invisible woman
EVERYBODY WATCHES THE PIG
The Princess on the Empty Bridge
The most disturbing scene in the first episode of Black Mirror is not the British Prime Minister having sex with a pig.
It is a young woman walking through an almost deserted London.
In The National Anthem, a member of the Royal Family, Princess Susannah, is kidnapped. Her captor demands that the Prime Minister perform an extraordinarily degrading sexual act on live television in exchange for her freedom.
The country is horrified.
Then fascinated.
Then obsessed.
Politicians debate. Journalists report. Social media erupts. Opinion polls measure whether the Prime Minister should comply. Millions of people become emotionally invested in the princess's fate.
Everybody wants her saved.
Eventually, the Prime Minister submits to the demand. The nation gathers around its screens to witness an event nobody should ever have wanted to see.
But something extraordinary has already happened.
The kidnapper released the princess thirty minutes before the broadcast.
Drugged and disoriented, she has been left on London's Millennium Bridge.
The streets are practically empty.
Nobody is watching the bridge.
Everybody is watching the pig.
The woman whose protection supposedly justified the entire national drama has become invisible.
The kidnapper, an artist staging a grotesque experiment in collective behaviour, subsequently takes his own life.
And the audience is left with a rather uncomfortable question.
At what point did the public's emotional investment in saving the princess become more important than the princess herself?
That question has fascinated me for years.
Because there is a fundamental distinction between public concern and practical responsibility.
Concern is an emotion. Responsibility requires decisions. Sometimes even actions. Ideally.
Concern can be expressed in seconds. Responsibility may require months of investigation, examination of evidence, identification of competent authorities and acceptance of uncomfortable conclusions.
Concern allows us to declare what we believe. Immediately.
Responsibility requires us to establish what actually happened. Sometimes is takes years. Sometimes decades. Sometimes centuries.
And sometimes the transition between the two does not occur at all.
This week, I conducted a small, entirely informal experiment in public reasoning.
It began with four schoolgirls, two women from the legal profession, a proposed criminal prohibition and a question about sexualisation.
It ended with me thinking about that princess walking through London while everybody watched a pig.
Four Schoolgirls and a Proposed Law
On Friday, 23 October 2026, The Guardian published an opinion article written by four teenage girls.
Rose, Mae, Aylin and Willow, aged 14 and 15, are campaigning to prohibit the use of school uniforms in pornographic depictions, including those involving adult performers.
Their argument is that sexualised representations of school uniforms may make real schoolgirls uncomfortable about how other people may perceive them.
They believe that clothing associated with children should not be presented as sexually attractive.
The girls describe their own discomfort. They also refer to accounts from other women and girls who say they experienced sexual harassment while wearing school uniform.
These are legitimate concerns.
There is no reason to dismiss them.
A child should not have to worry about being subjected to unwanted sexual attention on the way to school. Nor does a child need to prove that she has personally watched pornography before she can express concern about its wider cultural effects.
The campaign has attracted support from adults, politicians and legal professionals. Its authors want the law changed.
Fair enough.
But I am a solicitor. And when somebody proposes criminal legislation, a different set of questions immediately comes to mind.
What precisely is the intended outcome?
Are we trying to prevent children from accessing pornography?
Are we trying to prevent adults from associating school uniforms with sexual fantasies?
Are we trying to reduce actual sexual harassment of schoolgirls?
Are we trying to improve children's subjective sense of safety?
Or are we trying to establish a normative prohibition against sexualising a particular category of clothing, irrespective of any measurable change in behaviour?
Those are different objectives.
They may overlap. They may even support one another.
But they are not interchangeable.
A prohibition on a category of images might reduce the lawful availability of those images without necessarily reducing harassment. It might influence cultural norms without eliminating private fantasies. It might improve some girls' sense of safety without changing the conduct of every man who encounters a schoolgirl.
Or it might achieve broader benefits. That possibility deserves examination too.
The essential point is that the moral desirability of protecting children does not, by itself, establish the effectiveness of a particular legislative intervention.
That was what interested me.
Not whether children should be protected. I am a mother of a teenage girl, I have no other opinion that her safety, as well as safety of any woman of any age and wearing any clothing should be protected. By the state as we as by citizens.
But how a stated moral objective becomes a proposed criminal law — and how we establish whether that law will deliver the protection being promised.
An Experiment with Two Lawyers
I encountered the campaign through a LinkedIn post shared by a senior female lawyer at a major national law firm.
The post attracted expressions of support.
I decided to ask a few questions.
Initially, I wanted to understand where the girls had obtained their information about the particular pornographic representations they wished to prohibit.
One of the lawyers pointed me towards an account in the Guardian article: a girl had seen a scene on ordinary television, while watching with her mother, in which a female character wore a school uniform to arouse a man.
Another participant referred me to material from the Children's Commissioner discussing children's exposure to pornography more generally.
Interesting information.
But neither response established the specific causal mechanism I was trying to understand.
Awareness of pornography is one question.
Knowledge of a particular category of sexual representation is another.
And whether that representation causes, contributes to or normalises sexual harassment of actual children is a third.
I kept trying to distinguish them. I repeated the same set of questions.
The discussion changed character.
Instead of examining those distinctions, my questions was interpreted as an indication that I did not support the girls' campaign.
I was encouraged to recognise the importance of protecting children.
My persistence was questioned.
The discussion increasingly concerned what I supposedly believed rather than what I was actually asking.
I found this rather fascinating.
Here were two women with senior legal backgrounds, including a senior practitioner, discussing a proposed criminal prohibition.
Yet in this particular exchange, the argument repeatedly returned to the moral attractiveness of the objective rather than the evidence required to evaluate the chosen means.
I was not conducting a controlled psychological study. Two LinkedIn participants are not a representative sample of the legal profession, and a social-media conversation is not a courtroom.
Nor can I establish what either woman privately thought.
I can only describe the observable exchange.
Questions about the mechanism of a proposed law were repeatedly reframed as questions about the morality of the person asking them.
Then I introduced another element.
I explained that I was a fifty-year-old woman who had herself experienced what I sexualising and degrading treatment.
I was also a solicitor, attempting to obtain answers from identifiable institutions about identifiable conduct.
In other words, I introduced a concrete case of the broader problem we were discussing.
The purpose was not to divert attention from the schoolgirls.
It was to test whether we were discussing a general principle concerning unwanted sexual objectification, or exclusively a particular form of imagery involving school uniforms.
If the underlying principle was that women and girls should not be subjected to unwanted sexual humiliation or degrading objectification, we had substantial common ground.
If, instead, the campaign was concerned specifically with a particular class of pornographic images, I wanted to understand why that particular intervention was considered effective (and what eventually happens with a broader issue of unwanted sexualisation).
My personal example offered an opportunity to examine the principle outside its original emotional setting.
That opportunity was not taken.
My account did not become the subject of substantive engagement. The discussion remained focused on the campaign and on whether my questioning implied opposition to it.
Perhaps my example seemed irrelevant to my interlocutors. Perhaps they preferred not to become involved in an unfamiliar personal dispute. They were under no obligation to investigate my experience.
But the conversational fact remains: the comparison I introduced was not explored.
Eventually, I asked one final question.
Was the campaign intended to stop children watching pornography? Was it intended to stop adults viewing real schoolgirls through associations created by pornographic imagery, thereby making girls feel safer?
Or something else?
That last phrase was deliberate.
I was offering my interlocutor the opportunity to identify a different objective — one I might have misunderstood or overlooked.
The question received no further substantive answer in the exchange.
And that was where my experiment ended.
Not with a disagreement about the importance of protecting children.
Not with a disagreement about the legitimacy of feminism.
But with a much narrower and, to me, more interesting observation.
Had an emotionally compelling cause made it harder, rather than easier, to examine the practical mechanism through which its objectives were supposed to be achieved?
I cannot answer that question definitively from one LinkedIn conversation.
But the exchange gave me an excellent reason to investigate it.
Especially because I had already encountered a rather different version of the same problem.
The Woman in the Spanish Dress
In 2024, I entered a relationship with a Spanish naval commander serving at NATO's Allied Maritime Command in Northwood.
I was a British solicitor, a mother, a woman approaching fifty, and a British and Polish citizen who happened to have been born in the Soviet Union.
It was an ordinary adult relationship, notwithstanding the rather unusual professional environment in which my partner worked.
In December 2024, I attended Christmas events involving members of the NATO and Spanish military communities.
For one of those occasions, I wore a carefully chosen black dress with Spanish-inspired details.
I looked elegant. I wanted to honour my partner's culture. I wanted to meet people who mattered to him.
I did not imagine that my clothing, birthplace, accent or recreational shooting skills would later feature in a rather extraordinary public account of suspected espionage.
But over the following months, I experienced what I understood as hostility, exclusion and degrading characterisations.
My partner and I raised concerns about discrimination and harassment within the military environment.
The relationship subsequently became entangled with security-related decisions, administrative restrictions and police involvement, where the initial concerns still appear to derive from the social bias.
Those events are now the subject of several separate legal proceedings and complaints. Some underlying facts are recorded in official documents; other allegations remain disputed.
I am not going to litigate them in this essay.
We are exploring here something else.
In the summer of 2026, as I prepared to travel to Russia, I wanted to understand what information concerning me might have circulated through British, Spanish and NATO security structures and, based on some circumstantial evidence, could have reached Russian security services.
I needed enough information to assess my own safety.
I had been unable to obtain satisfactory answers through the institutional correspondence routes I had pursued.
So I approached journalists.
I thought that some public visibility might offer a degree of protection, while also allowing questions about institutional decision-making to be examined.
On 14 September 2026, The Telegraph published a story.
Then came The Times, Spanish newspapers and other coverage.
The ingredients were irresistible.
Tinder.
NATO.
A Spanish naval commander.
A woman born in the Soviet Union.
A shooting range.
Russian spies.
Apparently, I had become an international espionage story.
The media did not invent every element of the controversy, and journalists were entitled to examine the unusual circumstances. I appreciated the fact that my situation had finally received public attention.
But the resulting narrative was dramatically different from the questions that had originally led me to approach the press.
I wanted to know how information had been generated, verified, transmitted and acted upon.
The headlines offered an international spy thriller.
And then, five days after the first British publication, the story acquired another character.
Enter Red Sparrow
On 19 September 2026, the Spanish newspaper El Español published an article by Laura Garófano.
Its headline reported that colleagues in my former partner's NATO environment had called me Gorrión Rojo — Red Sparrow.
The article attributed the nickname to a combination of my accent, my ability to shoot and questions I had allegedly asked at military social events.
It presented the expression as a joke.
I disputed significant aspects of the article's description of my conduct and its chronology.
But I had never previously known that this particular nickname was reportedly being used about me.
So I watched the film.
Red Sparrow, starring Jennifer Lawrence, is not simply a glamorous story about a seductive Russian intelligence officer.
Its central female character is drawn into a system in which her body, sexuality and intimate relationships become instruments of intelligence work.
She experiences sexual coercion, humiliation and violence.
The film explores the use of sexuality as a mechanism of institutional power.
That was the fictional character reportedly assigned to me.
An actual woman.
In an actual relationship.
Within an actual military community.
Now, I cannot establish from a newspaper article which individuals used the nickname, what every person intended by it or whether they had seen the film.
Nor have I established that the nickname influenced subsequent security decisions.
Those are questions requiring evidence.
But I could finally identify the characterisation that had reportedly circulated.
And I found myself thinking about clothing again.
The schoolgirls in the Guardian article were concerned about the sexual meanings adults might attach to school uniforms.
I had worn a Spanish-inspired dress to a Christmas event.
Yet, according to subsequent reporting, an entirely different sexualised fictional identity had been attached to me.
Was my dress the cause?
My birthplace?
My accent?
The fact that I had a relationship with a military officer?
My ability to shoot a target?
Or the stories other people had constructed from those details?
I do not know.
That is precisely why I began asking questions.
Clothing does not create a duty on a woman to account for somebody else's sexual imagination. And another person's sexual imagination does not, by itself, establish wrongdoing. The question becomes different when those imaginings are expressed through degrading conduct, disseminated as factual characterisations, or potentially allowed to influence institutional decisions.
That is where personal dignity becomes a question of professional standards and public accountability.
Three Institutions. One Very Simple Request
After the Spanish publication, I approached the institutions connected with the environment in which the nickname was reportedly used.
I did not ask them to accept the newspaper article as proof.
I did not demand that they immediately identify guilty individuals.
I asked them to establish the facts and explain their institutional standards.
On 20 September 2026, I submitted a formal complaint concerning the reported Red Sparrow characterisation to NATO/SHAPE.
I asked whether NATO accepted, disputed or was unable to determine that the expression had been used. I asked which professional-conduct and anti-discrimination standards applied, how previous complaints had been handled and what safeguards existed against degrading social characterisations entering official information.
On 24 September, I wrote to the Spanish Ministry of Defence.
I offered three possible routes: an institutional examination, determination through appropriate legal procedures, or confidential constructive resolution.
I did not insist upon a particular outcome.
I asked the Ministry to choose a process.
I also sought a distinct response from the UK Ministry of Defence concerning what British personnel knew about the rumour environment and whether their professional standards had been applied.
That complaint encountered an existing procedural obstacle. Previous ministerial correspondence had treated related matters as part of ongoing litigation, and my constituency MP's office declined to forward the new September complaint, considering further representations unlikely to be productive.
That distinction matters. I cannot claim that the UK Ministry received that particular new complaint through the requested parliamentary route and ignored it.
But I still have no substantive institutional determination resolving the newly raised question about the sexualised characterisation and its possible presence within the British Defence environment.
Nor have I found a substantive response to the corresponding new requests addressed to Spain and NATO.
This does not establish that the institutions approve of the reported behaviour.
Silence is not consent. And the absence of a response does not prove that the allegations are true.
But it leaves a rather fundamental question unanswered.
What do an institution's professional standards actually mean if a civilian woman cannot obtain a determination of whether the conduct she reports is compatible with them?
A military institution could condemn degrading sexualised nicknames as a matter of principle without deciding that any identified officer used a particular expression.
It could investigate and conclude that the expression was never used.
It could find insufficient evidence.
It could determine that particular conduct fell outside its jurisdiction and explain who was responsible.
All of those would be identifiable institutional positions.
What I have not obtained is such a position on the questions I raised.
And the consequences of that absence do not disappear merely because the institution declines to express an opinion.
Then I Asked the Police
By September 2025, I had already spent several months formally raising concerns about what I believed to be discriminatory, humiliating and retaliatory treatment within the military environment.
The documentary record is quite extensive.
On 22 June 2025, formal legal notices were sent to NATO, Spanish and British Defence recipients.
On 5 July, Commander Pastor and I submitted a joint complaint to MARCOM alleging systematic social exclusion, discrimination, harassment and institutional prejudice.
On 12 July, I escalated those concerns to MARCOM's senior command, requesting substantive consideration.
On 27 August, I complained to RAF Police Professional Standards and the Service Police Complaints Commissioner about the treatment I had experienced at Northwood.
On 5 September, I brought allegations of harassment and abuse of authority to the attention of the Spanish Minister of Defence. I also reported suspected criminal conduct involving senior officials to the civilian police; the matter was subsequently handled by Hertfordshire Constabulary.
On 8 September, I submitted a separate criminal report to the Ministry of Defence Police, recorded under log 81-080925, and raised related concerns with UK Security Vetting.
On 30 September, I lodged a formal complaint concerning the conduct and decisions of Northwood's Commanding Officer. In October, I also approached the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Spanish Ombudsman.
Zero response, investigation or even acknowledgement.
These were complaints and allegations requiring examination, not findings of wrongdoing. But they establish something important: I was asking institutions to examine discrimination, degrading treatment, misuse of authority and the consequences of unverified allegations long before I discovered that I had reportedly been given the nickname Red Sparrow. That information emerged only in September 2026.
On 6 October 2026, I formally requested that Hertfordshire Constabulary reopen an earlier criminal investigation, 41/84346/25, identifying newly available material, recordings, documents and investigative leads.
I offered to provide a formal witness statement and supporting evidence.
I also requested a documented assessment of investigative independence and appropriate safeguards for the handling of sensitive personal data.
Hertfordshire replied on 13 October. An acting detective sergeant proposed a meeting to review the new information and determine whether the investigation should be reopened.
I welcomed the identification of officers responsible for the correspondence, but sought clarification of the investigation's procedural status, the conflict-of-interest assessment and the arrangements for receiving particularly sensitive evidence.
Those substantive questions remain outstanding in the correspondence available to me.
Then, on 23 October, the Ministry of Defence Police replied to a separate request for coordinated consideration of investigative responsibility.
Its detective sergeant stated that the circumstances were already subject to a live Hertfordshire Police investigation. On that basis, MDP said it could not duplicate the crime recording and that the matter would remain with Hertfordshire.
There is a problem with that explanation.
Hertfordshire had told me that it wanted to examine the material to determine whether to reopen the investigation.
MDP described the investigation as already live.
I asked both forces to clarify the apparent discrepancy.
Perhaps MDP had received information not yet communicated to me.
Perhaps it had inferred the investigation's status from an existing crime reference.
Perhaps the two organisations were using different administrative definitions.
I do not know.
But it is surely reasonable to expect the organisations responsible for investigating alleged criminal conduct to establish, accurately and consistently, whether an investigation is actually taking place and which organisation is responsible for it.
So, after all these letters, complaints, documentary submissions and attempts to identify the appropriate authorities, what substantive determination do I have concerning the reported sexualised treatment and the possible compromise of private material?
No established finding identifying the origin of the nickname.
No established finding connecting or disconnecting it from subsequent administrative decisions.
No communicated technical determination establishing whether the reported account interference occurred.
No confirmed resolution of the questions surrounding possible dissemination of intimate material.
And, as I write this, no clearly reconciled account from the two police forces of the investigation's current status and full scope.
There has been correspondence. There have been administrative actions. There are ongoing legal processes.
So the literal claim that nobody has done anything would be inaccurate.
But on the questions that matter to this inquiry — the questions requiring an actual determination of facts and responsibility — the result still remains:
Zero. Nada.
And that brings me back to four schoolgirls and two lawyers.
The Difference Between a Cause and a Person
The girls who wrote for The Guardian are concerned about something that they believe contributes to the sexualisation of children.
They have every right to raise that concern.
Their discomfort is real, and the accounts of actual harassment discussed in their article deserve serious attention.
My question is not whether their feelings matter.
It is whether the proposed intervention addresses the mechanisms producing the harm they want to prevent.
And then there is a second question.
If we accept the broader principle that women and girls should be protected from unwanted sexual objectification, degrading conduct and harassment, what happens when we move away from a proposed law concerning images and encounter an identifiable person reporting actual treatment by identifiable people?
Do we apply the same seriousness?
Or does our interest diminish because the problem has become inconveniently specific?
A school-uniform campaign offers a clear image, an attractive moral position and a relatively simple proposed political action.
A complaint involving real military officers, information systems, possible unauthorised access to intimate material and overlapping jurisdictions offers something rather less emotionally satisfying.
There is no single petition that establishes the facts.
No slogan that reconstructs an audit trail.
No expression of solidarity that identifies who received a complaint, who investigated it, or why an institution decided not to act.
That work is slow.
It is technical.
It demands resources.
It may uncover wrongdoing. It may establish that no wrongdoing occurred. It may reveal administrative failures rather than criminal offences.
And it requires a willingness to accept conclusions that do not necessarily fit the original emotional narrative.
Public concern can be expressed without resolving a single factual dispute. Accountability cannot.
That is the mechanism I am interested in.
It is also the reason the LinkedIn discussion struck me so forcefully.
I had introduced a real example into a discussion about protecting women from sexualisation.
I had offered an opportunity to move from a particular moral campaign to a broader principle, and from that principle to a concrete question about institutional conduct.
The conversation did not make that transition.
Was that simply because my example fell outside the scope of the original campaign?
Or was I watching a more general phenomenon: an emotionally appealing cause retaining its power only while nobody demands the harder work of applying its principles to a complicated reality?
Perhaps both explanations are possible.
But there is one more institution I want to ask.
Not a military institution this time.
A newspaper.
Dear The Guardian: A Question About the Real Red Sparrow
Dear The Guardian,
Yesterday, you published an opinion article by four teenage girls campaigning against the sexualisation of school uniforms.
I have no objection to their campaign.
I am not yet persuaded that I understand its proposed legal mechanism or how its success would be assessed. But the girls are entitled to make their case, and your newspaper is entitled to give them a platform.
What interested me was discovering how extensively your own writers had already explored questions of sexualisation, women's autonomy and institutional power in connection with Red Sparrow.
Eight years ago.
On 21 February 2018, Jake Nevins reported Jennifer Lawrence's objection to criticism of her revealing dress at a Red Sparrow publicity event. The actress insisted that wearing it was her own decision.
On 2 March 2018, Guy Lodge examined the film as a story of female exploitation and institutional sexual power, while also defending Lawrence's agency in choosing the role.
On 4 March 2018, Simran Hans, writing in The Observer, described Red Sparrow as a sexist spy thriller, criticising the film's emphasis on the humiliation of its central female character.
On 14 March 2018, Elena Lazic examined its treatment of sexual violence, exploring the distinction between sexual desire and the exercise of power.
These were different writers expressing different judgments, not a single institutional editorial position.
Nevertheless, together they demonstrate that your newspaper has provided a serious forum for examining the sexual and political meanings of this particular fictional character.
And now, eight years later, a real woman is asking whether that same character was used to describe her within a military environment — and what happened when she asked the relevant institutions to establish the facts.
There is another reason I address this question to you.
On 5 September 2026, I contacted your UK technology editor, Robert Booth, about an information-governance problem involving military and civilian police.
Robert kindly replied, asking me to explain the issue further.
I did so the following day, and sent two additional analyses on 18 September.
At that time, neither he nor I knew about the reported Red Sparrow nickname.
That information emerged only on 19 September, with the Spanish newspaper article.
It introduced an entirely new dimension to an existing documentary question.
There was now not only a problem concerning the provenance and circulation of security-related information.
There was a reported sexualised characterisation of an identifiable civilian woman.
There were earlier reports concerning suspected access to private digital accounts.
There were questions about possible exposure of highly intimate material.
There were three defence institutions from which I was seeking explanations.
And there were two police forces whose positions on investigative responsibility required clarification.
I do not know whether Robert has had the opportunity to examine the material I subsequently sent him.
I do not know whether this new development fits his reporting priorities.
And I certainly do not expect any journalist to accept my conclusions or to investigate a story simply because its subject wishes it investigated.
I respect editorial independence.
But I do have a question.
Your newspaper has provided a platform for discussing the sexualisation of schoolgirls through images.
Your writers have also explored the sexual exploitation, humiliation and power dynamics represented by the fictional Red Sparrow.
And your technology editor has already expressed an initial interest in the information-governance questions arising from my documented experience.
Would The Guardian now be interested in undertaking the rather more concrete exercise of asking the UK Ministry of Defence, the Spanish Ministry of Defence and NATO what they know, what they investigated and what professional standards they applied?
Would Robert, or another appropriately placed journalist, be interested in examining the technical and policing questions about suspected access to private material, its possible dissemination and the outstanding allocation of investigative responsibility?
I would welcome that examination.
I can provide the correspondence, the original documents, the chronology and a clear separation between established facts, published allegations, personal testimony and hypotheses requiring investigation.
You would be entirely free to question my account, approach the institutions independently and reach your own conclusions.
I am not asking you to campaign for me.
I am asking whether a specific, documented problem might warrant the same intellectual curiosity that your newspaper has already devoted to its cultural and fictional counterparts.
Perhaps it does.
Perhaps it does not.
But after watching the princess cross the empty bridge in Black Mirror, and after observing how quickly an emotionally compelling discussion can become detached from questions of evidence and practical responsibility, I find myself curious about one final thing.
Can the journalists who so thoughtfully examine what sexualisation means in films, images and public campaigns also find the interest and resources to investigate what happened when a real woman was reportedly given that very identity — and the institutions she questioned did not provide her with substantive answers?
I wonder.
And today's song - IT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED
The most disturbing scene in the first episode of Black Mirror is not the British Prime Minister having sex with a pig.
It is a young woman walking through an almost deserted London.
In The National Anthem, a member of the Royal Family, Princess Susannah, is kidnapped. Her captor demands that the Prime Minister perform an extraordinarily degrading sexual act on live television in exchange for her freedom.
The country is horrified.
Then fascinated.
Then obsessed.
Politicians debate. Journalists report. Social media erupts. Opinion polls measure whether the Prime Minister should comply. Millions of people become emotionally invested in the princess's fate.
Everybody wants her saved.
Eventually, the Prime Minister submits to the demand. The nation gathers around its screens to witness an event nobody should ever have wanted to see.
But something extraordinary has already happened.
The kidnapper released the princess thirty minutes before the broadcast.
Drugged and disoriented, she has been left on London's Millennium Bridge.
The streets are practically empty.
Nobody is watching the bridge.
Everybody is watching the pig.
The woman whose protection supposedly justified the entire national drama has become invisible.
The kidnapper, an artist staging a grotesque experiment in collective behaviour, subsequently takes his own life.
And the audience is left with a rather uncomfortable question.
At what point did the public's emotional investment in saving the princess become more important than the princess herself?
That question has fascinated me for years.
Because there is a fundamental distinction between public concern and practical responsibility.
Concern is an emotion. Responsibility requires decisions. Sometimes even actions. Ideally.
Concern can be expressed in seconds. Responsibility may require months of investigation, examination of evidence, identification of competent authorities and acceptance of uncomfortable conclusions.
Concern allows us to declare what we believe. Immediately.
Responsibility requires us to establish what actually happened. Sometimes is takes years. Sometimes decades. Sometimes centuries.
And sometimes the transition between the two does not occur at all.
This week, I conducted a small, entirely informal experiment in public reasoning.
It began with four schoolgirls, two women from the legal profession, a proposed criminal prohibition and a question about sexualisation.
It ended with me thinking about that princess walking through London while everybody watched a pig.
Four Schoolgirls and a Proposed Law
On Friday, 23 October 2026, The Guardian published an opinion article written by four teenage girls.
Rose, Mae, Aylin and Willow, aged 14 and 15, are campaigning to prohibit the use of school uniforms in pornographic depictions, including those involving adult performers.
Their argument is that sexualised representations of school uniforms may make real schoolgirls uncomfortable about how other people may perceive them.
They believe that clothing associated with children should not be presented as sexually attractive.
The girls describe their own discomfort. They also refer to accounts from other women and girls who say they experienced sexual harassment while wearing school uniform.
These are legitimate concerns.
There is no reason to dismiss them.
A child should not have to worry about being subjected to unwanted sexual attention on the way to school. Nor does a child need to prove that she has personally watched pornography before she can express concern about its wider cultural effects.
The campaign has attracted support from adults, politicians and legal professionals. Its authors want the law changed.
Fair enough.
But I am a solicitor. And when somebody proposes criminal legislation, a different set of questions immediately comes to mind.
What precisely is the intended outcome?
Are we trying to prevent children from accessing pornography?
Are we trying to prevent adults from associating school uniforms with sexual fantasies?
Are we trying to reduce actual sexual harassment of schoolgirls?
Are we trying to improve children's subjective sense of safety?
Or are we trying to establish a normative prohibition against sexualising a particular category of clothing, irrespective of any measurable change in behaviour?
Those are different objectives.
They may overlap. They may even support one another.
But they are not interchangeable.
A prohibition on a category of images might reduce the lawful availability of those images without necessarily reducing harassment. It might influence cultural norms without eliminating private fantasies. It might improve some girls' sense of safety without changing the conduct of every man who encounters a schoolgirl.
Or it might achieve broader benefits. That possibility deserves examination too.
The essential point is that the moral desirability of protecting children does not, by itself, establish the effectiveness of a particular legislative intervention.
That was what interested me.
Not whether children should be protected. I am a mother of a teenage girl, I have no other opinion that her safety, as well as safety of any woman of any age and wearing any clothing should be protected. By the state as we as by citizens.
But how a stated moral objective becomes a proposed criminal law — and how we establish whether that law will deliver the protection being promised.
An Experiment with Two Lawyers
I encountered the campaign through a LinkedIn post shared by a senior female lawyer at a major national law firm.
The post attracted expressions of support.
I decided to ask a few questions.
Initially, I wanted to understand where the girls had obtained their information about the particular pornographic representations they wished to prohibit.
One of the lawyers pointed me towards an account in the Guardian article: a girl had seen a scene on ordinary television, while watching with her mother, in which a female character wore a school uniform to arouse a man.
Another participant referred me to material from the Children's Commissioner discussing children's exposure to pornography more generally.
Interesting information.
But neither response established the specific causal mechanism I was trying to understand.
Awareness of pornography is one question.
Knowledge of a particular category of sexual representation is another.
And whether that representation causes, contributes to or normalises sexual harassment of actual children is a third.
I kept trying to distinguish them. I repeated the same set of questions.
The discussion changed character.
Instead of examining those distinctions, my questions was interpreted as an indication that I did not support the girls' campaign.
I was encouraged to recognise the importance of protecting children.
My persistence was questioned.
The discussion increasingly concerned what I supposedly believed rather than what I was actually asking.
I found this rather fascinating.
Here were two women with senior legal backgrounds, including a senior practitioner, discussing a proposed criminal prohibition.
Yet in this particular exchange, the argument repeatedly returned to the moral attractiveness of the objective rather than the evidence required to evaluate the chosen means.
I was not conducting a controlled psychological study. Two LinkedIn participants are not a representative sample of the legal profession, and a social-media conversation is not a courtroom.
Nor can I establish what either woman privately thought.
I can only describe the observable exchange.
Questions about the mechanism of a proposed law were repeatedly reframed as questions about the morality of the person asking them.
Then I introduced another element.
I explained that I was a fifty-year-old woman who had herself experienced what I sexualising and degrading treatment.
I was also a solicitor, attempting to obtain answers from identifiable institutions about identifiable conduct.
In other words, I introduced a concrete case of the broader problem we were discussing.
The purpose was not to divert attention from the schoolgirls.
It was to test whether we were discussing a general principle concerning unwanted sexual objectification, or exclusively a particular form of imagery involving school uniforms.
If the underlying principle was that women and girls should not be subjected to unwanted sexual humiliation or degrading objectification, we had substantial common ground.
If, instead, the campaign was concerned specifically with a particular class of pornographic images, I wanted to understand why that particular intervention was considered effective (and what eventually happens with a broader issue of unwanted sexualisation).
My personal example offered an opportunity to examine the principle outside its original emotional setting.
That opportunity was not taken.
My account did not become the subject of substantive engagement. The discussion remained focused on the campaign and on whether my questioning implied opposition to it.
Perhaps my example seemed irrelevant to my interlocutors. Perhaps they preferred not to become involved in an unfamiliar personal dispute. They were under no obligation to investigate my experience.
But the conversational fact remains: the comparison I introduced was not explored.
Eventually, I asked one final question.
Was the campaign intended to stop children watching pornography? Was it intended to stop adults viewing real schoolgirls through associations created by pornographic imagery, thereby making girls feel safer?
Or something else?
That last phrase was deliberate.
I was offering my interlocutor the opportunity to identify a different objective — one I might have misunderstood or overlooked.
The question received no further substantive answer in the exchange.
And that was where my experiment ended.
Not with a disagreement about the importance of protecting children.
Not with a disagreement about the legitimacy of feminism.
But with a much narrower and, to me, more interesting observation.
Had an emotionally compelling cause made it harder, rather than easier, to examine the practical mechanism through which its objectives were supposed to be achieved?
I cannot answer that question definitively from one LinkedIn conversation.
But the exchange gave me an excellent reason to investigate it.
Especially because I had already encountered a rather different version of the same problem.
The Woman in the Spanish Dress
In 2024, I entered a relationship with a Spanish naval commander serving at NATO's Allied Maritime Command in Northwood.
I was a British solicitor, a mother, a woman approaching fifty, and a British and Polish citizen who happened to have been born in the Soviet Union.
It was an ordinary adult relationship, notwithstanding the rather unusual professional environment in which my partner worked.
In December 2024, I attended Christmas events involving members of the NATO and Spanish military communities.
For one of those occasions, I wore a carefully chosen black dress with Spanish-inspired details.
I looked elegant. I wanted to honour my partner's culture. I wanted to meet people who mattered to him.
I did not imagine that my clothing, birthplace, accent or recreational shooting skills would later feature in a rather extraordinary public account of suspected espionage.
But over the following months, I experienced what I understood as hostility, exclusion and degrading characterisations.
My partner and I raised concerns about discrimination and harassment within the military environment.
The relationship subsequently became entangled with security-related decisions, administrative restrictions and police involvement, where the initial concerns still appear to derive from the social bias.
Those events are now the subject of several separate legal proceedings and complaints. Some underlying facts are recorded in official documents; other allegations remain disputed.
I am not going to litigate them in this essay.
We are exploring here something else.
In the summer of 2026, as I prepared to travel to Russia, I wanted to understand what information concerning me might have circulated through British, Spanish and NATO security structures and, based on some circumstantial evidence, could have reached Russian security services.
I needed enough information to assess my own safety.
I had been unable to obtain satisfactory answers through the institutional correspondence routes I had pursued.
So I approached journalists.
I thought that some public visibility might offer a degree of protection, while also allowing questions about institutional decision-making to be examined.
On 14 September 2026, The Telegraph published a story.
Then came The Times, Spanish newspapers and other coverage.
The ingredients were irresistible.
Tinder.
NATO.
A Spanish naval commander.
A woman born in the Soviet Union.
A shooting range.
Russian spies.
Apparently, I had become an international espionage story.
The media did not invent every element of the controversy, and journalists were entitled to examine the unusual circumstances. I appreciated the fact that my situation had finally received public attention.
But the resulting narrative was dramatically different from the questions that had originally led me to approach the press.
I wanted to know how information had been generated, verified, transmitted and acted upon.
The headlines offered an international spy thriller.
And then, five days after the first British publication, the story acquired another character.
Enter Red Sparrow
On 19 September 2026, the Spanish newspaper El Español published an article by Laura Garófano.
Its headline reported that colleagues in my former partner's NATO environment had called me Gorrión Rojo — Red Sparrow.
The article attributed the nickname to a combination of my accent, my ability to shoot and questions I had allegedly asked at military social events.
It presented the expression as a joke.
I disputed significant aspects of the article's description of my conduct and its chronology.
But I had never previously known that this particular nickname was reportedly being used about me.
So I watched the film.
Red Sparrow, starring Jennifer Lawrence, is not simply a glamorous story about a seductive Russian intelligence officer.
Its central female character is drawn into a system in which her body, sexuality and intimate relationships become instruments of intelligence work.
She experiences sexual coercion, humiliation and violence.
The film explores the use of sexuality as a mechanism of institutional power.
That was the fictional character reportedly assigned to me.
An actual woman.
In an actual relationship.
Within an actual military community.
Now, I cannot establish from a newspaper article which individuals used the nickname, what every person intended by it or whether they had seen the film.
Nor have I established that the nickname influenced subsequent security decisions.
Those are questions requiring evidence.
But I could finally identify the characterisation that had reportedly circulated.
And I found myself thinking about clothing again.
The schoolgirls in the Guardian article were concerned about the sexual meanings adults might attach to school uniforms.
I had worn a Spanish-inspired dress to a Christmas event.
Yet, according to subsequent reporting, an entirely different sexualised fictional identity had been attached to me.
Was my dress the cause?
My birthplace?
My accent?
The fact that I had a relationship with a military officer?
My ability to shoot a target?
Or the stories other people had constructed from those details?
I do not know.
That is precisely why I began asking questions.
Clothing does not create a duty on a woman to account for somebody else's sexual imagination. And another person's sexual imagination does not, by itself, establish wrongdoing. The question becomes different when those imaginings are expressed through degrading conduct, disseminated as factual characterisations, or potentially allowed to influence institutional decisions.
That is where personal dignity becomes a question of professional standards and public accountability.
Three Institutions. One Very Simple Request
After the Spanish publication, I approached the institutions connected with the environment in which the nickname was reportedly used.
I did not ask them to accept the newspaper article as proof.
I did not demand that they immediately identify guilty individuals.
I asked them to establish the facts and explain their institutional standards.
On 20 September 2026, I submitted a formal complaint concerning the reported Red Sparrow characterisation to NATO/SHAPE.
I asked whether NATO accepted, disputed or was unable to determine that the expression had been used. I asked which professional-conduct and anti-discrimination standards applied, how previous complaints had been handled and what safeguards existed against degrading social characterisations entering official information.
On 24 September, I wrote to the Spanish Ministry of Defence.
I offered three possible routes: an institutional examination, determination through appropriate legal procedures, or confidential constructive resolution.
I did not insist upon a particular outcome.
I asked the Ministry to choose a process.
I also sought a distinct response from the UK Ministry of Defence concerning what British personnel knew about the rumour environment and whether their professional standards had been applied.
That complaint encountered an existing procedural obstacle. Previous ministerial correspondence had treated related matters as part of ongoing litigation, and my constituency MP's office declined to forward the new September complaint, considering further representations unlikely to be productive.
That distinction matters. I cannot claim that the UK Ministry received that particular new complaint through the requested parliamentary route and ignored it.
But I still have no substantive institutional determination resolving the newly raised question about the sexualised characterisation and its possible presence within the British Defence environment.
Nor have I found a substantive response to the corresponding new requests addressed to Spain and NATO.
This does not establish that the institutions approve of the reported behaviour.
Silence is not consent. And the absence of a response does not prove that the allegations are true.
But it leaves a rather fundamental question unanswered.
What do an institution's professional standards actually mean if a civilian woman cannot obtain a determination of whether the conduct she reports is compatible with them?
A military institution could condemn degrading sexualised nicknames as a matter of principle without deciding that any identified officer used a particular expression.
It could investigate and conclude that the expression was never used.
It could find insufficient evidence.
It could determine that particular conduct fell outside its jurisdiction and explain who was responsible.
All of those would be identifiable institutional positions.
What I have not obtained is such a position on the questions I raised.
And the consequences of that absence do not disappear merely because the institution declines to express an opinion.
Then I Asked the Police
By September 2025, I had already spent several months formally raising concerns about what I believed to be discriminatory, humiliating and retaliatory treatment within the military environment.
The documentary record is quite extensive.
On 22 June 2025, formal legal notices were sent to NATO, Spanish and British Defence recipients.
On 5 July, Commander Pastor and I submitted a joint complaint to MARCOM alleging systematic social exclusion, discrimination, harassment and institutional prejudice.
On 12 July, I escalated those concerns to MARCOM's senior command, requesting substantive consideration.
On 27 August, I complained to RAF Police Professional Standards and the Service Police Complaints Commissioner about the treatment I had experienced at Northwood.
On 5 September, I brought allegations of harassment and abuse of authority to the attention of the Spanish Minister of Defence. I also reported suspected criminal conduct involving senior officials to the civilian police; the matter was subsequently handled by Hertfordshire Constabulary.
On 8 September, I submitted a separate criminal report to the Ministry of Defence Police, recorded under log 81-080925, and raised related concerns with UK Security Vetting.
On 30 September, I lodged a formal complaint concerning the conduct and decisions of Northwood's Commanding Officer. In October, I also approached the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Spanish Ombudsman.
Zero response, investigation or even acknowledgement.
These were complaints and allegations requiring examination, not findings of wrongdoing. But they establish something important: I was asking institutions to examine discrimination, degrading treatment, misuse of authority and the consequences of unverified allegations long before I discovered that I had reportedly been given the nickname Red Sparrow. That information emerged only in September 2026.
On 6 October 2026, I formally requested that Hertfordshire Constabulary reopen an earlier criminal investigation, 41/84346/25, identifying newly available material, recordings, documents and investigative leads.
I offered to provide a formal witness statement and supporting evidence.
I also requested a documented assessment of investigative independence and appropriate safeguards for the handling of sensitive personal data.
Hertfordshire replied on 13 October. An acting detective sergeant proposed a meeting to review the new information and determine whether the investigation should be reopened.
I welcomed the identification of officers responsible for the correspondence, but sought clarification of the investigation's procedural status, the conflict-of-interest assessment and the arrangements for receiving particularly sensitive evidence.
Those substantive questions remain outstanding in the correspondence available to me.
Then, on 23 October, the Ministry of Defence Police replied to a separate request for coordinated consideration of investigative responsibility.
Its detective sergeant stated that the circumstances were already subject to a live Hertfordshire Police investigation. On that basis, MDP said it could not duplicate the crime recording and that the matter would remain with Hertfordshire.
There is a problem with that explanation.
Hertfordshire had told me that it wanted to examine the material to determine whether to reopen the investigation.
MDP described the investigation as already live.
I asked both forces to clarify the apparent discrepancy.
Perhaps MDP had received information not yet communicated to me.
Perhaps it had inferred the investigation's status from an existing crime reference.
Perhaps the two organisations were using different administrative definitions.
I do not know.
But it is surely reasonable to expect the organisations responsible for investigating alleged criminal conduct to establish, accurately and consistently, whether an investigation is actually taking place and which organisation is responsible for it.
So, after all these letters, complaints, documentary submissions and attempts to identify the appropriate authorities, what substantive determination do I have concerning the reported sexualised treatment and the possible compromise of private material?
No established finding identifying the origin of the nickname.
No established finding connecting or disconnecting it from subsequent administrative decisions.
No communicated technical determination establishing whether the reported account interference occurred.
No confirmed resolution of the questions surrounding possible dissemination of intimate material.
And, as I write this, no clearly reconciled account from the two police forces of the investigation's current status and full scope.
There has been correspondence. There have been administrative actions. There are ongoing legal processes.
So the literal claim that nobody has done anything would be inaccurate.
But on the questions that matter to this inquiry — the questions requiring an actual determination of facts and responsibility — the result still remains:
Zero. Nada.
And that brings me back to four schoolgirls and two lawyers.
The Difference Between a Cause and a Person
The girls who wrote for The Guardian are concerned about something that they believe contributes to the sexualisation of children.
They have every right to raise that concern.
Their discomfort is real, and the accounts of actual harassment discussed in their article deserve serious attention.
My question is not whether their feelings matter.
It is whether the proposed intervention addresses the mechanisms producing the harm they want to prevent.
And then there is a second question.
If we accept the broader principle that women and girls should be protected from unwanted sexual objectification, degrading conduct and harassment, what happens when we move away from a proposed law concerning images and encounter an identifiable person reporting actual treatment by identifiable people?
Do we apply the same seriousness?
Or does our interest diminish because the problem has become inconveniently specific?
A school-uniform campaign offers a clear image, an attractive moral position and a relatively simple proposed political action.
A complaint involving real military officers, information systems, possible unauthorised access to intimate material and overlapping jurisdictions offers something rather less emotionally satisfying.
There is no single petition that establishes the facts.
No slogan that reconstructs an audit trail.
No expression of solidarity that identifies who received a complaint, who investigated it, or why an institution decided not to act.
That work is slow.
It is technical.
It demands resources.
It may uncover wrongdoing. It may establish that no wrongdoing occurred. It may reveal administrative failures rather than criminal offences.
And it requires a willingness to accept conclusions that do not necessarily fit the original emotional narrative.
Public concern can be expressed without resolving a single factual dispute. Accountability cannot.
That is the mechanism I am interested in.
It is also the reason the LinkedIn discussion struck me so forcefully.
I had introduced a real example into a discussion about protecting women from sexualisation.
I had offered an opportunity to move from a particular moral campaign to a broader principle, and from that principle to a concrete question about institutional conduct.
The conversation did not make that transition.
Was that simply because my example fell outside the scope of the original campaign?
Or was I watching a more general phenomenon: an emotionally appealing cause retaining its power only while nobody demands the harder work of applying its principles to a complicated reality?
Perhaps both explanations are possible.
But there is one more institution I want to ask.
Not a military institution this time.
A newspaper.
Dear The Guardian: A Question About the Real Red Sparrow
Dear The Guardian,
Yesterday, you published an opinion article by four teenage girls campaigning against the sexualisation of school uniforms.
I have no objection to their campaign.
I am not yet persuaded that I understand its proposed legal mechanism or how its success would be assessed. But the girls are entitled to make their case, and your newspaper is entitled to give them a platform.
What interested me was discovering how extensively your own writers had already explored questions of sexualisation, women's autonomy and institutional power in connection with Red Sparrow.
Eight years ago.
On 21 February 2018, Jake Nevins reported Jennifer Lawrence's objection to criticism of her revealing dress at a Red Sparrow publicity event. The actress insisted that wearing it was her own decision.
On 2 March 2018, Guy Lodge examined the film as a story of female exploitation and institutional sexual power, while also defending Lawrence's agency in choosing the role.
On 4 March 2018, Simran Hans, writing in The Observer, described Red Sparrow as a sexist spy thriller, criticising the film's emphasis on the humiliation of its central female character.
On 14 March 2018, Elena Lazic examined its treatment of sexual violence, exploring the distinction between sexual desire and the exercise of power.
These were different writers expressing different judgments, not a single institutional editorial position.
Nevertheless, together they demonstrate that your newspaper has provided a serious forum for examining the sexual and political meanings of this particular fictional character.
And now, eight years later, a real woman is asking whether that same character was used to describe her within a military environment — and what happened when she asked the relevant institutions to establish the facts.
There is another reason I address this question to you.
On 5 September 2026, I contacted your UK technology editor, Robert Booth, about an information-governance problem involving military and civilian police.
Robert kindly replied, asking me to explain the issue further.
I did so the following day, and sent two additional analyses on 18 September.
At that time, neither he nor I knew about the reported Red Sparrow nickname.
That information emerged only on 19 September, with the Spanish newspaper article.
It introduced an entirely new dimension to an existing documentary question.
There was now not only a problem concerning the provenance and circulation of security-related information.
There was a reported sexualised characterisation of an identifiable civilian woman.
There were earlier reports concerning suspected access to private digital accounts.
There were questions about possible exposure of highly intimate material.
There were three defence institutions from which I was seeking explanations.
And there were two police forces whose positions on investigative responsibility required clarification.
I do not know whether Robert has had the opportunity to examine the material I subsequently sent him.
I do not know whether this new development fits his reporting priorities.
And I certainly do not expect any journalist to accept my conclusions or to investigate a story simply because its subject wishes it investigated.
I respect editorial independence.
But I do have a question.
Your newspaper has provided a platform for discussing the sexualisation of schoolgirls through images.
Your writers have also explored the sexual exploitation, humiliation and power dynamics represented by the fictional Red Sparrow.
And your technology editor has already expressed an initial interest in the information-governance questions arising from my documented experience.
Would The Guardian now be interested in undertaking the rather more concrete exercise of asking the UK Ministry of Defence, the Spanish Ministry of Defence and NATO what they know, what they investigated and what professional standards they applied?
Would Robert, or another appropriately placed journalist, be interested in examining the technical and policing questions about suspected access to private material, its possible dissemination and the outstanding allocation of investigative responsibility?
I would welcome that examination.
I can provide the correspondence, the original documents, the chronology and a clear separation between established facts, published allegations, personal testimony and hypotheses requiring investigation.
You would be entirely free to question my account, approach the institutions independently and reach your own conclusions.
I am not asking you to campaign for me.
I am asking whether a specific, documented problem might warrant the same intellectual curiosity that your newspaper has already devoted to its cultural and fictional counterparts.
Perhaps it does.
Perhaps it does not.
But after watching the princess cross the empty bridge in Black Mirror, and after observing how quickly an emotionally compelling discussion can become detached from questions of evidence and practical responsibility, I find myself curious about one final thing.
Can the journalists who so thoughtfully examine what sexualisation means in films, images and public campaigns also find the interest and resources to investigate what happened when a real woman was reportedly given that very identity — and the institutions she questioned did not provide her with substantive answers?
I wonder.
And today's song - IT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED
