So…
You have been for a good night out on the town, had a few drinks with friends and the time comes for the expensive cab ride home.
The question on the lips of many discerning drinkers is going to be ‘how do I get home for the least possible amount of money’. Well wonder no more – Brentwood Borough Council have come up with an answer to this age old question.
It would appear that the solution – for the ladies amongst us anyway – is wear as little as possible!
In what is possibly the biggest piece of short-sighted policy I have seen proposed in years, Brentwood Borough Council Councillor Chris Hossack and an action group that he is heading up have published and subsequently been forced to defend a proposal to ask taxi companies to charge less for those who are provokatively dressed to save them from being subjected to sexual assaults.
There appears to be suggestion from the council that those who dress less conservatively – going out in outfits so small that mean, in Cllr Hossack’s words, they ‘can’t possibly wear any less’ – are more likely to become a target for sex attacks.
The comments made imply a belief that if a women go out in short skirts and low cut tops, they increase their chances of being attacked by such a significant percentage that the council are having to take action to protect them from inevitable consequences of their wardrobe decisions.
This attitude is completely misrepresenting the issue.
The focus of any public body concerned with preventing sex attacks should be on tracKing down, prosecuting and detaining the offenders, not putting the responsibility, even partially, in the lap of the potential victims.
When asked Cllr Hossack stated that he considered that there was some degree of influence in what females wear from shows such as TOWIE which is filmed in the same area of the country. He then said that the actions of females who dress to emulate the fashions from the show may encourage males to try and take advantage of them.
If that was not bad enough I also see another issue with this…
I would be willing to stake a significant amount of money on the fact that if such a policy comes into force a culture of dressing for the cheap fares will quickly develop. The chance of getting a cheap ride home may well encourage more women to dress to impress than do at the present time.
If availability of taxis does not increase by the same degree the net result willactually be MORE people out on the town wearing next to nothing and potentially vulnerable to attack.
It would be interesting to see how long it was before the first ‘taxi driver offers free ride to naked passengers’ or ‘female fares forced to remove more and more clothing to win the competition for a ride home’ stories surfaced.
It worries me that before long, the worst case scenario might hit the headlines when a woman gets assaulted or raped by a taxi driver and that the suggestion would be that she had dressed in a way that contributed to the attack purely so she could get home for less.
Cllr Hossack clearly believes this can happen in the town. If this is the case then why can it not in a cab?