“The proportions of female practitioners vary across the Criminal Justice System (CJS) organisations. Over the last five years, female representation has remained constant within the Ministry of Justice (67% in 2019). Likewise, only slight changes have been seen since 2015 regarding female representation in CPS staff (65% in 2015; 66% in 2019). The female majority in Magistrates’ Court staff has continued to increase, also, recorded at 56% in 2020.
The representation of females among His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) staff (excluding National Probation Service (NPS)) has increased over the last five years, from 39% to 42% … the HMPPS HQ (and Area Services) has a majority female staff, increasing to 59% in 2020.' MoJ stats.
Is having only around a third of Criminal Justice staff male such a triumph for equal rights? Human interest cases such as sexual assault, harassment and stalking require the investigators at every level to look from both sides, and to try to understand where each is coming from. It's no longer sufficient to simply 'Believe the complainant' in a post-Depp-Heard culture; in fact, it's been recognised as infantile, and infantilising to the criminal justice system, which is already considered biased toward women by the majority of the general public.
The high-profile cases of Liam Allan, Sir Cliff Richard, Carl Beech and the Depp-Heard trials have done some positive work in redressing a terribly skewed field, but nowhere near enough. Academics complain daily - but necessarily privately - of feeling isolated, hounded and sent to Coventry for no other reason than their chromosome count; or if they dare to show a flash of pro-male understanding, pressure pile-ons.
The arts, publishing, justice, media and academic sectors have been fully 'taken over' by fourth-wave feminist woke activists, bent on completing the work of Andy Warhol's would-be assassin Valerie Solanos on a wider cultural scale. Metaphorically speaking of course, but in the way that women only had the kitchen to look forward to, or call their own, now the same is true of the sports field for men.
Justice and academia especially require cool heads that are neither swayed by emotional arguments nor tainted by an anger at an overdone, supposedly patriarchal past. Traditional social structures, whether patriarchal or technocratic, have benefited the world for thousands of years, leading us to the 8 billion throng we are today, increasingly digitally connected. The wars and power and blood are all part of that story, and it's as useful hating that as it is hating the gleam of your father in the flash of an eye.
You only need to have a mixed-sex Zoom meeting to observe how differently the two sexes see things – as spectrum-like as they can appear, there is still such a phenomenon as male and female-pattern brain thinking. It would seem that the one-hundred-year social project of feminism is still in its 'anger' phase, and terrified to leave it to step towards rapprochement with the evil, competitive, bloodthirsty, destructive male.
Because that's all he is, right? Criminology departments have become full of professionally positivistic young women, and while that's much better than not enough, it's not as good as something like 50/50. Who will these women be helping, communicating with, or trying to understand the sometimes very heinous crimes of? The 95% male prison estate population, and the one third of British men who have a criminal record?
Criminology is suspended somewhere between the disciplines of Law and the humanities, but it needs to deal with the latter before it grapples the former. Understanding an extremely, compulsively violent man might not just happen if he genuinely can't help it, and not everything can be explained by upbringing.
So, in the same way that the successful criminologist needs to integrate understandings of nurture and nature into their case studies, so do they need to appreciate both female and male pattern thinking.
There's just a possibility that having more males than around one in four might help in this kind of logic, however allegedly unfashionable might that way of thinking be in itself.
By Sean Bw Parker
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