by Harriet Wistrich, director of Centre for Women’s Justice
Five women.
Five true stories.
Twenty-four years of deception.
In 2011, Helen Steel, a veteran environmental and left-wing campaigner, well known as one of the two defendants in the McLibel trial, approached my colleague Gareth Peirce at Birnberg Peirce and partners, for advice. The ‘McLibel’ case was the longest running libel trial in British history commenced by food chain, McDonalds, against activists who were picketing their outlets protesting against the company for paying low wages, for cruelty to animals used in its products and other malpractice. Helen was seeking advice on behalf of another environmental campaigner who had recently discovered and exposed her long-term lover, Mark Stone, as an undercover police officer whose real name was Mark Kennedy.
The story of Mark Kennedy’s seven-year long infiltration of climate change protest groups, which had culminated in a criminal trial of protesters seeking to disrupt a coal powered fire station, had been well covered in the media. It was reported that he had had a number of sexual relationships with women in the movement including with ‘Lisa’, the woman he claimed he had fallen in love with; the woman who had exposed him. Senior police leads commented that his behaviour was unacceptable and that he had gone rogue.
When Gareth was first approached, she hadn’t realised that Helen, an old client of the firm, had also been deceived by a former lover, not Mark Kennedy but another ‘activist’ who had been involved in the group which distributed the McLibel leaflets. Gareth asked me if I would be interested in exploring any legal remedies and I jumped at the chance, fascinated and horrified by what was being exposed. This was indeed new territory for lawyers like myself specialising in holding police accountable. Police racism and brutality, unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution and more recently failures to protect and investigate violence, mainly against women, were the staple issues in police misconduct law. However, the idea that the state would invest hundreds of thousands of pounds into creating and maintaining a sophisticated operation that would place police officers deep undercover to gather intelligence on mainly left wing, environmental and social justice campaigns, was surely the stuff of fiction. Or at least tales from the secret police of a totalitarian state.
I met with Helen and over the following few months she introduced me to seven other women who had similarly been deceived into long term sexual relationships with undercover police officers. It was now clear that the rogue officer story was far from unique and indeed appeared to reflect a pattern.
The story of what happened to these women and how they battled for truth, justice and accountability over the following few years is told by five of the women in the forthcoming publication of their book, ‘Deep Deception’. The process of working together, sharing their stories, overcoming fundamental differences of approach and politics was intense, emotional, frustrating but ultimately deeply rewarding as an act of extraordinary solidarity and one which held the police to account and forced from them an historic public apology. It was through that process of sharing their experiences and identifying the patterns of abuse and deceit, that the women began to name what had been done to them and the culture that enabled it to happen. They described it as ‘institutional sexism’.
Institutional sexism or misogyny has recently become a term more widely recognised in connection with policing. Over the last year, since the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Metropolitan police officer, we have seen a stream of revelations of sexual misconduct within the Met and more widely. The recently published IOPC report, Operation Hotton dealing with communications and activity from a group of officers at Charing Cross police station, exposed horrifying misogyny as well as racism and homophobia. Interestingly, one example provided in that report of the misogyny was the term, ‘weary’, used in relation to female police officers. This was a secret derogatory term used to describe female activists widely used by the Special Demonstration Squad, the secret unit within special branch which produced most of the offending undercover police officers.
CWJ’s recent super-complaint into police perpetrated domestic abuse and our subsequent project examining the patterns of such of abuse by police officers has similarly exposed a pattern of appalling sexism and a frightening failure to hold officers to account or to prevent the victimisation those who complain about them or blow the whistle. As long as the vast majority of police officers who abuse their position for sexual purposes or to maintain control in an abusive relationship are not held to account, it will continue to be appropriate to describe policing as institutionally sexist.
On 5th April, CWJ are co-hosting a book launch of ‘Deep Deception’, hosted by Samira Ahmed where I shall join the authors of this important book to explore the dark and seedy scandal of undercover policing that impacted so profoundly on so many women’s lives.
To book tickets go to EventBrite
The event will be live streamed - follow @out_of_lives for details.
The book is available to buy here: Deep Deception