2 Women’s trust in the police
I think we should probably add a trigger warning here to raise that there are discussions of rape and murder.
An internal culture in policing which has problems with sexism and/or misogyny has the potential to influence the way in which some officers respond to violent crimes against women, including serious offences such as domestic abuse or rape.
Consider, for example, the case of Emma Caldwell, who was raped and murdered in Glasgow in 2005. Caldwell was a drug addict who had turned to prostitution to supplement her addiction. It took 17 years to arrest her murderer in 2022. He was found guilty of 33 charges against 22 women, including offences against more than a dozen sex workers.
Activity 2 The police investigation into Emma Caldwell’s murder
Watch the following video which is made up of clips from a Scotland Tonight news piece in which the lawyer for Emma Caldwell’s mother is interviewed about the conviction of Emma’s murderer in 2024.
What does this interview say about the actions of the police in investigating this murder?
[Clipped video on shared Teams OneDrive folder]
Discussion
The lawyer conveys the sense of injustice felt by many and indicates how damaging the case and its subsequent investigation have been to policing in Scotland.
Police Scotland subsequently apologised for the handling of the original inquiry by what was then Strathclyde Police saying:
Emma Caldwell, her family and many other victims, were let down by policing in 2005. […] A significant number of women and girls who showed remarkable courage to speak up at that time also did not get the justice and support they needed and deserved.
During the original investigation many women complained to the police that they had been raped by the man eventually convicted of Emma Caldwell’s murder, but they felt that their reports were ignored by the police because they were sex workers. Such failings by the police in investigating the rape or murder of sex workers is not new. It is possible that the misogyny and sexism unearthed in many forces may be connected to failures in investigating cases of sexual violence and intimate violence against women.
Policing therefore faces two contemporary challenges related to gender. There is a need for more female officers and of greater seniority (to improve the representativeness of policing) and there remains a need to root out the misogyny and sexism which persists among some male officers (so as to improve the track record of forces in investigations involving crimes of sexual or intimate violence against women in particular).
How longstanding are these problems? In the following sections you will learn about the history of women in policing, and the ways in policing has neglected the investigation of certain crimes against women in the past.