UK: Violence Against Women and Girls

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I congratulate my noble sisters on facilitating this debate on the vital issue of violence against women—an epidemic exacerbated by decades of austerity.

While I totally agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, on the need for more judicial training, today also feels like a moment to celebrate our judiciary. I pay tribute to my dear friend, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, who retired from your Lordships’ House last week due to fading health. It is sometimes hard to believe that it was as late as 1991 that rape within marriage was outlawed in this country, and that it was judges, not parliamentarians, who established such an obvious and civilised reform. This is what the ever self-deprecating noble and learned Lord said about his landmark decision in the Crown v C years later in 2017:

“I have few boasts to my name by way of legal achievement, few jewels in my judicial crown, but I can and do boast of being the first judge in this jurisdiction … to rule that a husband is not permitted in law to have intercourse with his wife quite simply whensoever he chooses—in short, that there is such an offence as marital rape. That decision was said at the time to fly in the face of centuries of established legal principle but in fact, happily, it was upheld by both the Court of Appeal and indeed the Appeal Committee in your Lordships’ House”.—[Official Report, 10/3/17; col. 1584.]


But now, six years later, it is political priorities and economic resources, rather than the law, that are letting so many women in the United Kingdom so badly down. As we have heard, attrition rates between the reporting and charging of rape, let alone trials and convictions, are so dire as to amount to de facto decriminalisation of one of the gravest offences, the prevalence of which casts a very long shadow on any society’s levels of basic common decency.

Further, we are now in a vicious spiral of such low trust in policing and the criminal justice system, on the part of women in particular, that they are reluctant, as we have heard, even to come forward as victims of terrible, inhuman and degrading abuse. Rape and other types of violence against women are complex crimes, and all the more difficult, evidentially, on account of their intimate nature. It takes expensive expert personnel and generous support services to even begin to tackle the problem, and years of neglect now render the challenge even greater. Will the Minister commit to making this a personal priority for his tenure in the Home Department?

Will the Government guarantee the provision of specialist rape provision in every police force in the country, of more publicly funded refuge places and of other priority support for victims? Will the Prime Minister, himself a father of daughters, lead a public campaign for women’s and girls’ dignity and rights, in contrast with, I am afraid, the rather laddish and often misogynistic political culture of recent years?