Sarah Everard one year on – why flashing is still not taken seriously

The first time Simona Paliulyte saw the man who has now exposed himself to her multiple times in the past year, she was with her husband. She clocked him standing strangely behind a tree near her north London home, walked on and thought nothing more of it. Later that night, after dark, she popped to the local shop alone.

There was the man again. “He had his penis out... it was sort of hanging, but he was hiding it with his T-shirt. There was no one around so I just ran. I wasn’t sure what he might do,” she says.

Simona, 29, was “scared and shocked”. “I felt lost for words. It made me feel so little and upset.”

She returned home and tried to brush it off. The second time she saw him, a few weeks later, it was broad daylight and she was sitting at her desk which overlooks the street. “He was walking around and it was exactly the same. [His penis] was hidden by his T-shirt but it was clearly out. We called the police.”

They never came. Then, last summer, Simona saw the man for a third time when she was out walking. “It was in the middle of the day and he did it again. I just had this horrible rage come over me. I said ‘what the f--- do you think you’re doing?’”

She called 999 and followed the man, hiding out of sight where she could, determined that the police wouldn’t lose him. But again, they never came – calling her days later to say she would have to catch him “in the act.”

“Apparently it was because there was a big incident around the corner. But after the Sarah Everard case, it was really frustrating,” she says.

Simona has since moved to a new area for fear of encountering the man again. “The last time, he saw the building that I came out of. That made me really scared because he knows where I live.”

According to the Office for National Statistics, one in 10 women has, like Simona, been subjected to flashing – or exposure, to give it its legal name. It’s one of the only offences to fall under what might be termed ‘public sexual harassment’ that has been made a crime, punishable by up to two years in prison. That should, in theory, make it more straightforward for police to take seriously, and for the CPS to proceed to charging and prosecution.

Telegraph analysis of Home Office data shows an explosion in the numbers of exposure or voyeurism cases reported to police last summer in the wake of Sarah Everard’s death – which happened a year ago this week. In England and Wales, 3,652 incidents were reported between June and September – the highest on record. Even before Sarah’s murder, there had already been a steady rise, from 7,516 a decade ago to 10,775 in the year 2019/20.

Yet charges have plummeted. Telegraph analysis shows a significant drop over a five-year period, with 18 per cent being solved in 2015/16, compared with 11.6 per cent in 2020/21.

Before Sarah went missing, exposure lingered among the so-called ‘low level’ sexual offences that didn’t tend to take up column inches. It was only when Wayne Couzens was found to have a history of flashing that the floodgates opened. Mothers, sisters, daughters, grandmothers, friends began to share incidents they had previously buried. They spoke about their terror, revulsion, confusion. How they changed their behaviour afterwards, often walking different routes.

It’s impossible not to wonder how different things might have been. Couzens is now known to have flashed McDonald’s workers in 2015 (Kent Police is subject to an investigation for failing to look into the incident at the time). There is also a probe into whether two Met officers breached standards after they failed to investigate allegations he had exposed himself three days before Sarah was killed. An enquiry led by Dame Elish Angiolini QC is seeking to establish the decision making surrounding his vetting, including whether “any red flags were missed”, and the extent to which his behaviour was “known and raised by colleagues”.

In October last year, Priti Patel told The Telegraph police needed to “raise the bar” by taking the harassment and flashing of women more seriously, saying women should have the “confidence to call it out”. The Prime Minister, meanwhile, targeted delays in the legal system, saying he wanted to “compress that timetable between a woman complaining about what has happened and any action… It’s a nightmare for the women concerned.”

Has that nightmare now ended? No expert, academic or campaigner we spoke to knew of a single initiative in the past 12 months to specifically encourage women to report exposure, or to deter perpetrators. The Government’s new £3m ‘Enough’ publicity campaign, launched this week and designed to encourage the calling out of sexual harassment, mentions ‘cyber-flashing’ – where unsolicited explicit images are sent to women’s phones via the Airdrop feature – but doesn’t address indecent exposure.

Yet the evidence is out there. A 2014 review found that between 5 and 10 per cent of flashers escalate their behaviour to more serious sexual offences. And that’s just the incidents we know about.

What happened to Sarah was, it’s widely acknowledged, extremely rare. That Couzens was a stranger and a police officer is terrifying, but unusual. His previous offences, however, are borderline run of the mill. It speaks to an escalation that police and policy makers can no longer afford to ignore.

Dr Fiona Vera Gray of the Child and Women Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University says we are at a “moment of realisation”.

“The fact that women did report Couzens, and the fact that the police didn’t do anything, and the fact that he went on and did what he did – it’s unavoidable for them now. They cannot ignore the fact that these things are connected.”

Indeed, who could forget that a young woman, named only as Georgina, was flashed as she left the vigil for Sarah on Clapham Common last March? The officers she reported it to at the scene, told her they’d “had enough with the rioters” and prevented a female colleague from assisting her. The Met launched an investigation after the incident was made public.

So why isn’t flashing taken more seriously? Some say it simply fits into a pattern of embedded misogyny in our police forces. Many felt that complacency was compounded when, last June, then Met Commissioner Cressida Dick called Couzens a “bad ‘un”, continuously failing to acknowledge a wider problem. That attitude “filtered down to officers, because if your leader is saying there’s not a problem, it’s only a few bad people, then the rest become braver,” says one former female police officer, who wished to remain anonymous.

“It’s the silent majority that turns a blind eye. They know what’s going on but they just think ‘I’m not going to be any part of it’. They’re almost complicit.”

That culture, she adds, “gets translated into how you treat members of the public. If you’re seeing women in a particular light, the people you’re dealing with, you’re treating them in that particular light.”

In February, an Independent Office for Police Conduct review uncovered hundreds of sexually violent messages sent between officers at Charing Cross police station, which had been dismissed as ‘lad banter’ (‘I would happily rape you’, read one). Two Met officers who shared images of murdered sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry (calling them ‘dead birds’), were jailed in December. Last month, three officers were charged over sharing misogynistic messages with Couzens himself. Meanwhile, data seen by the Telegraph shows there has been a small rise in the number of referrals for Abuse of Power for Sexual Purpose within the Met in the year since Sarah’s murder.

Women have long understood that flashing is a ‘red flag’ offence and part of a sliding scale of sexual assault. It has also been a factor in recent high profile cases; Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein are known to have exposed themselves in front of women. Being flashed can be hugely traumatic, particularly as women never know how a situation could escalate. When faced with a man masturbating on a dark street, you don’t know what his intentions are – could it lead to a physical attack?

“Violence against women and girls so often starts with what is termed ‘low-level offending’, such as indecent exposure or voyeurism, but rarely is confined to it,” says Victims’ Commissioner Dame Vera Baird. “If the offender is allowed to get away with it, we risk them feeling empowered and emboldened to go further – with potentially terrible consequences. As we have seen only too clearly in the last year, this type of so-called low-level offending behaviour can escalate – and quickly. They should be viewed as clear red flags and a valuable opportunity for police to intervene early.”

As one retired female probation officer from the North West, who asked to be named by her Twitter handle of ‘Belstaffie’, observes: “I supervised these men on community orders when they were caught. One was found to have false number plates on his car and a ‘rape kit’ in his glovebox. Indecent exposure is a sexual offence, highly indicative of further, more serious, sexual offences.”

It’s not always a linear progression, either, explains Vera Gray. “We need to look at these things as happening all at the same time,” she says. “With Couzens one of the reports of indecent exposure was days before. So it’s not that it escalated in three days from him exposing himself to killing a woman. It’s the way that he saw the world and how he saw women in it. When we start to think about it like that, we can see the connections more clearly… how that mindset connects to the mindset of someone who would then rape or kill.”

The other, significant, blindspot lies within the justice system. Home Office data from January revealed that just a historic low of 1.3 per cent of rape cases reach prosecution in England and Wales, with a typical backlog of 1,000 days between the incident and the conclusion of any case.

When the justice system isn’t working for the most serious sexual crimes, what hope is there for anyone who has been flashed?

“Where we are at the moment, if I know that I’m not likely to get a good response if I report rape, I’m not going to report the fact that some man showed me his penis when I was walking the dog,” says Vera Gray. “What is the point when you don’t think it’s going to go anywhere?”

Anna*, 33, was flashed one weekend in January, on her way to the gym. It was a cold, dark afternoon, but she made a quick calculation that the streets would be thronging with people as a Leeds United match had just finished in the nearby stadium. She threw a parka over her gym gear and ventured out.

Soon, she saw three men walking towards her and instantly felt something was “weird”. “I didn’t make eye contact and the road was busy with traffic,” she recalls.

By the time they were a couple of metres away, one of the men had pulled his trousers down, pulled out his penis, and was doing his best to make sure Anna saw it. She sped up, trying to get past as quickly as possible. It was only hours later, lying in bed, that she realised how badly the incident had shaken her. Since then, Anna hasn’t walked that route alone. “It was busy and it didn’t stop him. After Sarah Everard, I just thought…” she trails off.

Anna liked to go to the gym every day. Now, she only goes when her boyfriend does. She has wondered whether she should have reported it. “There’s no CCTV on that road. I just thought ‘I don’t want to relive it’... it was just the sense that the police wouldn’t take it seriously,” she says.

Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, says it’s the “normalisation of so-called ‘low-level’ sexism” that helps to create a sense of impunity.

“Indecent exposure can be hugely traumatic, yet our society treats it as a joke, minimising perpetrators by labelling them ‘peeping Toms’ – even when men found or alleged to have committed indecent exposure have gone on to murder women, their behaviour escalating after they faced no repercussions,” she says. “Everyday Sexism is littered with thousands of entries relating to indecent exposure. They are full of phrases like: ‘Nobody seemed bothered’; ‘They said we were making it up’; ‘Everyone laughed’; and ‘I never dreamed of reporting it’.”

It begs the question whether women are any safer on our streets a year on from Sarah’s death.

In October, the first police lead for Violence Against Women and Girls, Maggie Blyth, was put in place. This week, it was confirmed that VAWG will be included in the Strategic Policing Requirement – elevated to the same level of policing priority as terrorism.

In December, the National Police Chiefs’ Council launched a new violence against women framework, tasking officers with targeting the most high risk and prolific perpetrators, with all forces required to complete an action plan by the end of this month. “We know offences such as exposure and voyeurism can be a precursor to other sexual offences and so police will use risk assessments to help measure the risk levels of offenders and help determine what early action can be taken to stop them,” a spokesperson said.

There have been other schemes put in place, though critics point out that many of these place the onus on women to keep themselves safe: the Safer Streets Fund, which saw an extra investment of £25m last year, prioritises CCTV and street lighting; the Government-backed Path app tracks a woman’s journey home and alerts loved ones should she deviate from her route; after the murder of Sabina Nessa in September 2021, women in south-east London were given rape alarms to carry. On March 8, International Women’s Day, the Met is launching a ‘walk and talk’ scheme that allows women to buddy-up with an officer and discuss their concerns.

Our Streets Now founder Maya Tutton says more focus needs to be placed on the root causes. “We should be educating young people about public sexual harassment – including indecent exposure,” she says. “We need to stop expecting the behaviour to take place, and then encourage reporting.”

As for the law? This week, Home Office minister Rachel Maclean said the Government could make public sexual harassment a crime if an ongoing review proves it is needed – something Priti Patel first hinted at last summer and which campaigners think is moving too slowly.

“We need to empower victims and survivors to know about what is and isn't illegal,” says Tutton. “Women and girls are being sexually harassed day in day out, and perpetrators are getting away with it. There’s no time to waste.”