Telford mayor complains of abuse ‘rooted in misogyny’

A mayor has complained she is receiving online abuse which she believes is “rooted in misogyny” and resentment of women in leadership.

Eileen Callear, the Mayor of Telford and Wrekin, said as a result of the abuse she had become worried about her own safety, with the murders of MPs Jo Cox and Sir David Amess in her mind.

She now has a security guard to escort her to her car and said: “I never would have anticipated that as Mayor of Telford and Wrekin that I would ever have needed that.”

Callear said politics could be “quite a scary place to be” for a woman, but she felt she had to speak out because “at some point you have to say something”.

On Remembrance Sunday, Callear was photographed at an event with a phone in her hand.

She said the phone was being placed back in her pocket and it was before the service started, but she said it sparked a number of abusive comments, and she made the move to call them out in a Facebook post.

“I think a lot of the comments are rooted in misogyny and I think a lot of them are around women in leadership,” she said, adding that they had been reported to the monitoring team at the council and Facebook.

It was the latest in a pattern of abuse she said she had received online.

Callear said bullying and harassment had come “almost daily” and she had been labelled “a witch” or the “dark one”.

At first, she said the insults were “laughable”, but she now took them very seriously.

She said she understood violence against women and girls was a big issue and the abuse “makes you think then when you are walking around outside, are you putting yourself in danger?”

The mayor, who was first elected to Telford and Wrekin Council in 2019, said when people chose to step into politics some “forget that they’re a human being and a woman and a mother and a grandmother”.

She urged those people to “imagine you’re talking your own mother, imagine you’re talking to your own daughter, imagine that your mother is listening to what you are saying while you are typing on your keyboard and try to do better”.

Jane Lees, the Town Clerk for Hadley and Leegomery Parish Council, said: “It’s so difficult when you see women in positions of power who have to work twice as hard to be thought of as half as good as a man.”

She said in her experience most online abuse of politicians was directed towards women.

“Why women are the point of so much anger and bitterness, I really don’t understand why,” she said.

“You look at women in sport, like the Roses and Lionesses and they seem to get so much more abuse than their male counterparts, and it is all personal abuse rather than what’s happening on the field.”

Ms Lees said: “The only way things will get better is for more women to be in positions of power and of decision making.”

This week, the prime minister said he was “acutely aware” that women in public life were subjected to greater levels of criticism and abuse than men.

He said it was “about time we acknowledge that”.

Callear welcomed Labour’s move to look at the Local Government Code of Conduct to make “it far stronger”.

The government said its Online Safety Act would also offer protection and dictates that social media platforms had a duty of care towards theur users.

Ofcom said it was working on a code of practice to help the companies meet their obligations.