It’s been another week of tone-deaf ministers and unenlightened court judgments
Less than a day separated the arrest of a serving Metropolitan police officer on suspicion of Sarah Everard’s murder from the first suggestions that women calm down and put it in perspective. The Metropolitan police commissioner Cressida Dick, wanted to stress that actual kidnap is “rare”.
A professor of criminology, Marian FitzGerald, thought it important to tell other women – twice – on the BBC, not to get “hysterical”. She was being interviewed by a senior man in an organisation which has evidently shared her reservations about women’s fallibility – were they worthy, even, of being paid the same as men? – and it duly went unchallenged.
