For Issy Vine, the trajectory of her career, and her life, changed within a 12-hour shift. It was April 2023, and she was working as a 999 call handler for the Metropolitan Police. One morning she sat next to an employee who, after speaking to a rape victim, called her a “slut”. He then said that immigrants should “fuck off back to your own country”, followed by an inappropriate Sarah Everard comment whispered in Issy’s ear. As if it couldn’t get much worse, he proceeded to follow Issy home. After reporting this call handler, she was left waiting for months with no answer. Despite being dismissed once, he was later reinstated and put back on the same shift as Issy.
After five years working in the Met, Issy has now left the police and is campaigning for VAWG, and institutional accountability within the police. Despite being mistreated, she continues her fight and is now suing the Met over their mishandling of this incident.
I had the privilege of interviewing Issy on the misogyny that is, still, poisoning public services, her personal experience as a police call handler turned campaigner, and what we can all do to start tackling insidious and deep-rooted misogyny.
“Within the police, there was a huge tolerance for misogyny”
One of the first questions I had for Issy was how did this happen? How could it be possible that the police, an institution whose raison d’être is to uphold law and order, be handling misogyny and harassment among their employees in such an inadequate, and harmful, manner? The murder of Sarah Everard by Wayne Couzen highlighted, tragically, misogynists in our police force, and I had assumed that police had done significant amounts to tackle the culture of their workforce.
From my conversation with Issy, it is clear that verbal and physical misogyny are still rampant in the Met. The causes she identified were threefold: structural, social and cultural. On the structural issues, there just aren’t comprehensive structures for reporting misogyny or information about how to do this. And then, if you do report it, it is up to the judgment of individual police officers as to the response which is taken.
She said, “In the misconduct process, it’s up to one police officer, and it’s dependent on their mind frame and beliefs”. Where issues are taken forward through formal channels, communication with the victim is inconsistent, and no steps were taken in Issy’s case to offer mental health support through months of investigation. The crux of the issue is, she says, that policies on misconduct in the police are first and foremost driven by the desire to protect the reputation of the police as a whole, rather than individual employees.
The lack of a robust, comprehensive and independent system of reporting misconduct is just one facet of this institutional misogyny. There is a culture of tolerance towards bigoted beliefs in the Met, she says. These prejudices are intersectional and reinforce one another. Issy’s case exemplifies this; the perpetrator made both xenophobic and misogynistic comments in the space of a few hours.
Socially, the culture of the police force is such that reporting other employees can be met with hostility and isolation if not outright abuse. There is a pressure, she says, that comes from colleagues to protect the image of the police. Even writing about her experiences in her blog, “A Can of Worms”, and passing her stories on to journalists, she has been met with the same comments. When her story first appeared in The Telegraph, she faced hundreds of comments, a significant proportion of which were from male ex-police officers, furious that she, in their eyes, would put the workforce in such disrepute. One message she wants people to take away from her experience is that we need to be able to criticise institutions, even ones we work for, without being personally offended.
Too often, people conflate challenging institutional failures with an attack on all the employees who work for it. Two things can be true at once. In this case, there will always be an abundance of hardworking, decent people who keep our public services running. Yet, there are too many abusive or hateful employees who are slipping under the net, or worse, whose wrongdoings are brushed under the carpet in the interests of institutional reputation.
“The Met have the best lawyers. They have money to silence”
Despite the emotional drain of an investigation process which has lasted years, on top of the backlash she has received online, I wonder how Issy has the strength to continue campaigning. I couldn’t help but ask whether she felt intimated taking on such a huge and seemingly impenetrable institution like the police. She responded to this with two pieces of wisdom which I think are pertinent and inspiring for us all. The first is that backlash only fuels her. When people are ignorant, or outright hateful, about her work, it only proves her point further, by highlighting the normalisation of misogynistic attitudes in society, especially those vocalised online. The more she is told to be silent, the more ammunition she has to shout louder.
Using her blog and social media outlets has been therapeutic for her, she says. Expressing societal injustice through creative mediums is also another form of persuasion and education. Writing, or TV like Adolescence, are powerful vehicles for putting an audience in the shoes, and the psychology, of both a victim and a perpetrator. It is so easy to become desensitised to news statistics about VAWG. Cultural expressions give these individual stories back their humanity; they tell us not just what is happening, but why and how it feels to experience and bridge the disconnects in understanding.
Fundamentally, she says, it is at times terrifying taking on an institution as an individual, but for her, there is no other option. Issy, I could tell, has a steely core, and an inherent desire to seek justice for herself and for others. I imagine that’s what brought her into the police force to begin with. She said that she could not live with the regret of not trying, even if she fails. In her words, “Whether it’s the Met or your mum or a teacher, you should always stand up for what’s right, because you will only regret it otherwise”.
“Giving people second chances enables cracks for misogynistic poison to seep through”
I asked Issy what needs to change in the long term to stop these incidents recurring. She said there was a long way to go, and misogyny can feel so pervasive it can be hard to even know where to start. But change must happen. Employment law must be adapted to meet the specific issues in public services, she says. Part of the problem is that when incidents of harassment in the police are reported, by law it is required that the individual employee is given an opportunity to learn from the incident and rectify their behaviour. But, in the case of public services, the stakes are too high to allow people second chances.
In the case of 999 call handlers, these employees are speaking to the general public every day, and often the callers at the other end of the line are in their most vulnerable position. Reinstating someone who has called a rape victim a “slut”, is not allowing them to educate themselves, it’s giving them more exposure to potentially harm others.
We have known for decades now of the inextricable relationship between verbal and physical harassment. Misogyny is on a spectrum, starting with normalised abusive language and ending in femicide. We’ve seen this play out, tragically, time and again. Wayne Couzens was making rape jokes and racist comments in a WhatsApp group with six other officers before he went on to kidnap, rape and murder Sarah Everard. The truth that verbal abuse is a glaring red flag indicating potential further violence is yet to be embodied in policing practices. Their existing strategy of ‘educating’ employees, or blatantly ignoring bad behaviour,, is not good enough. Of course, we can and should, reeducate people who have expressed bigoted beliefs. But, in public services, the protection of other employees, and all those who come into contact with these services, should be paramount.
“You shouldn’t be silenced just because you’re up against a big organisation; public services are there to protect us and we all have a duty to make sure they are run by decent people”
After speaking to Issy, I was left furious, and pretty terrified, by both how she was treated, and the institutional misogyny that is left to tackle in the Met. But her courage to speak truth to power and to continue fighting despite the setbacks gave me huge amounts of hope. What I’ll take away from this conversation is that no institution is too powerful to confront head-on. Yes, it is intimidating and, yes, people will try to stop you along the way. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
Fundamentally, public services are there to serve us and protect us, and we should demand better when they are failing to hold themselves accountable. Because, as Issy said, “We know there’s misogyny in society, but when it starts poisoning the authority that’s supposed to hold people accountable, that’s when it’s really terrifying”.