Female safety a priority says Dorset's Police and Crime Commissioner
David Sidwick says he wants women and girls to feel safe
Crimes against women, including domestic abuse and sexual offences, will be a priority for Dorset’s Police and Crime Commissioner, David Sidwick.
He says he wants women and girls to feel safe wherever they are in the county – whether out at night, or in their own homes.
The Commissioner says that the actions of men needs to be tackled both by police and the courts as welll as working on the underlying causes of misogynistic behaviour and attitudes.
“Deep attitudinal changes are needed. Why do so many young men, and it is typically young men, commit crimes against women? …we need to understand and change that behaviour” he told the pan-county police and crime panel on Thursday.
“Across the UK, a woman is killed by a man every three days. It’s a sobering statistic,” said Mr Sidwick.
“We especially need to increase convictions for rape and sexual assault.”
He told the meeting that he will be holding justice agencies to account to ensure that offenders are brought before the courts.
The Commissioner said that he wanted to see an improvement in the confidence of any viciim to report incidents in the first place, knowing that they would be listened and supported until and beyond the time when the offender was brought to justice.
Cllr Sherry Jespersen said while she welcomed the Commissioner’s words she did not want to see women and girls have to change the way they behaved, or where they went, because of what she described as “toxic masculinity.”
“It’s not just a question of better lighting – we need to address this at source,” she said.
“When we are saying to women and girls ‘ this is what you have to do’ to because men are violent – that is not answering the question…we need to go beyond mitigation measures,” she said.
Mr Sidiwck said he was looking across the country at how other areas were tackling the problems and aimed to adopt the methods which worked, including addressing where violent men got their attitudes from and tacking that.
Other areas for the Police Commissioner, raised at the meeting, included doubling the level of rural policing, partially through the use of additional special constables; new speed watch and neighbourhood watch groups; improving ways of contacting the police, including a new web-based system and tougher action against drug dealers and those who carry knives.