UK: Violence Against Women and Girls

Baroness Bertin Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bertin (Con)]

My Lords, I echo the thanks to the noble Baronesses, Lady Drake and Lady Warwick, for securing this debate. We need to do all we can to keep up consistent focus and momentum on this issue and need always to be asking ourselves: what is working? What legislation has been successful? What has not been so successful? Where are the gaps and what more needs to be done?

To begin on a positive note, I am delighted that the Government have toughened up revenge porn laws this week. The onus is now no longer on the victim to prove that the perpetrator intended to cause distress. This is big progress; it sends a powerful signal to perpetrators but also to society as a whole. It says to the predominantly female victims that, finally, a law is on their side. The dismal prosecution figures associated with crimes of a sexual nature have to change, and I hope that announcements such as this will mark some kind of turning point. It also rightly recognises what is actually going on in the world: technology is now the dominating theme in so many crimes against women and girls.

I was unable to speak on the Online Safety Bill, but I give my full support to noble friends and colleagues who have fought to make changes around age verification for pornography and codes of conduct for violence against women and girls, recognising that of course we are disproportionately attacked and abused online. Real damage is being done not only to our children but also to women, and if we let this opportunity pass without putting the best protections in place, we will have failed. I urge the Government to be brave on this and accept many of those amendments.

On the issue of pornography, allowing young people, particularly young boys, such easy access to misogynistic and degrading porn renders much of the hard work that many people, so many campaigners and organisations are doing to combat VAWG completely redundant. It changes behaviour and informs how relationships begin and continues. Anecdotes of boys in primary schools playing out porno scenes where they are choking their female classmates are commonplace and absolutely shocking. There was one shocking anecdote from a head teacher which will always stay with me. She described having a 12 year-old boy in her office accused of raping his classmate. He was sobbing as they waited for the police, saying he had no idea that what he was doing was wrong, believing that force was a normal part of sex, having watched so much pornography of that nature. Her life was ruined and his life too.

When researching this speech, I spoke to a group of 16 year-old girls. One issue, as the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, said, that came up time and again was cyberflashing. Every one of them had experienced it and they all found it frightening and threatening. They also expressed concerns that, despite it becoming a crime, prosecution levels would be non-existent, due to the onus being on them to prove the intent of the perpetrator. This is the wrong way around and once again prioritises men’s freedoms over women’s and girls’ freedoms not to be sexually harassed.

Cyberflashing, just like real-life flashing, is completely perverse behaviour. Let us just take a moment to remember what this is. A young woman might be sitting on a crowded train when someone decides to airdrop a picture of his penis. He is close by. She knows he is watching her reaction, getting a kick out of the shock, the disgust and fear. This really is an unpleasant crime and one-third of women have experienced it. Worse still, it is a precursor, as we know, to far more serious crimes and should not be left unchecked. People do not just wake up one morning and become a rapist or a murderer; they work up to it, very often through crimes such as these.

So, I ask the Minister, if he cannot accept the amendments, which I sincerely hope he does, can he reassure us that, since there are unacceptably low prosecutions in the area of cyberflashing, the Government will think again about how they deal with this increasingly ubiquitous and sinister crime? I end by saying that, while of course it is men’s behaviour that is the problem, we must be careful not to pitch this as men versus women. This is about violent men versus society, and we need to include men and boys in the conversation and the solution much more than I think we do at the moment.