‘We’ve got people in the police who shouldn’t be there’
A year after Sarah Everard’s death, the police chief tasked with tackling violence against women tells Claire Cohen why public trust is shattered – and her plans to rebuild it
When Maggie Blyth was a student in Leeds, she found herself in the shadow of the Yorkshire Ripper. The history undergraduate was a resident in the same halls where Peter Sutcliffe’s final victim, 20-year-old Jacqueline Hill, had lived and been murdered barely four years earlier in 1980.
It was an era of Reclaim the Night protests and female dread which continued long after Sutcliffe was behind bars and about which Blyth recalls the “absolute fear of violence… the irrational fear of being harmed walking home at night.”
She reels off a list of other such experiences: “People standing very close to you on the Tube or sitting really close in the cinema. All that common – what we now call ‘street harassment’ – you think you have to put up with. And I don’t think we have to put up with it. We have to change it.”
Blyth is the woman who has been charged with that change. In October, the 57-year-old was named as the first national police coordinator for violence against women and girls, tasked with implementing a new framework that demands action from every police force in England and Wales to make women and girls safer.
The role, for which she put herself forward as then-Deputy Chief Constable of Hampshire Police, was announced last summer by Priti Patel in reaction to the horrific murder of Sarah Everard – a tragedy which, almost unbelievably, marks its first anniversary on Thursday this week, ahead of which the Home Office has confirmed its commitment to elevate violence against women to the same level of policing priority as terrorism.
As Blyth was haunted by the Ripper murders, so the heartbreaking details of Sarah’s death have stayed fresh for so many of us; how serving Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens was able to abuse his powers to kidnap, rape and strangle the 33-year-old as she walked home in south London.
Blyth, who is the mother of three daughters and lives in the rural West Midlands with her husband, joined the police in 2016 via the direct entry fast-track scheme – immediately becoming a superintendent. Prior to that, she had spent 30 years in public services – starting in probation before moving to child protection. In Oxford, she chaired the independent Safeguarding Children Board – leading a headline-making report into failures around child grooming gangs in the city – and has published five books on the subject. Until joining the police, she held a ministerial role with the Parole Board.
It was her experiences around safeguarding – in which she regularly dealt with talented front-line officers – that persuaded her to make the jump to policing, feeling she had something to offer. Clearly, she knows a thing or two about what goes on behind closed doors in Britain.
“I’ve seen only too tragically the impact of violence, usually from men on women’s lives,” she says, when we speak over Zoom. She has broken off from a visit to a police station in West Mercia and is sitting in the sort of soulless room I suspect characterises her days. “But for much of my career it’s been something that people haven’t thought really happens.”
Blyth declares this a “watershed moment”, with cases such as that of 28-year-old teacher Sabina Nessa killed on the way to meet a friend; sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman murdered in a London park; and Ashling Murphy, 23, attacked while jogging in January, all grabbing public attention.
“The absolutely appalling circumstances of how Sarah Everard died at the hands of a serving police officer rocked policing, but I think it was also a final point for many women and girls,” says Blyth.
“For the first time in my career, violence against women hasn’t gone out of the headlines for over 12 months, and it’s difficult and upsetting. The public are saying ‘we’ve had enough’. And for the first time, in the past six months, I’m hearing men say to me, ‘OK, I get it.’
“If you look back to 2010 with Jimmy Savile, it was a marker for child abuse. In the same way, I think 2021 is a marker for violence against women.”
Blyth thinks the pandemic played a significant part in changing attitudes. “Lockdown highlighted how vulnerable women can be on isolated streets, at home and online. I think the penny finally dropped for the public… an understanding that women die every week in this country at the hands of men and many don’t even make the front pages.”
Couzens, of course, was able to manipulate lockdown rules to carry out his terrible crime.
“What will be imprinted in the DNA of men who want to perpetrate this level of harm is using any opportunity that comes their way to do so,” she says. “Being able to know that streets are quieter and that many people are inside… lockdown would have offered more opportunity for men to perpetrate violence.”
In a speech in June last year, then Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick referred to Couzens as a “bad ’un”, painting a picture of a force in which he was a lone monster. Blyth says it’s not just “one bad apple” but is at pains to point out that misogyny in the police is not exceptionally high. “Sexism is rife in policing, because I believe that sexism is rife in society. I don’t think it’s any worse in policing than elsewhere,” she says.
“It will tend to be things like ‘love’ or ‘bird’ – demeaning language. That’s the tip of the iceberg. The other much more concerning side is the men who come into policing because they want to use their power and control for sexual purposes, either with vulnerable victims or colleagues, and we have to root that out.”
Dick’s departure in February was, Blyth feels, untimely given the task ahead. “The [ex] Met Commissioner is one of the leaders I’ve admired most in my career. I think it’s the toughest job in policing without a doubt. It really saddened me to see her go, as the first female commissioner and at a time when we’re trying to tackle violence against women and girls.”
Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to say the Met currently faces the biggest crisis in its 193-year history.
Dick’s resignation was accelerated by an IOPC (Independent Office for Police Conduct) report that found officers at Charing Cross police station had joked about rape over WhatsApp, with one officer writing: “Getting a woman into bed is like spreading butter. It can be done with a credit card but it’s quicker and easier to use a knife.” Last month, The Telegraph reported that sexual offence allegations against Met officers had doubled in the year since Sarah’s death. And just 10 days ago, three Met officers were charged with sharing “grossly offensive” misogynistic messages with Couzens – himself the subject of indecent exposure allegations which were never investigated.
I could go on – and according to Blyth, it will.
“I was absolutely sickened when I read those comments by Charing Cross officers. That was a very low moment,” she says. “I think this is going to get worse before it gets better.”
This, she explains, is because “we’re seeing more officers calling out behaviours from their colleagues that are despicable or disgusting. And increasingly they feel confident that senior leaders will listen and something will happen. But also because people like me are turning over stones in a way that we’ve never ever done before. So we’re going to see more and more cases coming to light. As painful and difficult as that is, I think we’ve got to go through this.”
Is it painful for her personally?
“It’s really hard. It affects me every day of my working life,” she says. “It affects me outside my working life because I get asked questions by my friends, my daughters: ‘How can you do what you do, when we’re reading things like this?’ And I say it’s because I believe in the organisation, and I work with amazing women and men. But I know that we’ve got some people who come into our police service who shouldn’t be there and I want them removed. We don’t want to have people like that tainting how we are seen by the public.”
Of equal concern is the sheer number of officers against whom serious allegations have been made, but who remain in their jobs. Several of those involved in the Charing Cross scandal are still serving, while other high profile cases include that of Des O’Connor’s daughter, Kristina, who is taking action against a Met officer after he sent her an email telling her she was “amazingly hot” when responding to her report of attempted robbery. He was found guilty of gross misconduct at a police hearing but remains in his role.
One controversial suggestion has been to conduct spot checks on officers’ phones, in much the same way as drug tests.
“It’s something we’re going to have to look at,” Blyth says. “Where male behaviour might once have been down the pub on a Friday night expressing sexist or misogynist attitudes over beers – it’s now online.
“We have to be proportionate about weighing up people’s human rights against the need to investigate areas of their personal life. But our workforce has to comply with much higher standards of ethical behaviour than probably any other profession. We have powers that are different. It’s something we have to impart upon new officers, but also upon older officers, who perhaps haven’t grown up in a social media world.
“That’s taking us into territory where we might have to use access to WhatsApp in a different way. But it’s such new territory that it needs to be considered ethically.”
She also wants to interrogate what is setting these incidents in motion.
“What is it that enables boys growing up and men to think it’s OK to harm women? That still distresses me in my late 50s,” she admits.
Blyth points to lockdown school closures as having made things worse. “We left boys and girls alone without the leadership that school and teachers provide; for a sustained period their only ‘friend’ was social media.
“On the one hand, that’s images of how girls should behave. But it’s also the grooming of boys that takes them into more sinister parts of the internet. At its worst that’s groups like incels but it’s also just the access to pornography, to violence and thinking it’s OK to treat girls in a certain way. And that becomes normalised, but there’s been no normalising back by leadership from teachers that might challenge what’s set in their minds.
“If you give [boys] all of that – which will have very strong misogynist traits – it’s no wonder you see levels of sexual harassment increasing. I’ve been quite shocked by some of the cases we’ve seen since the pandemic. And I don’t think we’ve fully appreciated the full impact on boys’ and girls’ lives.”
For Blyth, growing up in the 1970s in Bristol and Oxford before the era of social media, any sexism she faced was more about “the expectations of how you should lead your life”.
“There was a strong sense when I left university of ‘you have got the option of a good career and don’t waste it by going off and having a family, don’t think you can have both’. But I knew that I wanted both – and I’ve done so successfully.”
Blyth and her husband (about whom she remains tight-lipped) have three daughters in their 20s and 30s, and three granddaughters. As one of three girls myself, also around the same age as Sarah Everard, I’ve had more conversations about safety with my parents and sisters over the past year than ever. Has she?
“Yes, absolutely. It’s ‘we’ve had enough, we are not going to tolerate what you had to in your generation Mum, we want things to be different’. I brought all my three girls up with a very strong sense of understanding about the impact of male violence.”
Given that justice for rape survivors is at an all-time low in Britain – with just 1.3 per cent reaching prosecution – would she advise her daughters to report an assault if, God forbid, it were to happen?
“Absolutely,” Blyth nods. “I have huge confidence that if any woman or girl experiences sexual violence the police will listen.”
And yet, in November a YouGov poll found that just 29 per cent of women now trust the police…
“I understand completely why that trust and confidence is shattered,” she concedes. “It really saddens me, because I work with passionate colleagues who prioritise keeping people safe. I want to do everything I can to bring back that trust. So it’s really important that women continue to report what’s happening so that we can bring about the changes needed – we won’t have the opportunity again.
“But policing alone cannot stop violence against women and girls – if we really are serious about it, we’ve got to work collaboratively. It will need investment, it will need a public campaign where all of us
– and particularly men – stand up to their responsibilities to challenging attitudes.”
A report last week suggested that a
‘It saddened me to see Cressida Dick go, as the first female Commissioner’
‘I don’t think we’ve fully appreciated the impact of lockdown on the minds of boys and girls’
separate court be set up to deal with a chronic backlog of rape cases that sees some women wait up to two years – a recommendation Blyth supports – and about which Andrew Cayley, HM chief inspector of the Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate, said: “Frankly we should all feel ashamed.”
“I do feel ashamed,” agrees Blyth. “I want to bring lasting changes to women and girls’ lives. But that is going to have to be a transformational change to our criminal justice system. What I don’t want is for us to go back into our silos – and for the police to blame the CPS and the CPS blame the police because that doesn’t help victims and it doesn’t stop perpetrators. We have to have that overhaul of the criminal justice system. We owe it to women and girls.”
For that to happen, how important is it that the next Met Commissioner is female?
“The Commissioner doesn’t have to be female. I would like it and support it – but I think we need male allies, too. Whether it’s a female or a male, that person just needs to stand strong on prioritising violence against women and girls.”
Might it not be a step backwards to have a man in the job now?
“I thought the same about my role and I felt that needed to be a female,” she says. “It’s a difficult one, because I think that it would be a really strong indication of continuing to make progressive change if it was another female appointment.”
By the second anniversary of Sarah Everard’s murder, there will not only be a new Commissioner, but Blyth hopes to have made serious progress.
“I want – and my ambition is really high – for women and girls to feel that they can trust us, in terms of reporting crime, but that they can trust officers. And I’m particularly making reference to male officers, I suppose in saying that. I would hope in a year there is greater faith in policing.
“I would also like there to be greater confidence that priority is being given to domestic abuse, rape, stalking and harassment. This year is going to be really difficult as we expose more misconduct and poor standards. And we will continue to see, sadly, women and girls being harmed. It’s going to take time to change attitudes. But I think this time has got to be grasped.”
Failure, she says, would “look like this being just meaningless words”.
“There are plenty of people who say ‘you’re never going to get it to change’,” she adds. “Look at the broken criminal justice system. Look at the lack of confidence in policing. Look at the awful cases coming to light. But if I didn’t believe we could make those changes, then I wouldn’t be doing the job.”
And it’s not a job she can easily leave at the door. “I have had incidents disclosed by friends of my children. I’ve had incidents disclosed by the parents of the friends of my children. People who know me in all sorts of walks of life will often come to me to say ‘this has happened, how should I go about it?’
“Sometimes it is really hard to hear. But it’s also what drives me because I think I’m here for a purpose: to make the lives of women and girls better.”