A Green Party peer has suggested that all men should have a 6pm curfew in order to “make women feel safer and lessen discrimination”.
There is currently a large problem across Britain and most of the world. Some men are committing obscene acts of violence and sexual harassment against women. It has to be said that most people disapprove of this, both men and women.
The answer, however, is clearly not a curfew on just one gender because, like fire cannot be fought with fire, gender discrimination acts in the form of sexual harassment cannot be fought by a collective gender stereotype in which all men are categorised as a threat and forced to stay indoors.
The benefits of this proposal are very obvious: it is far easier to commit a violent crime against a woman when it is both dark and there are few people around. Preventing men from being outside when it is dark should surely decrease the number of crimes against women?
The initial issue with the implementation of this proposal would be the ability of the police to enforce it. As police officers should are in no way immune from committing a violent crime, male officers should be part of the curfew also. This leaves less than a third of the police officers left to patrol the streets, enforcing the curfew. Female police officers would likely entice violent and potentially dangerous males out onto the street more.
Furthermore, the night-life economy is huge across the whole of Britain. In large urban areas, clubs and restaurants are filled with people of both genders. Likewise, in more rural areas, pubs and local dining facilities are bustling most evenings. This doesn’t take into account the gyms, conferences, cinemas, evening schools, live performances, galleries/ museums, business meetings and many more reasons for all people to be out after six.
For the standard working person, after six is potentially the only time possible for most people to get out and do something in their own time. Pre-Covid, Statista suggested that night-life is the fifth-biggest industry of the UK economy, contributing 6% of the UK’s GDP. A curfew would not just remove half of this, but also a large section from couples, families etc., where the women stay inside with their male friends and partners.
Baroness Jones, a 71-year-old peer and mother of two daughters, demanded a blanket curfew for men in the hope it would “make women a lot safer”.
The momentum behind this proposal has grown almost exponentially, as social media is filled with stories from women with the hashtags #TooManyMen.
This is definitely a major problem that needs to be addressed very rapidly, attempting to preclude the causes of crime, rather than poor campaigns that categorise half the country and revoke basic rights from them.
Growing up in a fatherless home has been labelled the most important cause of both poverty and crime. An absence of male role models is a problem that many male adolescents face today. This is a very difficult problem to change, but doing so would probably prove much more effective than a total post-6pm lockdown for males.
It is no doubt that crime, especially violent crime, has no place in today’s society, yet neither does a discriminatory curfew. A number of lessons need to be learnt from these crimes for both men and women to prevent future attacks.
The most sensible compromise has to involve both genders working together in order to rid the country of horrendous acts of sexual harassment and violence. Polarisation between women and men would do nothing to achieve this, and alienating half the country would no doubt create more problems than those faced by the women of today.
