Twitter users are outraged today after it was revealed that a disabled woman was arrested by Gwent Police in South Wales for posting stickers related to domestic violence and women’s rights.
On January 24, Twitter user @quetiapina1 posted that she had been subjected to police detention and interrogation after being reported for committing a hate crime. The woman, who lives in the Newport area in Wales, says police had been called after she was declared a “threat to the [trans] community” due to stickers and posters she had put up in her area.
The user says she was arrested in a way painful to her splinted arm and brought to the Newport Central Station by Gwent Police, who kept her in a cell and seized her watch and phone. While detained, her house was searched and a number of stickers and posters were seized by police. She notes that none of them mentioned transgender people or directly referenced trans issues, and were more generally about women’s rights.
The woman, who is disabled and requires medication, says she was interrogated around 1:30 a.m while being denied her prescriptions. She says she was released at 3:30 a.m without her phone or any transportation, and was left to navigate a very steep hill in the city centre with her mobility scooter.
“I am on [bail]. Conditional in that I don’t do stickering and postering in all of Newport,” she concluded, stating that she is allowed to do leafletting and she will continue to do so out of passion for her causes.
In her thread, @quetiapina1 posted one example of a trans activist complaining about a poster she’d put in the area — one which stated quite simply “No Men in Women’s Prisons” on a stylistic background. But some others she’d made have since emerged, with one set of stickers in particular simply declaring a statistic on domestic violence. These stickers were also allegedly branded as transphobic hate speech.
According to recent data acquired through a Freedom of Information request, over 580 rapes were reported to Gwent Police last year, but only 5 charges were made and over 430 are still “under investigation.”
In April of 2021, Gwent Police made national headlines after allegedly informing a woman who tried to report a sexual assault that she hadn’t been raped, telling her “you can’t be pressured into sex.”
Similarly in November, Gwent Police were forced to apologize to female officers who attempted to report a senior male colleague’s abusive behaviour towards them. The man, Clarke Joslyn, was forced to resign in 2019, but had subjected women on the force to a campaign of terror for almost a decade, using his position of power over young female trainees to groom and intimidate them into relationships. One woman was pinned against a wall and had a knife pulled on her by Joslyn, who threatened another woman if she ever “humiliated” him. Higher-ups at Gwent Police effectively ignored the women’s reports and calls for help, and failed to act on Joslyn’s behaviour.
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