ABSTRACT
In March 2006, The Guardian filed a report on a Home Office proposal for dealing with violence against women under the arresting headline: ‘Sex violence policy has failed – minister’. The policy in question was rape prevention. Speaking about a new £500,000 advertising campaign urging men to get women's consent to sex, the then Home Office minister, Fiona McTaggart, pronounced that the government had to challenge men's attitudes to sex because other attempts at tackling rape such as changes to the law and improvements to support services had failed to stem men's attacks on women. Further, she insisted that the government needed to focus more on ‘men's behaviour and teach men they have some responsibility … We have done a lot of things to help victims of rape … and it still keeps happening.’ More crucially, what was needed, she said, was ‘some really active crime prevention’ (Branigan and Dyer 2006). Yes Minister, and so feminists have been saying, and your government promising, for years.
