Vertical Markets

Priorities, priorities

by Mark Rowe

Yesterday morning, at an appropriately online event, the UK National Cyber Strategy 2022 was launched. Towards the end of the 130-page document, it stated that the Strategy (taking over from the first one in 2016) was ‘a guide for action’, ‘the beginning of a conversation that we want to continue, to ensure our objectives and priorities remain relevant over the next five to ten years’.

Meanwhile on Radio 4, on Women’s Hour, another strategy – or in the clunkier language of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, a ‘national framework for delivery’ – because why use one word when you can use several? they are free after all – was being launched; by Deputy Chief Constable Maggie Blyth. She was appointed in September by the Home Office as the new national police co-ordinator for violence against women and girls. VAWG for short, a term that has only just been formed, arising from the outcry over the murder in the spring of Sarah Everard.

Maggie Blyth had an uncomfortable time as the interviewer pressed her on priorities; partly because, if VAWG had not been a priority before now, why not?! And uncomfortable also because the trouble with setting something as a priority is that you at once set up a grotesque policing Premier League table. Just as a particularly despicable crime and court case can spark a public urge for something to be done, so VAWG – or child sexual exploitation, or human trafficking, or county lines or other drug dealing, or knife violence – rises in the league table, only implicitly all the other valid and important crime types fall, in terms of public interest, and resources allocated by the police and others in authority.

It follows; that crime priorities are political; that decisions have to be taken about where finite police investigators, awareness advertising campaigns and other resources go. That resources into any priority can go down as well as up, even if, as Maggie Blyth has said, this year has been ‘a watershed moment for society and policing in how much more needs to be done to radically reduce violence against women and girls’.

The trouble is, that as with the case of the murdered boy Arthur Labinjo-Hughes; the same failings by those in authority – not acting on tip-offs, one department not passing on intelligence to another department – keep happening, and victims, usually the powerless, such as the very young and old, suffer, one generation to the next; no matter what priorities are set.

For it follows that this is also a discussion about power. Do those in power – whether social workers, police officers, teachers, tech firms, councillors and other elected politicians – listen to the powerless? According to a recent report, by the UCL Institute of Education, the University of Kent, the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) and the School of Sexuality Education, teenage girls are overwhelmingly affected by the impact of unwanted image-sharing and that the practice has become ‘dangerously normalised’ for many young people; who are unlikely to report receiving, or being asked to share, non-consensual sexual images to their school, parents or social media platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram.

If something is not reported and then recorded by the police or anyone, then it’s as if it hasn’t happened, and nothing can be done about it; the same goes for violence against shop and other front-line workers. No doubt another priority.

In a democracy who sets priorities, and according to what criteria – harm done? The number of victims, and how much they suffer, or how much harm is done to society, either in bodily, financial or reputational (how the UK looks in the eyes of other countries) loss?

“My number one priority is the safety of each of our residents with a commitment to build a visible and effective frontline service that protects our communities by taking the fight to criminals,” said Lancashire Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) Andrew Snowden, setting out his four-year plan. PCCs are ten years old, having run their third cycle of elections – interrupted by the covid pandemic – and having replaced the previous system of oversight of police forces by local government. His plan spoke of anti-social behaviour as top priority; but other named priorities included disrupting and dismantling organised crime, burglary and robbery and targeting dangerous drivers. The trouble with having too few priorities is that some are missed out; too many priorities, and they become meaningless.

Not only is there a league table of crime priorities (and surely a priority above all ought to be keeping people alive, from suicide terrorism), but crime and criminal justice have to compete in priorities for public spending in general. Some priorities are short-term (what if anything to do if a house is burgled or a shop assistant is threatened with a knife), some medium (when or whether to renew a police force’s vehicle fleet) and longer term (the cyber strategy document speaks of ‘broader priorities such as the transition to Net Zero’).

And a crime priority may have connections to non-crime priorities. The cyber strategy says that the new National Cyber Force will be used ‘as a force for
good alongside diplomatic, economic, criminal justice and military levers of power. They will be used to support and advance a wide range of government priorities relating to national security, economic wellbeing, and in support of the prevention and detection of serious crime.’ But what comfort is that to young people in the UK who, according to Prof Jessica Ringrose of UCL Institute of Education, ‘are facing a crisis of online sexual violence’?

Related News

Newsletter

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay on top of security news and events.

© 2024 Professional Security Magazine. All rights reserved.

Website by MSEC Marketing