Sunday, August 21, 2005

Safer Streets For Ladies

We've had the Respect Agenda - now a big shout for the "feminised street", courtesy of - John Prescott ? They're making this up, aren't they ?

Guidelines to be issued by the deputy prime minister’s office are principally intended to encourage women to “reclaim” the streets from rowdy teenagers, which they believe will help curb antisocial behaviour.

Through creating friendlier streets, community spirit will be reinvigorated, the department believes. “Improved social interaction and relations, knowing your neighbours and those around you, came up [in interviews with the public] as one of the key things to make people feel safer and more secure,” someone working on the project said. “Women are instrumental in this process.”


Wasn't 'reclaiming the streets from rowdy teenagers' what Tracey Cullum tried to do ?

Anyway, the streets of Sheffield are safer for women tonight.

A Home Office spokesman said: "This was a traumatic incident for the staff and other prisoners. Our thoughts go out to Louise Giles' family at this difficult time."


If it's all right with the Home Office, my thoughts go out to the family of Helen Hay, killed by a woman who should never have been on the streets. She'd been given community service, that great crime preventative so beloved of Lord Justice Woolf, only weeks before she killed Helen Hay, for assaulting police and medical staff. The year before, she'd barricaded two social workers in her house and threatened them with a knife (I didn't say she was all bad). For this she got - community service.

If this Sheffield Star piece is correct, "feminised streets" will be covered in puke and fistfuls of hair ...

UPDATE - Peter Briffa in the Times.

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