Written submission from Avon and Somerset Police and Crime Commissioner (SPP102)
Sexual Assault in bars and clubs
Awareness campaign launched July 2017
Last summer, we worked with a number of partner agencies including Bristol Women’s Voice, The Bridge and our licenced premises in Bristol City Centre, to highlight the issue of sexual assault on a night out in Bristol’s bars and clubs. Surveys by the NPT at the Bridewell revealed this type of unwanted sexual touching was widespread and happening to the majority of young people every time they went out. The also discovered that very few people bothered to report such assaults and instead just put up with it, as it was considered ‘normal’.
Our key messages were aimed at encouraging victims to report assaults - if not to the police then to the venue’s staff; and to discourage offenders from behaving like this. Through our partnership with Bristol Women’s Voice, the local police team worked with licensed premises to train their staff in how to support victims and how to deal with offenders. We produced posters which went up in bars and clubs across the city and worked with a young woman called Lottie who fronted our campaign. Lottie spoke to the media about her own experiences of this type of assault; how it made her feel; called for people to have the confidence to report such incidents; for men to call out their mates for behaving in this way; and for venues to improve their responses to such offending on their premises.
We received widespread coverage of and positive audience engagement with our campaign:
- Lead story on national BBC Radio One’s Newsbeat for a day last July and covered in bulletins every hour throughout the day, with longer features in the lunchtime and drive-time programmes.
- R1 interviewed Lottie and Det Supt Marie Wright. Our approach was positioned as the first initiative of its kind – A&S portrayed as lifting the lid on unacceptable behaviour. There was a high level of listener engagement with lots of young people getting in touch with R1 to talk about their own experiences.
- Our social media posts on the campaign generated a useful discussion of the issues – one FB post reached 85k people, with the video clip featuring Lottie and Marie viewed 36k times. Our engagement rate on this post was 63% - the average engagement for a campaign post is 2.5% so this topic obviously captured people’s interest
- We also secured local coverage on Heart FM, the Bristol Post, Bristol 24-7 and Made In Bristol TV who all interviewed Lottie and Marie.
Since the summer, the local teams have continued to prioritise this issue, and it is now an embedded strand of Op Brio. We continued the momentum of the summer’s success, with the student press in the autumn, to coincide with Freshers’ Week and the return of students to the city. The University of Bristol’s student newspaper Epigram ran a feature and Radio One Newsbeat re-visited the issue, coming on a night out in Bristol, this time with Lottie’s sister Anna and her friends. The issues was also discussed on BBC2’s Victoria Derbyshire programme and a BBC3 series on rape and sexual assault.
Also please see this link to the main report: https://www.bristolzerotolerance.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Street-Harassment-report-FINAL.pdf