Disclosing women’s details to the police won’t keep them safe

Content warning: this post discusses rape and police?

A man in York who a court didn’t find guilty of rape has a “sexual risk order” on him, requiring him to notify police 24 hours before he has sex with any women. He must provide police with their full names, addresses and dates of birth. Somehow, this is supposed to keep women safe.

Except it won’t. It can’t and it won’t.

At best, this will do fuck all. At worst, it exposes women to far more risk than they were at before.

Everything is the wrong way round. The court have clearly acknowledged that this man is a danger to women in imposing the order, and yet rather than take measures that would actually keep women safe, they’ve chosen to hand him the tools to rape with impunity. If this man chooses a victim, all he needs to do is log her details at the cop shop 24 hours in advance, and then what he does may well be taken as consent. This is perhaps a doomsday scenario, but it is not impossible: after all, it looks as though it’s acknowledged that this man is a danger to women.

So why are they telling him he has to gather a vast amount of personal data from women to pass along to the cops, if he’s such a danger to women? Without the order, he wouldn’t necessarily have access to that much information: on a one-night stand, even a last name might not be exchanged, let alone full address and date of birth. Why are they so sure that this man can be trusted with this information?

And furthermore, can the police really be trusted with such information about women who have done literally nothing wrong? What exactly are they going to do with such information? I can’t think of many women who would willingly consent to the police holding their personal data.

It’s like anti-VAW policy from a parallel universe where up is down, left is right, cats are dogs, and keeping women safe means endangering them further.

Keeping women safe is absolutely not about filing a request to fuck involving full personal details. It’s about awareness, knowledge. What women need is to know who this man is, to be able to make decisions. Under rape culture, this cannot happen, because it is about protecting and enabling rapists above all else. We cannot be told who the man is, only be on our guard if a man says, “not tonight, but I’ll get in touch tomorrow. Can I have your number, full address, full name… oh, and date of birth?” (if, of course, he doesn’t just nick your passport to get those details).

I shouldn’t be surprised that there are feminists backing this policy–you can get someone who self-identifies as a feminist to give any quote supporting anything awful that you like–but I am disappointed to see End Violence Against Women’s Sarah Green providing a supportive quote in the Indy. I hope she just didn’t know the full extent of it. I’d hate to think that the head of an organisation dedicated to ending violence against women is backing something which could abet violence against women.

Solutions involving the police don’t work, which has been shown time and time and time again. This case unequivocally shows just how godawful they can be.