As Nausheen, a 14-year-old Mumbai schoolgirl, demonstrates the kicks and punches she has newly learned, there is a perceptible change in her body language. From a shy, giggly teenager, she turns into a budding supergirl: somehow she seems taller, her stance straighter and her voice louder. 

“When I practice these moves, I feel a surge of power inside me,” she says. “I feel like I don’t have any fear.”

Nausheen has been learning martial arts — among other concepts such as consent and communication — at the free biweekly workshops conducted by the nonprofit MukkaMaar at her government school in a crowded Mumbai suburb. “I have learned to be strong and to face people with confidence,” she says, “whether it is my parents at home or strangers outside.”

MukkaMaar partners with 56 government schools in Mumbai. Courtesy of MukkaMaar

Contrast this with what MukkaMaar’s founder Ishita Sharma remembers from a casual conversation with a group of middle-school girls a few years ago. When asked what they would do if someone attacked them on the streets, they unanimously responded: Shout bachao bachao! (help). 

“They didn’t even think about it,” Sharma says. “It was a natural response to expect someone else to come and save them, because that is what they have been taught, what they have seen in movies.”

It was with the basic aim to shift this control from the outsider to the individual that Sharma started MukkaMaar — roughly translating to “throw a punch” — as an empowerment program for adolescent girls. “Women need to take responsibility for their own safety and not succumb to the ‘What will the poor woman do?’ narrative,” she explains. 

Courtesy of MukkaMaar

At MukkaMaar’s free workshops, girls learn martial arts and build confidence. They also learn about communication and consent.

Sharma began in 2016 with four girls on a public beach and the conviction that teaching self-defense was the way to empower them. Over seven years and 3,000 girls later, she has learned that along with martial arts, there is also a need for a change in fundamental beliefs and attitudes. She shares examples of how these girls are schooled to be “good daughters” who grow up to be “good wives” (for instance, to blindly marry the man chosen by their parents, as opposed to committing to a “love marriage”). She explains that there is a need to teach them to question and debate at home, negotiate for their rights, develop and assert their own personalities, and so on. 

MukkaMaar now partners with 56 government schools in Mumbai, where martial arts teachers are trained to listen to and counsel the girls, who open up with their own stories. These trainers are young men and women in their late teens and 20s, who usually work in teams of two. At 19, national level boxing champion Aradhana Gaund is not much older than the girls she trains. “They treat me like their friend, and I laugh and cry with them,” she says. 

In the workshops, girls learn that violence is not a knee-jerk response, but a last resort. Courtesy of MukkaMaar

Elsa Marie D’Silva, founder of Red Dot Foundation, a nonprofit working to create safe spaces for women, says it can be intimidating for young women to stand up against harassment, and so “it is important to show them how they can speak out together, along with their friends or as a group, to call out bullies.” Indeed, this is one of the things that gives Gaund the most satisfaction: seeing how these classes have taught the girls to band together and support one another.

According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2023, India ranks a dismal 127 out of 146 countries, based on indices such as access to education, economic opportunities and health. What is even more concerning is the unceasing, systemic violence against women that takes several forms including intimate partner violence, rape and assault, dowry deaths, acid attacks and everyday street harassment.

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Women are told from childhood to keep their heads down and take these things in stride, that to react would be futile and even dangerous. They internalize this to such an extent that they suffer harassment silently, which in turn encourages their abusers to carry on with impudence. This is where MukkaMaar has been making a small but significant difference.

Iqra, 13, says, “Earlier, I used to move away quietly when a man touched or groped me in the [public] bus. But now, I just make my voice loud and strong like I have been taught, and tell them to stop it.” At this, her friend Fatima chimes in, “Now we feel like we can also walk and talk like the boys.” 

Courtesy of MukkaMaar

Ishita Sharma started MukkaMaar with the goal of changing girls’ “natural response to expect someone else to come and save them” — and showing them that they can be the ones in control.

But they have both also been taught that violence is not a knee-jerk response, but a last resort. “If we fight, we will also get hurt, but we can speak up,” Iqra declares with the wisdom of one far older. 

And speak up they do, at every chance. “At my cousin’s wedding, a boy I don’t know started teasing me,” Fatima recalls. “When I shouted at him, his mother intervened and scolded him. Earlier I used to feel nervous in such situations, I used to think, ‘I am a small girl, what can I do?’” 

As Sharma describes it, “We are not telling them that violence is the answer, but that violence should not be tolerated.”

“We train them to vocalize their feelings, to open up their shoulders and lift up their chins,” explains one of MukkaMaar’s trainers. Courtesy of MukkaMaar

The MukkaMaar website states, “It is necessary to recognize that violence includes microaggressions, discrimination, threats, and loss of opportunity as much as assault.” The training, therefore, does not just cover self-defense but also building physical fitness and emotional strength, as well as boosting (and often instilling) self-confidence. 

Senior training fellow, Bhishma Mallah, 26, who has been with MukkaMaar for over four years, says that the girls begin with so many barriers, like shame and fear, that even to get them to exercise in front of others or to express themselves verbally is a challenge. “We train them to vocalize their feelings, to open up their shoulders and lift up their chins. We have to tell them repeatedly to forget about adjusting their dupatta [traditional scarf used to cover head or shoulders] and focus on the activity.” 

Even during workshops, the girls ask for permission before making physical contact. Courtesy of MukkaMaar

One of the many ways in which the trainers chip away at the diffidence of these young girls is by making them chant “I am important” even as they practice their moves. Or asking them to imagine how a dog growls, and to channel that aggression in their kicks and punches.

Each hour-long session includes 20 minutes of conversations and counseling, with the remaining time devoted to physical training. “We teach them about concepts like boundaries, consent and safe touch. Even during lessons, they have to take permission from their partner before any physical contact,” explains Mallah.

Sharma admits it took her a couple of years to realize that for a girl to build agency, there is a lot of familial and social conditioning that needs to be undone. “There is no point in teaching them martial arts alone, with its focus on discipline and technique — because unless we teach them critical thinking, it is all pointless, and forgotten the minute they step out of the classroom,” says Sharma.

Red Dot Foundation founder D’Silva adds a word of caution: “It’s not enough to just empower the girls to speak up, it is also the responsibility of adults to listen to them when they do. If their parents or teachers don’t take them seriously, then the child will quickly learn not to tell anyone — because there is the added fear of having their personal freedom curtailed under the guise of protecting them or saving the family honor.” 

A change in the larger ecosystem may take a long time, but it is clear that something is shifting within these girls. While one cohort confronted a cop making a video call in front of them and challenged him to prove he was not taking their photos without permission, another group of girls gathered the courage to file a police complaint against their physical education teacher who had been harassing them. For others, it has meant something as seemingly trivial as talking back to their fathers and challenging gendered rules and restrictions. 

“I have learned to be strong and to face people with confidence,” one MukkaMaar student says, “whether it is my parents at home or strangers outside.” Courtesy of MukkaMaar

These may seem like small incidents, but for these young girls in Mumbai, the freedom to think independently and challenge those around them has been life-changing. 

In the short run, Sharma says MukkaMaar wants to focus on fewer places and create retention, rather than spread the program thin all over the city. The future is digital for MukkaMaar alumni, with a chatbot that helps the girls have a two-way conversation about self-defense techniques, physical fitness, understanding of different types of gender violence and soft skills like communication and negotiation. This keeps them connected to the program, and to everything they learned in it, even after they leave. 

The post How Teen Girls in Mumbai Are Learning to Stand Tall appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

Lesbian relationships in Britain were regulated and silenced for centuries, through the courts and though wider patriarchal structures. In an interview with Anna D’Alton (LSE Review of Books), Caroline Derry speaks about research from her book, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three centuries of regulation in England and Wales (2020) and what the portrayal of same-sex relationships in Agatha Christie’s novels reveals about attitudes towards homosexuality – and specifically lesbianism – in post-war Britain.

Caroline Derry will speak at a hybrid event hosted by LSE Library, Agatha Christie, lesbians, and criminal courts on Thursday 15 February at 6.00 pm.

Q: In your book, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three Centuries of Legal Regulation in England and Wales, you speak of lesbianism being silenced in upper-class British society “because of acute anxieties about female sexual autonomy.” Where did these anxieties stem from? 

Women’s autonomy posed a profound threat to patriarchal structures. Marriage, particularly for elite men, was central to maintaining those structures: transfer of property, inheritance, and control over their household all depended upon it. Legally, the wife’s existence was subsumed in her husband’s, giving him power over her property, actions, and sexuality. This was not only true in the 18th century, when the book begins; it persisted through the 19th century and has only slowly been dismantled over the past century and a half. For example, the legal rule that a man could not be convicted of raping his wife was finally abolished in 1991.

There was anxiety that if women ‘discovered’ lesbianism, both individual marriages and the institution itself would be undermined.

There was anxiety that if women “discovered” lesbianism, both individual marriages and the institution itself would be undermined. That was explicitly stated by lawmakers at various points in history. In 1811, Scottish judge Lord Meadowbank said that “the virtues, the comforts, and the freedom of domestic intercourse, mainly depend on the purity of female manners”.  In 1921, judge and MP Sir Ernest Wild asserted in Parliament that “it is a well-known fact that any woman who indulges in this vice will have nothing whatever to do with the other sex”. And the 1957 Wolfenden Report, which proposed reform of the law on male homosexuality, spoke of lesbianism as damaging to “the basic unit of society”, marriage.

Q: Why do you write in Lesbianism and the Criminal Law that “Patriarchal oppression […] made the criminalisation of lesbianism almost redundant”? 

There were many other ways of regulating women’s lives and relationships that could offer more effective control and less public scandal. These included economic constraints: in the 18th and 19th centuries, married women of all classes had little or no legal control of their own money. Single women without private incomes were little better off. For example, servants’ employers regulated most aspects of their lives under threat of dismissal without a reference.

Social norms set strict limits for unmarried women’s behaviour and gave families a great deal of control over them – although this could sometimes be evaded, as we know from Anne Lister’s diaries! Religious regulation of moral conduct was important, while medicalisation became more significant from the 19th century. Lesbian relationships were pathologised as a symptom of mental illness and the consequences could be awful: an extreme example was the use of clitoridectomy by surgeon Dr Isaac Baker Brown in the 1860s. In the 20th century, “treatments” included aversion therapies and even brain surgery. And until relatively recently, the courts themselves had the power to detain young women in “moral danger”.

Q: Although lesbianism may not have been strictly outlawed, you refer to a “regulation by silencing” of lesbianism within the British court systems. How did this operate? 

Legal silencing was based on the assumption that if women – particularly “respectable”, higher class, white, British women – were not told that lesbianism existed, they probably wouldn’t try it. Eighteenth-century models of sexuality assumed women craved men’s greater “heat”, while 19th-century models (which still influence today’s courts) emphasised women’s passivity and lack of independent desire. It was unlikely that two passive and desireless creatures would discover lesbian sex for themselves.

19th-century models (which still influence today’s courts) emphasised women’s passivity and lack of independent desire.

In the criminal courts, silencing worked in several ways. The most obvious was to avoid criminal prosecutions altogether, because court hearings are public and could be reported in the press. So, there has never been a specific offence criminalising sex between women (unlike sex between men, which was wholly illegal until 1967). However, when a prosecution did seem necessary, silencing could be maintained by choosing an offence which concealed the sexual element of the case. There is a long history of prosecutions for fraud where one partner presented as male (cases relevant to both lesbian and transgender history). In the 18th century, this was supposed financial fraud to obtain a “wife’s” possessions; in the later 19th and 20th centuries, making false statements on official documents. And throughout these periods, women have been brought before magistrates for disorderly behaviour and breach of the peace – although few records survive.

Q: What does analysis of the defamation case Woods and Pirie v. Cumming Gordon (1810-1812) reveal about how legal discourses defined morality in relation to race and class? 

This Scottish case offers a really potent example of those discourses. A half-Scottish, half-Indian teenager, Jane Cumming, told her grandmother Lady Helen Cumming Gordon that her schoolmistresses were having a sexual relationship. Cumming Gordon urged other families to withdraw their daughters, forcing the school to close, and the teachers brought a defamation claim for their lost livelihood.

The court had to wrestle with difficult questions: could two middle-class women of good character have done what was alleged? If not, how did their accuser come to know of such things? At the initial hearings, the judge’s answer was that the story must been invented by a working-class maid. But when witness evidence was heard, it became apparent that the story originated with Jane Cumming. Attention then shifted to her early life in India. The climate, the supposedly immoral culture, her race, or – in a mixture of race and class discourses – the bad influence of “native’” servants were all blamed.

This supposed contrast between Indian immorality and British, Christian morality was no accident. In the early 19th century, there was a shift in justifications of British imperialism.

This supposed contrast between Indian immorality and British, Christian morality was no accident. In the early 19th century, there was a shift in justifications of British imperialism. Greater awareness of the horrors of violence, corruption and exploitation by the East India Company made it difficult to present their activities as legitimate trading. Instead, a moral justification was claimed: that Indian people needed to be rescued from iniquity by the imposition of superior British law and standards, exemplified by virtuous British womanhood. Many of the judges and witnesses in this case had connections to India, so it is unsurprising that these discourses made a particularly powerful appearance here.

Q: What were the legal implications of the 1957 Wolfenden report for homosexual activity in Britain? What did the report (or its omissions) reveal about attitudes towards women’s sexuality? 

The Wolfenden Report recommended partially decriminalising sex between men, but barely acknowledged sex between women. The few mentions implied that lesbianism was “less libidinous” and thus less of a threat to public order. That was important because politically, equality for gay men through full decriminalisation was not attainable at that time. Wolfenden therefore took the pragmatic approach of silencing lesbianism as far as possible, to avoid the question of why women were treated differently by the law, and focusing on arguments specific to male homosexuality. It was successful: Parliament eventually implemented the recommendations in the Sexual Offences Act 1967.

Wolfenden […] took the pragmatic approach of silencing lesbianism as far as possible, to avoid the question of why women were treated differently by the law

Nonetheless, the Report was a watershed event in the legal regulation of lesbianism. Until then, the law had treated male and female sexuality as very different things. Wolfenden introduced the term “homosexuality” into law, and lesbianism became seen as “female homosexuality”. Combined with the Report’s characterisation of lesbians as less sexual than gay men, this meant that lesbianism was treated as a lesser variant of male homosexuality – an attitude that has never gone away.

Q: Was it remarkable that Agatha Christie included or suggested homosexuality in her novels? 

Yes and no. These were not issues that were generally discussed in polite conversation. At the same time, lesbian (and gay) people were a fact of life, even if not directly acknowledged. In 1950, most people knew of women living quietly living together like Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd in A Murder is Announced. Christie walked a careful line in that book, portraying an intimate and deeply loving relationship but showing nothing explicitly sexual about it.

By 1971, when [Christie] wrote of one woman’s love for another in Nemesis, it was no longer possible to directly silence lesbianism in law or society.

And of course, Christie was a rather more daring writer than people often realise: it’s unfair to treat her as a narrowly conservative author of formulaic novels. By 1971, when she wrote of one woman’s love for another in Nemesis, it was no longer possible to directly silence lesbianism in law or society. But Christie was in any event happy to engage with difficult issues in her work, even quite taboo ones like child murderers.

Q: What insights do these portrayals provide into the criminal justice system’s attitudes to lesbianism in post-war England? 

Christie’s novels reflect wider middle-class attitudes at the specific times they were written, so they offer insights that we can’t get from court reports alone. They also come from a woman’s perspective rather than that of the elite men who mostly made the law, and gender does make a difference here. Men were convinced that respectable women did not know of such things, but women didn’t necessarily agree!

The novels reveal how the extent to which the courts were keeping pace with wider societal attitudes and understandings.

In particular, the novels reveal how the extent to which the courts were keeping pace with wider societal attitudes and understandings. If we look at medical, psychological and sexological work on women’s same-sex relationships in post-war Britain, the courts seem hopelessly old-fashioned in comparison. But Christie’s books show us that outside expert circles, attitudes were indeed decades behind the latest science. In other words, the courts were reflecting and contributing to mainstream opinions, not falling behind them.

Note: This interview gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: A still from the the episode, “A Murder is Announced” of the BBC Miss Marple series (1984 to 1992), adapted from Agatha Christie’s novels, featuring Joan Hickson as Miss Marple (left) and Paola Dionisotti as Miss Hinchcliffe (right). This image is reproduced under the “Fair Dealing” exception to UK Copyright law.

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Zara (not her real name) was still in the hospital when she realised the police would be coming. She had just been run over by a former partner as part of a domestic dispute.

Everything seemed normal when she went with the police to the station to discuss the incident back in June 2020. Two weeks later, while out with a friend at Nando’s, she got a call with no caller ID. It was her arresting officer.

“He said ‘I’m just calling to see how your leg is’. That was his opening line,” she told Byline Times.

The conversation soon became uncomfortable. He started flirting with her, asking if she wanted to share her Nando's meal with him, and saying that "in my line of work there’s not a lot of people you want to meet again" and that it was "nice to look at" her body while she was in custody.

“It felt really awkward and I just wanted the call to end,” she said. “His last words were ‘given the chance, I would have loved to have conducted the search on you in custody’ – then I hung up.”

“The officer in question was the one that checked me in at the station," she added. "He was well aware that I had mental health issues and was a victim of domestic violence."

A statement by the Metropolitan Police at the time acknowledged that the officer’s “flirtatious conversation” with Zara was “wholly inappropriate and fell far below the standards expected of a police officer”. It said sanctions had been applied to the officer.

But Zara is still angry about how it was handled.

“When I hung up, I drove to the police station and said I wanted to report a police officer, which they all laughed at and tried to shoo me away,” she recalled. “I genuinely do believe if I didn't have a recording of him, no one would have investigated, they wouldn’t have checked to see if he actually gone and accessed my number. I doubt anyone would have either taken a statement off me that day.”

The police officer only ended up receiving a formal warning.

“They said that because he'd started the conversation with 'how's your leg?’ – even though he was off-duty in his own car and had to access the database to get my number and use it on his personal phone – it was for police purposes,” Zara said. “He was basically given a slap on the wrist.

“He is still a police officer in Croydon. The other day and we were side-by-side in traffic. I think the police are like a gang, there’s no other word for it. They’re so backhanded in everything they do, and they really do just stick up for their own.”

Unfortunately, Zara is far from alone.

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'You Lose Any Faith You Have in the System’

The crisis in UK policing has only been growing in prominence in recent months and years after a string of criminal officers have come to light.

The most high-profile of these have included serial Met Police officer rapist David Carrick; and Wayne Couzens, who used his police ID and handcuffs during the kidnap and murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard in 2021.

In recent months, Byline Times itself has revealed that police forces have been subject to record levels of misconduct complaints, that the police watchdog is investigating fewer than 1% of complaints, and that almost one in four reasons given for police officer dismissals for serious misconduct last year were for sexual offences. 

At some police forces in the country, the number of annual complaint allegations actually heavily outnumber the number of officers serving. 

This newspaper has been speaking to victims of police misconduct like Zara to share their all too first-hand stories of the kind of abuses happening up and down the country.

The husband of Karen (not her real name) turned abusive not long after their child was born. He had serious health issues and she says him and his family took issue with how much time she was spending with their son in the hospital. 

“My husband then became more aggressive at the time, and started to try and throw me and my son out," she told Byline Times. "And this was coming up to like the middle of the night. He then hits me and tried to throw me down the stairs. I tried to do what I could to get through the night.”

The next day she called her family, and her sister called the police to give Karen safe escort from the home.  

“I think it was about a month or two later that my then husband happened to say 'we know what you said to the police. We know your sister made the phone call’,” she recalled. “And that's when we started thinking: how would they have known that she called the police? No one would have known that as that wasn’t said to anybody.”

It was then that they remembered that her then brother-in-law worked for West Midlands Police and she made an urgent complaint to the police. It took the force a year to finalise the complaint investigation. In the final hearing, he was issued with a final written warning. 

“I was thinking the whole time: are they going to come here? How much more do they know? And I was living with my sister who made the phone call. So then she got paranoid because they had access to her information, because her address was logged,” Karen said.

“You also lose any faith and trust that you have in the police –I mean this was domestic abuse and this happened. You lose any faith you have in the system and the people who should be there to protect you. It should be that if you breach confidentiality like this, you’re not a police officer any more."

A West Midlands Police spokesperson said the force acknowledged the facts of the case and the final written warning outcome handed to the officer. They confirmed he is still employed.

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'It Felt Like they Enjoyed Doing What They Did'

Erin Dawson was a student at Salford University when she went to a protest in central Manchester over the Government’s proposed increasing of police powers to break up protests. It was just a couple of weeks after a vigil in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard was violently dispersed by the Met in south London.

After a few hours, the crowd was ordered to disperse by police, under what they called “the power of being nice”. Soon after, riot police arrived to disperse the protest.

As she was being dragged across the square, Erin's jeans were dragged down and her t-shirt was pulled up, leaving her naked except for her underwear.

She was eventually issued a fixed penalty noticed and released from custody.

“I was at the police station until midnight and, when I was let out, I saw photos of when I was up being dragged along the floor – it was worse than I realised,” she told Byline Times. “That sort of set me off again. It flung me into quite a bit of chaos for the few months after. It took me six months to even write up what I thought about it all.”

In a statement after the event, Greater Manchester Police said that “no misconduct" had been identified among its officers, but that it “apologised for any distress caused”.

In the end, the penalty notice she was issued with was overturned – suggesting the entire police intervention was unjustified. Erin was never directly told by the police that they had decided the penalty notice was wrong – she only found out when she the fine was refunded. 

After Erin was put in touch with a lawyer who threatened to take the police to court, Greater Manchester Police offered her compensation of £5,000.  

The incident seriously impacted her mental health for months. Even years later, it casts a big shadow. 

“There's been a police car parked on the car on the road nearby,” she said. "And it still makes me quite anxious to see that car being parked there because it felt like they enjoyed doing what they did to me.”

Matthew McConville, a lawyer at Irvings Law working in its specialist ‘actions against the police’ wing, represented several of the victims featured in this article. 

He told this newspaper: “The public have the right to expect integrity in the police service and should have confidence in police officers to act in a professional manner. Unfortunately, there has been a definite shortfall in the service that these clients have received and there are grave concerns over how police forces deal with them as a whole too."

The sad reality is that a recurring theme with every one of those Byline Times spoke to was that the experience had left them with a complete lack of faith in the police. 

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An investigation into an allegation of serious sexual assault against MP Julian Knight was moved from the Metropolitan Police to a local force because the complainant believed it was “institutionally misogynistic” and “could not be trusted” to prosecute a serving Westminster politician, Byline Times can reveal.

This newspaper has seen emails detailing how the case was transferred to Essex Police in May following high-level discussions between the Conservative Chief Whip Simon Hart and Scotland Yard, after Knight’s alleged victim expressed her dissatisfaction with the Met to Hart.

The woman’s decision was further motivated by the Casey Review, which found the Met to be “institutionally misogynistic” and revealed that it could be employing more officers like Wayne Couzens – the Westminster-based armed officer who was jailed for life for the 2021 murder of Sarah Everard.

It has also emerged that Essex Police is now looking into multiple serious sexual offence allegations against former select committee chair Knight, who was interviewed by its officers for several hours.

A source close to the case told Byline Times: “The complainant thought her allegations against Julian were not being taken seriously by The Met. She felt officers assigned to the case were not competent and didn’t appear to know what they were doing. 

“Given the Met had an armed Metropolitan Police officer working around Parliament who went on to kill a woman, and the Casey report said there might be others, she didn’t think it could be trusted to investigate her allegations.

“It is another example of how, yet again, the Metropolitan Police has let itself down and, more importantly, let down the women it’s meant to serve.”

Nazir Afzal, former Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England, said moving the case was unprecedented.

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“It’s not uncommon for another police force to investigate allegations where there may be potential conflicts of interest or perceptions of bias because one of the suspects, alleged victims, or witnesses has some significant connection with the exporting force," he said. “But I can’t recall a situation where a case has been transferred because the culture has been misogynistic. What confidence does that give the thousands of other alleged victims whose cases haven’t been moved?”

Caroline Russell, leader of the Green Party in the London Assembly, said it was a “grim situation” when women don’t trust the Met to investigate serious sexual assault claims against politicians. “It shows just how much work is needed to rebuild the trust and confidence of Londoners in our police service,” she added.

Patsy Stevenson, who was awarded compensation from the Met over her treatment following a vigil for Sarah Everard, said she is "not surprised that women do not trust the Met" but that she is "scared because now there is nowhere to turn when things like this happen". 

“Right now, I can’t see a way forward for the Met – apart from completely starting from scratch or defunding the police to put money into organisations that actually help,” she added.

'More Supportive and Communicative'

The Met confirmed last December that it was conducting an investigation into a single allegation of serious sexual assault against Julian Knight, then Conservative MP for Solihull, and the chair of the House of Commons’ Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

Knight had the party whip withdrawn after the inquiry was launched, but insisted he is “entirely innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever” and branded the move “wrong and unjustified”.

The force then announced in late March that it was "no longer proceeding with an investigation".

With the Conservative Party refusing to reinstate the whip, the following month Knight announced he would be resigning from the committee, and would not be standing as an MP in the next election.

Six days later, the BBC reported that four women had made complaints to parliamentary authorities about Knight since police dropped the investigation into him. It reported that the complaints are “thought to allege inappropriate comments and behaviour”.

In a statement, Knight said: "I am fully aware of the circumstances of the single complaint made against me to the Metropolitan Police and the motivations of those involved in making it. This baseless complaint was dismissed by the police without their even feeling the need to interview me, which they never did.

"I have not been made aware of any details of allegations supposedly made subsequently against me to any parliamentary authorities. Nor am I the subject of any investigation by Parliament's Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme. Should I become the subject of any such investigation, I will fully and publicly defend myself against any allegations.

"Meanwhile, it is deplorable that, despite the police decision, I remain the subject of what appears to be a smear campaign conducted through leaks, false innuendo and briefings."

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In May, the case was then handed over to Essex Police, which confirmed it was investigating a single allegation of serious sexual assault. It was not clear at the time why the case was referred. But Byline Times has learned that the complainant expressed her concerns about the Met to Conservative Chief Whip, Simon Hart.

He is understood to have personally intervened by making an appeal to high-ranking Scotland Yard officials that the case be referred elsewhere. 

While a spokesman for Hart declined to comment while the investigation was ongoing, a source said: “It’s fair to say that Simon’s actions saved the complainant from pulling out and the case collapsing altogether. The case was transferred to a really well thought of department of Essex Police, which is led by someone who is highly-experienced in this area of investigating. Since the move, there is a feeling that Essex Police has been far more supportive and communicative.”

Essex Police confirmed to this newspaper that it is currently investigating multiple allegations against Knight. A spokesman said: “A man has been voluntarily interviewed in connection with an investigation into allegations of serious sexual assault. The investigation relates to alleged incidents outside of Essex which are non-recent. Our investigation is ongoing.”

The Metropolitan Police and Julian Knight MP were contacted for comment.