6 Fully integrating women into policing
Women’s Police Departments began to close and to be integrated into main police forces during the 1970s. The introduction of the Equal Pay Act (1970) and the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) meant that the segregation of women in professions was no longer legal.
This critical juncture was not welcomed by all female officers. Some felt that decades of specialist experience and support for women victims of crime were being set aside. Consider Figure 9, a letter printed in the Daily Telegraph in 1982 which encapsulates such concerns.
Figure 9: Letter to the Editor, Daily Telegraph, 26/1/1982 [Source: https://go-gale-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/ps/retrieve.do?tabID=Newspapers&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&searchResultsType=SingleTab&retrievalId=5c325857-60ff-46af-8b52-2aa63755a35f&hitCount=328&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm¤tPosition=177&docId=GALE%7CIO0702991609&docType=Letter+to+the+editor&sort=Pub+Date+Forward+Chron&contentSegment=ZTHA-MOD1&prodId=TGRH&pageNum=9&contentSet=GALE%7CIO0702991609&searchId=R3&userGroupName=tou&inPS=true]
The text reads:
Sir - Until a few years ago every police force in Britain had a trained specialist branch of women. Every woman recruited into a force underwent the same basic training as her colleagues.
She was required, as she progressed through the service, to pass exactly the same promotion and technical examinations as her male counterparts.
Every woman officer at various stages throughout her service received specialist training and instruction in dealing with cases of assault on women and children and the action to be taken in such cases.
Then, a few years ago, a system of ‘integration’ was introduced within the police service requiring all officers, men and women, to perform the same duties, After 60 years’ experience a highly organised specialist branch within the police service was disbanded overnight,
Now we are faced with cases of children being battered and neglected to the point of death. In addition we were to see on television the deplorable handling by police of a victim of alleged rape.
Beryl Derwin, Former Supt. Metropolitan Police. Richmond, Surrey.
The response of male officers was often outright hostility. As Pam Giles notes, recalling her first day in Plymouth after integration:
There was a lot of resentment. They didn’t want women on the section. It was the old-fashioned attitude ‘we don’t want women here’.
The resentment and sexism of male officers frequently prompted abusive and hostile practices. One female officer recalled:
The sergeant said to me, ‘you’re new […] Have you been initiated into the job?’ ‘No’ [I said] [...] And they lifted up my blouse and stamped me all over with a rubber stamp, saying, ‘Verminous: to be destroyed’ [...] I went back to my office and I said ‘Well, why didn’t you warn me?’ [they said] ‘Oh well, they do it to everybody, you know’.
Female police officers were initially expected to accept this behaviour from their male colleagues with few channels of effective redress. In 1983 the first female Assistant Chief Constable was appointed (Alison Halford, Merseyside) and the British Association of Women Police (BAWP) was formed in 1987. It was not until 1995, however, a mere 30 years ago suggest removing ‘a mere 30 years ago’ as OL courses can live on for years and this will date, that the first female Chief Constable was appointed (Pauline Clare, Lancashire).
The ‘firsts’ of women policing therefore belie the significant struggle women had in police forces historically. Alison Halford, for example, wrote an article in the Police Review claiming that:
… there appears to be a strong but covert resentment of the competence of a woman who can get to the heart of a problem, shows creativity and innovation, and manages to acquire a reputation for getting things done.
When the position today is compared with that of the 1970s and 1980s, considerable progress against an equality agenda has been made. Yet significant problems remain. Independent research published in 2018 concluded that sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour towards women were still ‘a serious problem for police forces’ (LSE, 2018).
It seems highly likely that the internal culture of policing is a factor which shaped how policing was conducted historically. You will now explore this via a consideration of:
- the historic policing of ‘domestic’ violence
- the historic policing of violence towards sex workers
- the historic police treatment of women in custody or when being questioned.