UK Women’s Safety Crisis Revealed in Official Report.
The investigation is part of the so-called Angiolini Report, which was prepared and published yesterday, chaired by the prominent Scottish lawyer and former Attorney General of Scotland, Elish Angiolini, at the request of the UK Home Office, following the shocking crime of the abduction, rape and murder of a British woman named Sarah Everard by a police officer.
Sarah Everard was abducted, raped, and murdered by Wayne Cousins, a then Metropolitan Police officer, while returning to her home in south London in 2021. In the first part of her report, published in February 2024, Angiolini had exposed a history of sexual harassment and structural weaknesses in the police selection and supervision system, and in the second part, published on Tuesday, she focused on the wider dimensions of women’s insecurity in public spaces and the ineffectiveness of preventive and policing mechanisms.
The report, which was prepared after fieldwork in eight police forces, a study of 240 cases of rape, sexual assault and public indecency against women in public spaces, interviews with senior police commanders, officials from various ministries and civil society activists, as well as a national survey of 2,000 people, presents a systematic picture of women’s insecurity and structural weaknesses in dealing with sexual violence.
A hidden crisis with incomplete data
In summarizing her findings, Angiolini states that the scale of violence against women and girls in the UK is shocking, but at the same time, even officials do not know exactly how many women are victims of sexual crimes in public spaces, because the available data is incomplete, fragmented, and unreliable.
According to statistics cited in the report, which cites the UK National Police Strategy on Combating Violence Against Women, around one in 20 adults in the UK is identified as a perpetrator of violence against women and girls each year, and at least one in 12 women will be a victim of some form of gender-based violence in their lifetime. However, the report itself stresses that the true figure is likely to be much higher than this official estimate.
According to the document, crimes recorded under the category of violence against women and girls account for nearly 20% of all recorded crimes in the UK (excluding fraud), and on average, around 2,959 such crimes were reported to the police every day in 2022-2023; this figure does not include the countless cases of unreported sexual violence.
At the same time, the Angiolini report notes that even within this broad framework, there are no specific statistics on sexually motivated crimes against women in public spaces, and, for example, there is no single dataset available showing how many women were raped in public spaces in the past year. The report’s author sees this as a worrying gap in policy and planning for women’s safety.
Women on ‘constant alert’; from changing routes to normalising harassment
According to surveys and testimonies collected for this research, a large proportion of women in the UK, from students and employees to policewomen, change their routes daily to reduce the risk of being targeted, coordinate their travel plans with others, send their location to family members, and avoid certain public spaces, particularly at night, parks, and public transport. The report says this has created a state of constant alert for women, with many of them viewing street harassment as so normal that they only report the more severe cases.
Citing a United Nations survey of more than 1,000 women in the UK, Angiolini notes that around 71 per cent of them said they had experienced some form of sexual harassment or violence in public at least once in their lives, from unwanted teasing and touching to stalking and threats.
According to new data released by the British media at the same time as the report, almost half of respondents said they felt unsafe in public spaces, with the figure rising to 87 per cent among women aged 18 to 24. Angiolini’s report calls this a crisis of confidence in security among a younger generation of women.
The women participating in the study emphasized that their feelings of insecurity were not simply exaggerated, but were based on real and repeated experiences of street harassment, harassment on public transport, and even indifference by officers when reporting these incidents. The report states that many women said they would only report harassment if they were confident that the police would take it seriously and take effective action. This is even though, according to the report, trust in the police has been severely weakened in recent years.