Police to use ‘anti-terror’ methods to tackle violence against women and girls

We spoke to Maggie Blyth – who’s the National Police Chiefs Council lead on violence against women and girls – and we began by asking her why she thought that violence against women and girls had gone up by 37% since 2018.

Maggie Blyth: It’s a huge volume of crime, and we’re calling this an epidemic. We think there’s many reasons for that. We have some confidence that women and girls are coming forward to report these crimes to us. This is 20% of reported crime in to policing. Policing is dealing with this every day. On a level of the national threat that it is, we’re taking our methodology from the way we approach counter-terror, the way we approach serious and organised crime. To have national coordination, to set standards through our National College of Policing, to look at training, to look at ensuring we have the right workforce in the police service, to provide the right service to victims.

Cathy Newman: And once they have come forward to report, what confidence can they have in the police, because hundreds of police officers across England and Wales are now under investigation for sexual, domestic abuse themselves?

Maggie Blyth: Because of the scale of what we’re reporting today, 1 in 12 women in this country will be victims of these crimes. We think 1 in 20 of the population are perpetrators. So largely men, not always, but male perpetrators will be working in every organisation, and certainly we’ve found them in policing. We’ve been turning the stones, rooting out those officers that we don’t think meet the standards of a police officer.

Cathy Newman: If you’re treating it like terrorism, then you’ve got to put more money into it, haven’t you? How much money, how much more money? There’s a spending review coming up, make your pitch now to the government.

Maggie Blyth: I’ve already had that conversation with new ministers into the new government. There is no doubt in my mind and in the mind of every police chief in this country, that because of the level of threat that we’re seeing, we have to properly resource it. We are aware that there will be a spending review coming up through government, and we are clear that we will continue to do what we need to do. But having that national coordination is needed.

Cathy Newman: We’ve reported extensively on deepfake online porn. How concerned are you about the scale of that at this stage?

Maggie Blyth: One of the features of doing a threat assessment from policing, this is our judgement of the scale of a threat, is to look at emerging complexity, emerging new crime and the online harm in terms of violence against women is something that still, we’re at the early stages of understanding just the extent to which criminals can use this.

Cathy Newman: Recently we reported on leading MPs being deepfaked, and they then called in the police. I spoke to the officer handling the investigation. He basically said, ‘well, there’s not very much we can do. We’re not going to be able to catch the perpetrator because they’re probably overseas.’ May be true, but there wasn’t that sort of drive to investigate.

Maggie Blyth: There has to be a drive to investigate it, and we have to understand the awful impact that this has on women in positions of authority and women anywhere.

Cathy Newman: You’re looking at huge backlogs in the courts. Prisoners being released from jail early because there isn’t the space for them. How would you describe the criminal justice system right now and how it’s serving victims?

Maggie Blyth: We know our prisons are near full to capacity. We know with the scale and the numbers of perpetrators that are out there, that even if we were to arrest all and lock them up, that isn’t going to be the right approach.

One of the interesting features of our threat assessment is the age of perpetrators. We know that children and young people are drawn into being both victims and suspects of these types of crime, particularly online. It wouldn’t be appropriate and right to criminalise all, the average age is 15, all young people at this stage. So we’ve got to have a different approach to how we’re tackling these crime types.