Serious conversations needed to eliminate spiking threat - The Yorkshire Post says

The Home Affairs Select Committee has warned today that poor victim support and a lack of available data means it is difficult to get a clear picture on the true extent of such incidents.

However, without wishing to scaremonger, the fact that a Parliamentary committee has had to look into this deeply worrying threat at all speaks volumes about the levels of misogyny and threat of violence that women suffer.

What is unacceptable is that the committee, headed by Hull MP Dame Diana Johnson, has discovered there to be a culture of viewing victims as having had ‘one too many’ and a lack of coordinated support from nightclubs, police and health services meaning many incidents are going unreported.

‘One too many’ is just the sort of insinuation that has punctuated awful cases in days gone by.

That implication by some in authority that women drinking in a nightclub is somehow an inevitable precursor to becoming a victim of crime is one that ought to stay firmly in the past.

It is part of the same culture of hatred towards women that has seeped into politics and enabled a Tory MP to brief a newspaper into reporting that Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, attempts to distract the Prime Minister whilst he is at the dispatch box.

While efforts must go into catching the perpetrators of the acts described, a candid discussion about why some men feel so free to commit them in the first place is much needed.