I’ve been wondering but didn’t think it worth a thread so this looks like a good place to ask.
All we’re getting on this side of the pond are the lurid bits, but if I’m understanding the time line, Couzins was a person of interest – if not outright arrested – before Everard’s body was found, never mind positively identified.
What led the police to suspect him?
There’s a story about Golda Meier (I don’t know if it’s true). There was a string of rapes in one city. A police chief proposed a curfew for women (as they were the ones getting raped). Golda countered that there should be a curfew for men (as they were the ones who were committing the rapes). The story is told as proof of how good a leader Golda Meier was.
Don’t know the full picture but it’s been reported that there was a complaint against him for exposing himself to a woman four days before Sarah Everard disappeared. Which complaint was not followed up on at the time. That was probably one factor. Presumably there was other evidence related to time and place etc. but I don’t believe that’s been released. Rightly.
It can’t be said any better than this.
Well what a great idea to reduce violence against anyone, but especially women - note that the great majority of violence against women is domestic related - how would keeping men locked indoors reduce that violence?
Next, no mention of violence against men - most murder victims in the UK are men, around 2/3rds of murder victims are men, also 75% of victims of knife crime are men.
So why isn’t there some national outcry about protecting men - who are much more likely to suffer violence, injury and death - talk about gender bias here.
It isn’t acceptable that ANYONE becomes a victim of violence, and yes men are the main perpetrators - but they are the main victoms too - so instead of this hype about violence reduction only directed to protecting women, we should be looking at violence against all people and we should sentence violent men accordingly - I have personally seen appallingly violent individuals get away with less than 4 year prison terms time after time. Those who work directly with offenders know who will be back again for violent crime - but the word of those carries little weight with parole boards who prefer to accept reports from specialists who spend perhaps a hour or so a year with them, ibnstead of those who work with prisoners 6 or 7 hours a day 5 or 6 days a week.
What we should be concentrating upon is schoolage bullying, behavioural work, why do we have so many men with a lack of empathy for others?
Seems to me we ignore the majority of victims of violent crime becuase what? I’ll tell you why, its because our society seems to think that men should fight for themselves, and perhaps within that view is a tacit acceptance that weaker men somehow have it coming.
As has been pointed out, instituting a curfew for men would protect many men from the violence, injury and death inflicted on them by other men.
You should be grateful that we’re looking out for your safety!
(As has also been repeatedly pointed out, none of these hypotheticals are being proposed seriously or are considered in any way realistic to implement. It’s a thought experiment trying to get men in particular to see the burdens that are being placed on women by expectations that they must restrict their activities to protect their own safety.)
The problem with thought experiments in this febrile world of fake news is that too many idiots think there is some validity to such an argument.
Those idiots can attract votes - we don’t need ‘thought experiments’ - we need facts and information from sources we can trust. End Of
Considering how vehemently upset so many men get at the bare notion of restricting their freedom in the same way that women are exhorted to restrict their own freedom every day for their whole lives, ISTM that we are actually in desperate need of thought experiments on this subject.
If you can’t handle even the possibility that a lot of “idiots” might be genuinely willing to impose burdensome restrictions on your activities in the name of protecting your own safety and public safety in general, then you have no idea what most women are routinely putting up with.
It makes considerably more, even without the barefoot and pregnant part.
I still wouldn’t recommend it (and I note that panache45 isn’t doing so, that’s just the point at which I jumped into replying to the thread), except as a riposte to anybody saying, in effect, ‘women shouldn’t do x because it increases their risk of getting raped’. Which does indeed seem to be what the case in the OP was.
I don’t think you get the reasoning at all. Women in general – all women – are very often told that we mustn’t go out at night, mustn’t go to particular places, mustn’t wear particular clothes, mustn’t move in particular fashions, because if we do it supposedly increases our chances of being raped. Responding to that by telling men in general that they mustn’t go out at night is meant to point up the problems with that.
Your “perspective” on that is just plain wrong.
That “advice” does put a burden on women. Try following it yourself for a year or seventy and see if you don’t feel burdened by it.
And that advice is also just plain wrong. Women get raped at home, in our own beds; get raped whatever we’re wearing; get raped by the people we’re told to trust to protect us from rapists. We’ve had multiple threads here in which people provided multiple cites for all of this, and the people pushing the sort of “advice” you’re pushing were challenged to provide cites that such advice worked and produced nothing whatsoever.
How does telling women not to go out at night, or telling them not to go out alone, reduce it?
Who is telling women not to go out at night?
This thread is about men not going out at night.
Most of human society during all of my lifetime.
This thread is about a response to that.
However, it’s probably soon going to shift into a spate of defensive objections “warning” women that if they really do impose a curfew on men, then all the violent men are just going to break the curfew and hit the streets to prey on the women who no longer have the non-violent men around to protect them, so there.
The advice of how to defend one’s self is the same for both men and women, and it’s not a burden to listen to common sense. If I go into the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time, I’ll get my ass kicked and my wallet taken. A women might get raped on top of that or instead. If I want to avoid those kinds of risks I take the same advice you’re complaining about being given to women. The vast majority of self-preservation is avoiding getting into dangerous conditions in the first place.
There simply are a small percentage of men (and a smaller one of women) who are predatory and violent. No amount of education or shaming them will change their behavior. The education is for the normal people to learn how to avoid those people until they can (hopefully) be removed from society. If society feels that too many women are being harmed, the education will be more strongly directed towards them, but it’s not a punishment nor does it only apply to them.
We’ve dealt with this kind of false equivalence so often in this sort of threads that I can just quote a response to a similar post from 2016, swapping out the original quoted phrase “a notoriously bad bar at three o’clock in the morning” with your more general but similarly loaded “the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time” and “dangerous conditions”:
For men, how much of town constitutes the wrong neighbourhood? How much for women? When does the wrong time start for men and for women?
More generally, you are on transmit. Try switching to receive
Women aren’t told just not to go into a specific neighborhood that men are also being warned against in the same fashion. Women are told not to go out in their own neighborhoods when men are not warned about those neighborhoods. Women are told not to go out anywhere after dark. Women are told not to travel alone. Women are told not to go into bars in general – not just a specific bar – without male accompaniment. Women are told not to dress in clothing that’s standard for the decade and area. Et considerably cetera. And we are told to behave in particular fashions not because a specific location is hazardous but specifically because we are women.
And yet a number of people have pointed out in this thread that men are on average more likely to be the victims of public violence than women are. So why is such “education” not more strongly directed towards the men than towards the women?
The effect is a punishment. Saying that the intentions are good doesn’t change that.
– @Kimstu, [ETA: re post #32, I seem to have not read a few intervening] maybe you’ve warded that one off! We seem to still be dealing with the ‘but we think it’s just good adviiiiiice!’ argument.
Very good comment!
I understand what you’re getting at but I think you’re missing the degrees of difficulty. As a man I rarely consider my safety when going out at night. I never think about what’s best to wear. I almost never worry about where I’m going. I get into a cab with no fear (except for that time the cabby drove up on the sidewalk). But for women this is a daily occurrence.
I don’t know what the solution is, if any, but the point of calling for the curfew is to hopefully make men aware of the process that women routinely go through. It doesn’t appear to be working for all.
Optimist. 
Standard crime prevention advice from authorities and institutions all follow a similar pattern. Lists of do’s and don’ts to encourage behaviour that avoids becoming an unwitting victim. Most of it is of general nature and common sense. The sort of advice given to the young, who have not yet developed situation awareness and may be in an unfamiliar environment.
Most will be disregarded by more experienced individuals who know how to assess risk. Unless it contains relevant intelligence that is current and up to date concerning a local situation.
Issuing these sort of check lists does serve an important purpose: it absolves an institution or authority from criticism when a crime incident does take place. It transfers responsibility to the victim. Institutions have a tendency to defend themselves in this way.
‘Don’t blame us, you were warned to avoid risk and take precautions after dark’.
The downside of this is that such blanket warnings about personal security can encourage a fearful and nervous disposition. Some people may find their lives completely blighted by exaggerated fears of going out in public. Prisoners in their own homes. Painting the outside world as full of monsters and criminals just creates another problem by blighting peoples lives with irrational fear.
For those who stay indoors, there is another list of what dangers they may face from friends and relatives and domestic violence. So no escape there.
A solution that simply moves a problem away from one institution to another that has to pick up the pieces is of little benefit.
The faith in the police as being reliable and there to protect the public. Well, that trust has been very undermined by this case. It may well have played a part in this appalling murder.
So what is the answer? A 6pm curfew for men? That is absurd, but the point is that so too are all these long list of precautions that women are encouraged to make that restrict their freedom and movement.
Individuals sometimes become dysfunctional and this can descend into violent behaviour. There are usually warning signs before people spiral out of control. There will be a trial in October where we may hear what caused a police officer to become a murderer and whether it could be prevented.
The UK has a low homicide rate and this case of kidnap and murder of a stranger is very rare. That a policeman was the perpetrator is unheard of and has shocked the nation.
Nonetheless it is being held up as a sign of a much more general malaise in society at the root of which is a tendency in some men towards misogyny. It is very difficult to have a rational conversation about that when people are still deeply shocked by this crime.
The Police are coming under a the spotlight and it is suggested that they have a culture that tolerates misogynistic attitudes. That they failed to see the warning signs that this officer was going off the rails. It will all come out in due course.
Whether this case may becomes a ‘cause celebre’ and leads to an inquiry that leads to reform of the internal culture of the police? Possibly…
It has happened before. The Stephen Lawrence case and subsequent inquiry led to an assessment of the police as suffering from institutional racism after the murder in the street of innocent young man by a racist gang and subsequent inadequate police investigation. That led to series of reforms of the police culture that was very far reaching.
It may happen, but the police force is far from the only institution that could be said to be having a misogynistic culture and is need of reform.
The trial is set for October.