Victims and Prisoners Bill

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 18th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome this Bill. As the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, has said, it is one we have waited quite a long time for. We will therefore want to strengthen it because I suspect there will not be another one coming down the road very quickly.

I will confine my remarks to a very specific area, although I support what others have said about children and other aspects of the Bill. I have spent far too many years working with women who have been abused and who have experienced violence. I really did think that, by this stage in my life, I would not have to be making as many interventions of this nature about this issue. You would have thought that we would be on top of this issue and made sure we had the legislation right. However, the reality is that the perpetrators are quite crafty. They have a persistence and determination to look for new vulnerabilities and new ways of exploiting the most vulnerable.

The 2018 Spicer review was a review of cases in Yorkshire and the north-east involving the grooming of young girls by large numbers of men for sexual purposes and other horrendous crimes. I have been working with an organisation which has renamed itself the STAGE project. It is a group of several organisations working in that region on the issues those young women faced then, and working with those same women and others as they have become adults and continue to be exploited. These young girls were targeted, groomed, raped and sexually exploited across the part of the world that I absolutely love, but the support for them has been very challenging.

The Spicer report acknowledged for the first time that not only children but women over the age of 18 are being groomed and sexually exploited. The problem is that too often this is seen not as a crime but as consensual: they are going with men in cars for sex, and being given drugs—what do they expect us to do about it? They are getting on with it; that is how they are making their money. But we also now hear about young women who cannot get accommodation—we even hear this about students—and are expected to give sexual favours in return for accommodation.

As STAGE says, we need to “change the narrative”. We need to understand what is really happening and make sure that those women are treated as victims and get the appropriate support to make sure they understand that they have had criminal activity perpetrated against them, and that there are routes for them to get support and for the perpetrators to be arrested, charged and punished. I have several copies of Changing the Narrative, and I will make sure the Minister and anyone else who wants one can have one.

I have been working with the organisations working with women who have experienced this level of exploitation. The stories are harrowing, and I am not going to repeat them in the Chamber today. The point I want to establish is that too often, the crime is not recognised. They are therefore not recognised as victims and the ability to change their lives and experiences simply disappears. A lot has been gained by the national definition of child sexual exploitation which came out of this work a few years ago, but we now need one for adult sexual exploitation.

I want the Secretary of State to consult on and develop a statutory definition of adult sexual exploitation and to publish accompanying guidance, and I will push the Government to accept that. Many organisations come up with their own definitions, which means that they vary enormously. Again, many women simply do not have trust in that. I know that Ministers have thought about this, but I want to make sure that this Minister understands where I am coming from and what I think we would gain by having that definition. It would enable everybody who works with victims—the police, probation, anybody in the criminal justice system—to understand what is happening to these women and help us build the right sort of support to tackle it.

There are ways forward. Too many times I have talked to young women whose support fell off a cliff edge when they were 18 because nobody saw it as exploitation any more—they were simply making decisions for themselves. They were far from making decisions for themselves: they were being exploited and are being exploited, and we should do something about it.