silly wimminz, guns are for boys!

[slemslempike]

There's been a news story in England about a police officer being shot, though not fatally. This is obviously pretty nasty,

However, I am angry with the press coverage of the incident, and especially the reported comments of Lancashire's Acting Assistant Chief Constable, Jerry Graham. Yahoo! (I check my mail there, I don't rely on them for news, thankfully) quote him as saying:

"It troubles me greatly that at a close confrontation level, someone is shooting not only a police officer but a female one who was clearly identified."

What the fuck? Why on earth would he think that shooting a female police officer is worse than a male one? Is it interfering with their strategy of throwing women at (male, of course) criminals and hoping that their famous chivalrous instincts kick in and they put down their weapons to catch her? That's probably the only way in which the quote makes the vaguest sense.

The BBC don't quote this in their (shorter) story, but have headlined it "Armed robber blasts woman officer". In a follow-up story, "Arrest after woman officer shot", they end with this:

Pc Johnson is the latest female officer to have been shot while on duty.

In November 2005, Sharon Beshenivsky, 38, was shot dead as she tried to stop an armed robbery on a travel agency in Bradford.

Three months later, trainee officer Rachael Bown needed emergency surgery after being shot in the abdomen while attempting to apprehend a suspected burglar in Nottingham.

Women just aren't cut out for police work, poor lambs, as they aren't equipped with a penis with which to deflect bullets. Seriously, what on earth is the point of that? To imply that only women get shot? Or that when men get shot it doesn't really matter? Unfortunately, the answer is fairly obviously that the point is to reinforce the idea that real police officers are men.

Comments

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

Oh gods yes, me too.

Also "Police Criticise Women Drink Drivers" was a nice ceefax headline this morning. Then the stats - out of 650ish people caught, over 100 were women. Now, excuse me, but really does gender matter in drink driving? Is it MORE shocking when women do it than men? So much so that when 5 times more men drink drive, it is the women who are drink driving that are the scandal? ANY drink driving is scandalous.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Oh god, I hadn't seen that Women Drink Drivers thing. How utterly stupid. I heard something, I think on Radio 4, where they were talking about the inane reasons people ring the emergency services, and every single example they played were from women, which was kind of weird.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

By the way, I am amused by the idea of a penis that deflects bullets. This is quite a difficult image to forget and still amuses me this morning. :)

[chiasmata]

YES. To you, obviously.

I heard that bit about 'not only a police officer but a female one' on the BBC news this afternoon, and had a little shout at the radio. Idiot.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I did vainly hope that Yahoo! was making the hole quote up, but apparently not. Grr.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is ridiculous. Another thing I find strange (on the other side of the coin) is the outrage that, say, a car bomb has killed 20 people in a market place, including women and children. As if male fruitsellers were somehow more legitimate targets.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Yes, and also the idea that "people" does not include women and children unless it's specifically indicated otherwise.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I recently saw a notice on a lamppost reading 'Please do not feed the seagulls as they can be a nuisance to children and people.' Wish I'd had a camera.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Hee! Much as it might occasionally seem to be the case...

[kerravongenius.livejournal.com]

There was a time when women were respected and violence against them viewed as unacceptable. Personally, I'm glad some men still feel that way. Would you really prefer violence against women to be seen as fine?

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

1) No, there wasn't. There is no 'golden era' when women weren't subject to violence because of their sex.

2) Seeing women as 'other' actually increases the likelihood of violence against women being seen as acceptable. Anger at this othering is, I thought fairly obviously, what my post is about.

ed: initially wrote unacceptable by mistake.

[kerravongenius.livejournal.com]

1) I didn't say women didn't suffer violence, I said that violence against women was seen as unacceptable.

2) Like it or not, men and women will always see each other as other, because they are different. Trying to pretend otherwise is counterproductive and personally, I don't want an equal right to get shot at, stabbed or otherwise done in.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's a useful distinction - if it still went on, it was acceptable at least to the perpetrators, and it wasn't at significantly lower levels than it is now. So it was in fact as acceptable as it is now - more so, in fact, if you think about the scarily recent advent of marital rape as an offence.

That's not what othering means.

[kerravongenius.livejournal.com]

Violence against women has increased. When policewomen first started going out on the beat, it was rare for them to suffer violence. These days, they are attacked almost as often as men. Of course, when a man says this is a bad thing, feminists get angry with him. If he said it was a good thing, they would still get angry with him. The poor chaps can't win.

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

Violence against policewomen has increased but I don't think violence against women in general has. It has become a lot less socially acceptable, particularly in the field of domestic violence.

[kerravongenius.livejournal.com]

I read it as "acceptable" anyway. :)

[ex-rita.livejournal.com]

There was a time when women were respected and violence against them viewed as unacceptable.

Not all women - just white, well-to-do "ladies." Women of color, poor women, and un-"ladylike" women (unwed mothers, etc) have never had the "privilege" of being on a pedestal, and in the past (and often today) were perceived and treated as little more than animals.

[kerravongenius.livejournal.com]

Surely all the more reason to be grateful when any man shows respect to any woman, rather than accusing him of dreadful things just because he doesn't want women to be hurt.

Actually, neither racism nor class prejudice is gender-specific.

In any case, my mother was a district nurse in a rough area of London during the sixties. She was out at all hours, quite unafraid, since a woman, and a nurse in particular, was safe in areas where men would not go unless they had some means of defending themselves. These days, attacks on lone nurses are practically commonplace. My mother was working class. Her grandmother, incidentally, who was well below the poverty line, the wife of a miner with 13 children to support, was equally free of harassment and abuse. In fact, the men in her community were very respectful towards women, even the local landowner, Lord Aberdare, who was deeply concerned about the plight of elderly widows and the aged poor in general. The position as regards unwed mothers was not as black and white as you would paint it either.

I know that feminists like to promote the view of woman as victim, but sometimes they overstate their case.

[cookiemonster01.livejournal.com]

I too was dissapointed at the media coverage of the shooting. The impression I came away with was that somehow this crime was particularly heinous because the police officer was a woman which seemed to me to imply that women are somehow less capable or need protecting when working as police officers and secondly, as you say below, that men get portrayed as something approaching legitimate targets. Shouldn't the 'non-bias' policy of the bbc include issues of gender as well as politics?

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

The thing is, it's not like the police have a particularly good track record of treating female officers well - the cases of sexual harrassment being ignored, and discrimination in promotion - and yet they are trying to say that they want to give female police officers special protection from other people.

[notmarcie.livejournal.com]

I haven't even dared to dissect the rightwing press coverage of this. I'm betting on several uses of WPC, even though that rank doesn't exist in the police force. Also "girl cop" will be no doubt sprinkled around.

The officer's comments are very annoying and show that he doesn't really accept women as equal colleagues in the police force.