Sexual Violence in Conflict (Select Committee Report)

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, as another non-member of the committee, I congratulate it on the report. I congratulate all those who have advanced and are advancing work on this issue such as, of course, the Minister and her predecessors concerned in government with it. I knew the word “tireless” would be used. That is perhaps appropriate but actually, if you analyse it, it is a very odd word because I am sure that the people who do this work must get very tired.

I need to declare an interest. One of the committee’s witnesses, already mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Black, was Dr Michael Korzinski, a psychologist and psycho-social expert who has been deployed twice to Bosnia as part of a team of experts. He is also co-author of a training module for judges, prosecutors and others on wartime sexual violence, developed with the support of the UK Government. As a friend, I have been aware of his work and talked to his colleagues about it as well. This has of course informed my thinking.

I want to say a word about the PSVI teams of experts. Multidisciplinary teamwork is a productive way of working in most fields and it is often productive to transfer knowledge between fields. Perhaps marginal to this debate but not to the big picture, I wonder how much learning, particularly with regard to support for survivors and witnesses, has been made available within this country to those engaged in work on sexual abuse, including and perhaps particularly trafficking, and vice versa. It is essential in both situations to understand why, for instance, a victim did not struggle or how his or her memory and recall are affected by trauma. That is relevant to how evidence may be gathered and to how a witness presents in court. As all those involved in the criminal justice system need to understand, what a witness says in response to a question may not be what a witness thinks. Indeed, the witness may not know what he or she thinks.

Noble Lords will know how important it is to capture the experience of those who work on the front line. I welcome the Government’s agreement to explore how to strengthen mechanisms for feedback from teams of expert members and to apply this to policy-making and disseminate it. There is a lot of scope for this and I urge the Government to pursue it. It is probably the cheapest and easiest recommendation in the whole report. I also welcome the Government’s encouragement of our embassies and high commissions,

“to think more ambitiously and creatively about how they may use the ToE’s expertise”.

The very nature of trauma requires an integrated approach. I understand from a lawyer recently a member of such a team that the teams currently generally comprise lawyers and gender experts but no trauma experts. An integrated approach and a sustained commitment to those concerns is required. The whole system needs to be attuned to it. I include in this not just victims. I already mentioned the range of people involved in criminal justice systems. They come from the same communities so it is more than a matter of the women or men who are victims knowing their own perpetrators—something to which the right reverend Prelate alluded. Witness support officers need to understand the impact on victims, and their own reactions; so do those working in the so often underresourced but pivotal local organisations. Relentless exposure to the horrors takes its toll. The lawyers need support and training.

Rape in conflict is not new. It was not new when it was widely used in the conflicts of the previous century. If its use is in part because of the concept of women as property, that is hard-wired—as old as the hills, maybe, but that is not to be defeatist; wiring can be changed—but so is the response hard-wired, which is why it is such a powerful tactic. It humiliates, as has been said. It undermines morale, as well as being used as a form of ethnic cleansing. My noble friend Lady Tonge called it a step towards genocide. Stigma and ostracism are not accidental outcomes, and I was struck by the observation of the noble Lord, Lord Bates, that those who are injured in different ways in war are often regarded as heroes.

Of course, support has to be culturally appropriate. If a survivor is to be supported and empowered to give the best evidence and not to be re-victimised or re-traumatised, it is critical to appreciate how his or her culture shapes the presentation. Our understanding of the neurobiology of trauma is also critical. That may sound like cutting-edge understanding, but the application may seem quite homespun. For example, a group of women in Afghanistan could not articulate their experiences and so could not access appropriate medical help—until they focused on something quite different. They sat together knitting, and gradually they began to be able to articulate it and to start the journey to recovery. That work was led by a team which understood trauma.

I have one more story as a proxy for all those who are stigmatised. A woman, who I know is not alone in her experience, was in her home city of Aleppo at a friend’s house when she got news that her home had been hit by a bomb. Distraught, she rushed out, forgetting to cover her head. Because of this “transgression”, she was raped and was then disowned by her husband. She was assaulted by the very people she thought were there to protect her and her children, who witnessed the assault. Long-term support following such experiences is a very real requirement.

I do not for a moment dismiss the experiences of men and boys, but women and girls who have been in such situations, who have lost family through war, who are themselves very vulnerable, and who find themselves bread-winners, need practical support. I will end with something that is part of the support landscape—not the end of the story but one thing that can be done. I was cheered to hear that DfID is engaged in setting up skills training for women refugees in the Middle East. This is support and prevention.

I have deliberately confined my remarks to something rather low-level, perhaps, in a topic which is very broad and deep, as the report and the debate have illustrated, but that says to me that the depth of expertise and determination that is required is also very great.

Legislative Reform (Civil Partnership) Order 2011

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Monday 7th February 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Smith of Finsbury]

My Lords, I want to contribute briefly to the discussion on this proposed order because I think I am right in saying that I am the first Member of your Lordships' House to enter into a civil partnership, as I did nearly 5 years ago. I regard it as one of the most progressive and forward-looking steps that we, in this country, have taken over the course of the past decade or so.

The order is wholly welcome. It makes a relatively minor and sensible change in enabling the performance of a civil partnership ceremony to take place where consular staff are locally drawn, rather than originally based here in the UK. This will enable more civil partnerships to take place. It is therefore a very good thing.

However, the debate enables us to reflect on the interesting table attached to the order and its Explanatory Notes that set out the status regarding civil partnerships in a whole range of different countries across the world. There are of course some countries where homophobia is not only rife but encouraged at the moment. We have only to think of some of the very distressing occurrences in Uganda recently to know that that is the case. Sadly, I suspect that it will be many years before we are able to see civil partnerships performed for British nationals in Uganda.

There are many countries across the world, some of which are full members of the European Union, where British nationals resident in that country would not be permitted to perform a civil partnership ceremony under the auspices of the British consul. I hope that the Government will continue to make representations to those Governments where we might have a degree of influence, either through common membership of the European Union or from old Commonwealth ties, to ensure that a more progressive and liberal approach to the possibility of civil partnerships is gradually taken in some of these countries. It would be very interesting to hear from the Minister exactly what steps are being taken in that respect.

Having said that, I believe that this order is entirely welcome. I fully support it. It is a sensible measure and I am very pleased that the Government are bringing it forward.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, on behalf of the Liberal Democrats, I, too, am very happy to see this order. Perhaps I may say that this is the most sympathetic, human and humane Explanatory Memorandum to any parliamentary document that I have ever seen. I was very impressed at the account of what some individuals did to assist the situation using free time in their diaries. I suspect that the high commissioner who was so helpful in Brisbane is well known to Members of this House. I would have expected no less of her, but it was nice to read about it.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Smith, I, too, am concerned about the wider issue. I appreciate that the Minister is not in a position to do more than make sympathetic noises to these representations. Nevertheless, it is right that we should do so. I was almost as much as anything dismayed at the list of countries in the table which did not reply, but which it was believed would object. That says a great deal.

I hope and would encourage the Government to work as far as they can at the recognition of civil partnerships in those countries. The UK recognises a number of overseas same-sex partnership schemes across and beyond Europe, but this is not widely reciprocated. This order is extremely welcome.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, my contribution has been largely pre-empted by what my noble friend Lord Smith had to say. The Committee will not be surprised to learn that Her Majesty's Opposition fully support the order. It is a sensible flexibility to the current arrangements and a real advance for those who would otherwise have to travel long distances in order to register their civil partnerships. It is important to recognise that in one sense this is part of a series of changes in the devolution of powers in the Diplomatic Service to locally engaged staff. We have seen that particularly in commercial sections and increasingly in consular sections in our embassies, high commissions and consulates throughout the world.

In the coalition’s business plan for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, there is a clause that says that the coalition Government will continue to slim down consular services across all our embassies, high commissions and consulates. Does that mean that the Minister envisages that, increasingly, locally engaged staff will undertake work that has heretofore been undertaken by members of the Diplomatic Service?

My question is similar to that posed by my noble friend in relation to those countries where same-sex relationships are currently illegal. Can the Minister tell us in what countries we are actively engaged in discussions with their Governments on that point? There is a rather more subtle point as well. In a number of countries in the world, same-sex relationships are not necessarily illegal but are not necessarily welcomed by a number of institutions. What training of locally engaged staff are Her Majesty's Government undertaking in this respect so that those who might have misgivings about officiating at same-sex civil partnerships not only are made to feel comfortable themselves but do not make those who are engaging in civil partnership ceremonies feel uncomfortable when they come for such an officiation?

I noted that during the consultation period, Stonewall and others responded to the order in an entirely positive way. I also remind the Committee that this was something begun under the previous Labour Government and I would therefore expect spokesmen on this side of the Committee to give it full support. Will the Minister engage in the slightly wider point about the devolution from the Diplomatic Service to locally engaged staff of other forms of consular activity?