How the women in blue are beating sexism in the police force

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/20/women-in-blue-sexism-police-force-officers

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When I came up with the idea to make a Radio 4 documentary about sexism in the police service I was inspired by cases such as Carol Howard, a firearms officer in the Metropolitan police, who was awarded £37,000 in aggravated damages last year having been targeted in a “malicious” and “vindictive” campaign of race and sex discrimination.

Then there was the shocking case of PC Barbara Lynford. From 2002 to 2005, she was the only woman in an all-male team of firearms officers at Gatwick airport. She said her boss was openly sexist, officers refused to sit next to her and made remarks about her breasts. They often read her private phone messages, and left pornography where they knew she could not fail to see it. In researching the programme Women in Blue, I spoke to Henrietta Hill QC, a leading lawyer in sexual discrimination cases, who represented Lynford.

Hill has found that there has been a culture shift within the service in recent years, but that problems still prevail.

“My perception generally about sexism within the police is that it is probably right that the more overt forms of discrimination are less common,” Hill told me, “but I don’t believe that there is yet full equality between male and female police officers, as there isn’t in other organisations.”

I could think of nobody better to present the programme than Jackie Malton, former DCI of the Metropolitan police and the real-life inspiration for the character of DCI Jane Tennison in the gritty police crime series Prime Suspect, first broadcast in 1991. Malton joined Leicestershire police in 1970. At that time, the women’s police department (WPD) was run separately from the mainstream service, and the role of the WPD was to deal with issues affecting women, such as missing, sexual assault cases, and domestic violence.

Malton wanted to get into the CID, and in 1975 her chance came when the Sexual Discrimination Act came in, which changed the working conditions for women and gave them equal opportunities. At one stage she was put in charge of a spate of pram thefts in the area, and Malton faced appalling sexism from a number of male colleagues. But Malton persevered and rose through the ranks, making DCI in 1989.

I first met Malton in 1989 at a conference on domestic violence, when she was representing Hammersmith and Fulham domestic violence unit. In a workshop on police responses to domestic abuse, a senior male officer claimed that the police had changed “unrecognisably” in the way it dealt with such crimes since the “bad old days” when it was viewed as a tiff between husband and wife. Upon hearing this, Malton was on her feet, telling her superior that this was “Bullshit!” She went on to outline every way in which the police were still letting down victims, and won applause from many of us in the room.

In 1990 Malton was contacted by an ex-police colleague asking if she would be able to help the writer Lynda La Plante with a script she was developing based on the experiences of a female DCI heading up a murder enquiry. Malton was one of only three female DCIs in the Metropolitan police at that time, and soon began working as script consultant on what would become Prime Suspect.

Thanks largely to Malton, the dire situation for women in the police was exposed and confronted within the series, and a number of serving and retired female officers we interviewed for the documentary recognised the misogyny within the storylines, and wished to model themselves on Helen Mirren’s character.

I was expecting to find strong evidence of a culture of misogyny within the service, and little change over the past couple of decades. But I was wrong. That became clear from the people we spoke to, though there are still several pockets of discrimination within the police, and the occasional dinosaur that resents female bosses, but there is no public service in Britain for which this is not true. According to Malton, the police service has been the lead organisation in the Gender Agenda debate, where female officers have been at the forefront of change. Other male-dominated professions have been slow to catch up.

I did approach a number of former and current female police officers who had taken discrimination cases against colleagues, but none were prepared to take part in our programme. Reasons given ranged from reluctance to stir up bad feelings, to being gagged by a legal agreement post-settlement. Their voices, had we been able to include them, may well have given a different slant to the programme. So would the involvement of very junior officers, who are unlikely to have been given permission to appear, simply because of rank. But these caveats aside, I share Malton’s optimism that, thanks to feminism and the tenacity of many women within the service who refuse to stand for inequality, or sexual harassment by male colleagues, the police service could well be setting a fairly good example to other employers. The days of Life on Mars really do seem to largely belong in the past.

• Women in Blue is on BBC Radio 4 tonight at 8pm