceded it. The answer is shame, the shame that they happened to me and the shame that I normalised them by just carrying on.
I asked myself over and over what I’d done to encourage them. The answer, beyond brushing my hair and dressing respectably, was nothing. I am only just starting to accept that and understand the impact they have had on me. Now I am wondering how many other men have experienced something similar and stayed quiet, too.
My next book is about a murder in my home town of Carluke in Scotland in the Seventies. It is actually a love letter to my three sisters, an examination of the culture of middleclass Scotland back then, a look at gender and prejudice and misogyny. The irony is that as a 60-year-old man I’ll be too wary to appear at any literary festivals to talk about it. Or not without a bodyguard, anyway.