Covid-19: International Response

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

This pandemic presents huge challenges to societies everywhere, and virtually every nation in the world has passed emergency legislation to limit freedoms and create social distancing and quarantine. However, steps taken should be proportionate and time limited, and the problem is that this contagion coincides with another contagion: the rise of populism and authoritarianism. I am the director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, and we are hearing the most appalling accounts and evidence of abuse worldwide. Under the flag of the pandemic, the escalation of human rights abuse is truly alarming, and in some cases horrifying. Are opportunities being taken by the Government to raise human rights abuses?

Everywhere, women face a terrifying increase in domestic violence and murder. In the Middle East, in India and Pakistan, and globally, women are harassed and victimised on social media. They are seeing their children abducted, and marriages forced on girls. In Poland, under the cover of Covid, abortion rights have been removed. The same is going on in parts of the United States. Police and military forces are using the virus as a pretext for rounding up dissidents. They use it to abuse minorities, LGBT people and those whose religion is not the dominant one. Thousands are in detention in El Salvador. In Kazakhstan, there has been a rounding up of people. In the Philippines, Duterte has given instructions to shoot dead anyone breaking the lockdown rules. Throughout India, the opportunity to turn on Muslims has been seized, and we know what has been happening to the Rohingya and the Uighur in China. I am afraid that the pandemic is accelerating the horrors that they are experiencing. In Kashmir, restrictive laws are being enforced in cruel and shocking ways, and the internet lockdown enforced by Modi means that people do not even know how to access help if they are ill.

Journalists are being targeted. In the USA, Trump has declared openly that asylum seekers are to be barred any opportunity to seek sanctuary, even if they are being persecuted. There has been a total dismissal of the international standards that we have been working towards over many years since the Second World War. The list of egregious conduct is long. I sincerely hope that the Government take every opportunity in raising this behaviour in their international interactions. We must remember that silence makes us complicit. In future efforts to secure post-Brexit trade deals, I hope that this behaviour is not forgotten. It should not be buried with the dead.

Role of Women in Public Life

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a director of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, which has given grants to, among others, WASPI, Make Votes Matter, and other organisations that have been mentioned already during the debate, as well as to many other political reform campaigns. I congratulate the noble Baronesses, Lady Williams and Lady Vere, for introducing this debate. We have had the most extraordinarily unified views about the success over the last 100 years, but also recognise that there are many problems.

I want to move back well over 100 years ago to John Stuart Mill. My favourite quotation from him is:

“The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves”.


He said that in a letter to Alexander Bain in 1869. A lot of the rest of his political life was spent helping women to be able to do that.

The woman who stirred up my own zeal was Baroness Stocks of Kensington and Chelsea, who started life as a Brinton and was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Norton. She had an extraordinary life. I did not know that—I knew a doughty old lady who came to lunch on Sundays. She was principal of Westfield College, just around the corner from where I lived. My Conservative father, though not an MP at that time, won every argument at the dinner table, except when Mary was there. She taught me, by my watching the way in which she debated and engaged, that it was perfectly possible for women to do what they wanted. I can remember her saying to me on one occasion in the late 1960s, when I was still just at secondary school and so a bit behind the revolution that was going on around me, “You know, you can do exactly what you want to do. You just have to set your mind to it”. This woman did set her mind to it. She did an extraordinary range of things, as did many of the other women who were suffragists and suffragettes. They took that into other parts of their lives. But her passion and deeds started early. In 1907, aged 16, she was on the Mud March, one of the first big marches of the suffragist movements. I quote her voice at that time from her autobiography, My Commonplace Book:

“I carried a banner in the 1907 ‘mud march’ at the head of which walked Mrs Fawcett, Lady Strachey, Lady Frances Balfour, and that indomitable liberty boy, Keir Hardie. As we moved off through the arch of Hyde Park Corner we met a barrage of ridicule from hostile male onlookers. ‘Go home and do the washing,’ ‘Go home and mind the baby’ were the most frequent taunts flung at us. As we proceeded along Piccadilly it was observed by some of the marchers that the balcony of the Ladies’ Lyceum Club was crowded with members looking down from their safe vantage. Some of the marchers looked up and shouted: ‘Come down and join us.’ I do not know whether any of them did.


It was a great adventure for a sixteen-year-old; and on returning to school on the following Monday I was uncertain how my public exploit would be regarded by authority. I need not have worried. All the mistresses were suffragists, as indeed were all salary-earning professional women”.


She went on in this autobiography to include some of the pictures from her journal at the time. There is a glorious cartoon dated 1913 of three versions of herself. The first is of a glorious young Edwardian lady in the full panoply, hat and social get-up of the upper middle class in London. Underneath, it says, “What Mary’s mother would like Mary to wear”. The next picture is of a young utilitarian girl about town—at this point she was an undergraduate at the LSE—and underneath it says, “What Mary’s mother thinks Mary wants to wear”. But the next picture is the most poignant. It is of a woman prisoner and underneath it says, “What Mary would really like to wear”. That is why I wear these colours, because she was not allowed to become a suffragette. She and many others would have been utterly shunned by their families if they had done so. Therefore, I wear these colours in her memory and that of many women who wanted to do more.

Lest noble Lords think that Mary felt stifled by being a suffragist, I should tell them that she did not. She had many friends who were suffragettes and she acted as a link between them. In her chapter on votes for women, she talks about how both the suffragettes and the suffragists understood that both sides were absolutely vital to winning the argument, as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, referred to earlier. The suffragists had the ears of politicians. They were perhaps too patient, especially in the face of Lord Asquith’s opposition. I am glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, is not in her place when I refer to her great-grandfather, but it is true that Lord Asquith was the major block to suffrage happening earlier.

Other noble Lords referred to those who 100 years ago led the way. As others have said, the failure of the Liberal Government was moved on when David Lloyd George ousted Asquith and attitudes changed. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, was right when she talked about the strategic positioning of both the suffragists and the suffragettes. All the right conversations had been had in the background. It is also interesting that the suffragettes’ militant action stopped the moment the war started and all women put their shoulders to whatever task they were asked to do to demonstrate that they were worthy of changing those men’s minds.

Many noble Lords did not want women’s suffrage. On observing the debate in the Lords that night, Mary Stocks said:

“The course of the debate made it clear that a majority of its members regarded even a limited measure of women’s suffrage with distaste, amounting to horror. But in view of the movement of public opinion outside, as demonstrated by an overwhelming vote in the House of Commons, the House of Lords was not prepared to flout democratically expressed public opinion. The anti-suffrage peers abstained from voting in sufficient numbers, thus enabling the vital clause to go through. In fact the Upper House was not in 1918 prepared to frustrate the clearly expressed will of the people. Nor should it be so prepared”.


That has relevance to the debates that we are undertaking at the moment on the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill and I have been encouraged by listening to the debate we had last week. Despite the fact that this House recognised that it has the opportunity and right—nay, the duty—to challenge and scrutinise, we also recognised that there is a will elsewhere. It does not stop any noble Lords whose political views are that they want to remain continuing to fight for that, but I have not heard that view changed. I am encouraged, though, that even the men who opposed suffrage were prepared to abstain to allow the voice of the people to go through.

The quote from the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne, from 50 years later was also interesting. Mary Stocks became a Peer in the mid-1960s. She was somewhat scathing about coming into the House but she also loved it. She reckoned that she was brought in as a broadcaster. For many years, she was the token woman on “Any Questions”, “The Brains Trust”, and the predecessors of “Prayer for the Day” and “Thought for the Day”. She was also an excellent interviewer. The interview to which the noble Lord, Lord Norton, referred is really engaging and the parliamentary archives still have it. Mary Stocks, who was not a Conservative, interviewed Nancy Astor, who was definitely not Labour. If any noble Lord gets the chance to see it, it is fascinating; it certainly was on Parliament TV some time ago.

There have been other notable women in the Lords. I am reminded of Nancy Seear, the first Liberal leader in this House, who was an indomitable woman. If you ever met her, you would never forget it. Shirley Williams was my mentor; many other women in my party and the Labour Party had her support. She guided me for 10 years when I was standing for Parliament and trying to decide what to do, and when I came into your Lordships’ House. I also note some of my current heroes. My noble friend Lady Thornhill was the first woman elected mayor in this country and is about to stand down after 16 years’ service in Watford. My noble friend Lady Benjamin is a role model, and not just in broadcasting. Since she took her place in your Lordships’ House she has become an absolute advocate for the safety of children and we listen to her with great care and attention. I was amused by her stories about the BBC. She and I worked together on “Play School” when I was a floor manager. At the same time as she was being put under pressure for expecting her first child, I got engaged. I was hauled in to see the personnel officer who asked, “So when are you leaving us?”, because married women did not work. I had a colleague who did work after she got married. She came back from maternity leave, having made arrangements for her very small baby. The first thing the floor management team did was send her to Thailand for six months to work on “Tenko”. She resigned.

An experience of my own of being a woman in that field was filming in a men’s club. I was the only woman on the team; the actors in the show and the other people there were all men. I was urinated on as I was trying to cue actors in the corner. My story is personal to me and shaped the way I view things, but every other woman in this House has experienced similar things.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

Me too.

[Baroness Brinton]

I am glad that there are others who are prepared to affirm it.

On business, I am delighted that the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, talked about the need for deeds not words. She referred to the work of the coalition Government, and I particularly want to highlight the work of my honourable friend Jo Swinson, who steered through parental leave. This is important, and it is not just about maternity leave. My son and daughter-in-law have two very small, premature babies. He works for L’Oreal, to which he moved just as the babies were born. He was told that there were no meetings after 4.30 pm because all young parents should have the chance to be at home to put their babies to bed. With examples like that, we have the pipeline that other noble Lords have been talking about. The responsibility for helping women move on entails an understanding that all parents, regardless of their gender, have a role in helping to bring up their children. Parental leave will take off as soon as organisations start asking young men what they are going to be doing when their baby is born.

The other fun person who I just wanted to raise briefly in the last couple of minutes—I think she has been mentioned in passing—is Marie Stopes. It is not fashionable to recognise her as a heroine but she was. I think her true recognition came in the 1960s, when her contribution was finally recognised for what it was. Mary Stocks wrote—I do not have enough time to quote her—that Marie Stopes did not just want contraception, she clearly changed women’s views about sex. One woman, speaking to Marie Stopes, said:

“He’s a good husband, he only troubles me once a week”.


In the 1920s, that was the common view. We talk about the outside and external achievements, but we must remember that the suffragists and suffragettes who went on to run birth control clinics also changed the lives of women around us—the entire world.

I must correct the view from some noble Lords on the Labour Benches that the Liberal Democrats have not introduced all-women shortlists. We have. Some 58% of our target seats in 2015 and just over 50% in 2017 had women in them. Unfortunately, when you lose seats, the chance of moving forward in other areas is somewhat difficult. We remain committed to that for exactly the same reasons as the Labour Party, because we know that it will improve diversity in other ways. It will improve the representation of disabled, BME and LGBT women in Parliament.

In conclusion, we have talked a lot this evening about deeds, not words. I ask every one of your Lordships to make your own deeds about what you will take out of this debate today. Write yourself a postcard with your top three actions, give it to your Whips Office and ask them to post it back to you in three months’ time to see what you have done. I will tell your Lordships why. I spoke about my granddaughters; they will be two this summer. At the current, glacial, rate of change they will be in their ninth decade before we have parity in the House of Commons. That is not good enough.

Domestic Abuse: Clare’s Law

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord is absolutely right to raise this point because, of course, the effect on children of even one incident of domestic violence can be lifelong and change their whole psyche. That is why the new domestic abuse Bill will look not only at victims of domestic violence, but at the effect domestic violence has on children.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister will know that in the last month we have seen the sentencing of a man who killed his third partner. He threw his first partner off a veranda on the ninth floor of a multi-storey building. He pleaded guilty on the grounds of provocation, was sentenced and released after nine years. He killed a second partner and invoked diminished responsibility manslaughter, and was placed in a secure hospital from which he was released after two years. He was thirdly convicted of attacking a partner with a claw hammer and then strangling her with the cord of a dressing gown. How can it be that someone is released after two years in a secure hospital and there been no oversight of his position in society?

At the moment there are requirements—often made by judges—that such people notify the police if they enter into new relationships. That involves self-referral. It is rather a silly idea that someone is going to notify the police when they embark on another relationship. Such oversight is essential, particularly in the circumstances of homicide and particularly given, as the noble Baroness mentioned, that two women a week are killed by their partners. The majority of deaths of women are at the hands of partners. Are we going to have an integrated system to make sure that there is oversight, particularly in homicide cases?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

There are several questions there but I shall attempt to answer them all. The noble Baroness is absolutely right to highlight the issue of multiple instances of domestic violence, where the perpetrator may go on to commit still more violence against women. The domestic abuse Bill will certainly look at sentencing. There is also the whole issue of the right not only to know but to ask. It is incumbent on the police to deliver the right to know. That is why the Government have placed such emphasis on domestic violence and how it affects all sections of society. It affects health, particularly mental health, and we are absolutely determined to tackle it. The noble Baroness is not wrong in saying that we need to tackle it from both a legislative and a non-legislative point of view, and that is precisely what we are doing.

Economy: Culture and the Arts

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, I, too, express my warm congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, on securing this debate. Like other speakers, I have had a variety of roles that reflect my own passion for the arts. I have chaired the British Council, I have chaired the London International Festival of Theatre, I have chaired Arts & Business, I was on the board of the Hampstead Theatre, and I am currently a trustee of the Man Booker Prize and the Hay Festival.

I had the great pleasure of getting to know the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, as co-trustee of the British Museum and I now count her as a friend. She will agree with me that to be a trustee of the British Museum is one of the greatest privileges that anyone can have. It is an extraordinary institution that is recognised internationally as one of the great wonders of the world. It is why travellers from around the globe make it a first port of call. It belongs not just to us but to the world, housing products of the world’s cultures. Yet Britain has the honour to be the steward of those collections.

To wander in its halls is to go on a great journey through the history of humanity. Its collections tell us what it means to be human and confirm that the peoples of the world are indeed one. A day in the museum leaves you with one overriding sense: what distinguishes the human from animal life is our creativity—our invention of things, our thinking of things, and then our making of things. There are at the museum displays of that incredible creativity from the earliest of times, back to the ice age, as a recent exhibition showed. That making of things—human creativity and invention—is a national asset that is beyond price. Here we are a nation that is small in size—a quarter the size of France—but which dominates the world in the creative industries. Caroline Norbury, CEO of Creative England, said that our inventors think the unthinkable—from Logie Baird to Tim Berners-Lee. We have some of the world’s most successful brands—from James Bond to Harry Potter. We have the largest commercial theatre operation in the world with ticket revenues of £535 million and 40 million visitors a year. It all depends on artists, makers and performers.

Why are we so good at this? It is because we have had an environment that has allowed for experimentation and, at times, for failure. We have in the past invested in the science and technological research that supports and respects artistic talent. There is a delicate ecosystem—an interplay between science and the arts and the cross hatching of the private and public subsidy—that has allowed talent to flourish in this country. When people are asked to think about the arts—theatre, film, paintings—they too often think of them as an add-on that are affordable only in times of affluence. The folly in such limited thinking does not need rehearsing in this House. What is forgotten is the knock-on effect on other sectors that work with the arts to create innovative products and services. All the design elements in our lives feed off art. Architecture looks to sculpture for form; graphic design looks at visual art and photography for new style; advertising looks to film. Steve Jobs was fond of saying that he did not employ geeks but hired poets, musicians and artists who were interested in technology. From that came Apple. However, even the economic value, which is estimated at £50 billion to the economy a year, is forgotten in our efforts to deal with the current debt. Yet a great deal of growth is to be found in unleashing the fund of creativity in this country.

I used to chair an organisation called Arts & Business, which created bridges between the arts and the world of finance. It was not just about sponsorship. It started its life in that way but it became about bringing the skills of the business world to creative endeavours. It was invariably to the advantage of both because there was reciprocity. People in the City loved being brought together with creatives and it changed how they functioned in their own milieux. Creative businesses are small and fragmented, undercapitalised and in need of constant reinvention. They face substantial problems accessing finance and have real problems getting banks or venture capitalists on board. It is a problem that we should recognise. They would often be the first to admit that they lack business skills and need good advice, but once they get the motor running, they can become huge financial success stories. However, we are in danger of doing what we have done in the past: losing out because we fail to capitalise fully on exploiting and distributing our inventions and intellectual property.

The arts have been described as the research and development laboratories of some of our most exportable products and brands. Yet while we are publicly proud of our investment in research for science and innovation, we are petrified at seeming too indulgent with creative people and the arts. We are sidelining art in the curriculum and squeezing the life out of our art and drama schools, while those without private incomes are finding it almost impossible to survive. We have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Grade, about those from different backgrounds who have the opportunity to find release in the arts, but I am afraid that this does not happen as frequently as we would want.

Somehow art is seen as risky but banking is not. We worry about the risk of investment in the arts, yet have no problem about investing in high-risk derivatives or space travel. I should like to refer to video games. They make £2 billion for the UK in global sales. In some of our new universities there is a great deal of creativity in making those games. The sector is now bigger than the film or music industries. The United Kingdom also leads in visual effects—all that amazing, fancy stuff in action movies. It is the fastest-growing component of the UK film industry, but I am told we are starting to lose our cutting edge because of skills shortages in the UK. Why is that the case? The answer is that we are not supporting appropriate technical training in our schools and universities.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, I started by speaking of the British Museum. It was through spending time among the ancient sculptures of the frozen north that Henry Moore took inspiration for his contemporary work. The old feeds the new. There are real anxieties that any significant downturn in public spending for the museum and other arts institutions will have a very damaging impact, which will not just be on the wonderful exhibitions, but on all the incredible scholarship that takes place beyond public view. I echo the plea of the noble Baroness that there should be no short-sighted cuts.

I make a general plea, too, for the places which nurture the ideas and the creativity: our schools, art schools and universities. Subsidising the arts should be up there as a high priority along with health. I also make a plea to Government to encourage banks and investors to support the initiatives. When Roosevelt responded to the Great Depression, he was persuaded to sustain the arts even in the worst of times. New projects were created, public art works for railway stations and post offices were commissioned and creative endeavours were encouraged. The payoff was immeasurable then. It would be now.

Rape in Armed Conflict

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Wednesday 9th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, I join others in paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, who has for many decades been a great champion of women’s rights. I am glad that he has raised this issue tonight. It is only recently that rape has been acknowledged as one of the hidden elements of war. Rape in war was always portrayed historically as a sexual and personal matter that was somehow about military men’s need for sexual gratification, when in fact it is now recognised as a tactic of war and a threat to international security, and is a recognised war crime. The Geneva Conventions expressly prohibit rape. In recent decades, we have seen a growing understanding of the function and effects of rape.

A great woman in the law is Judge Navi Pillay, the main judge in the Rwandan war crimes tribunal. I remember hearing her describing the rape in Rwanda of 500,000 women as the destruction of the spirit, of the will to live and of life itself. She described it as being about social control and as a process of destroying the Tutsi as an ethnic group. The reason it was seen to be so much about destroying life was because it was a question of making your enemy’s women carry your children. When her court found Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty of genocide, it held that rape and sexual assault constituted acts of genocide in so far as they were committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a targeted group. Rape is often about ethnic cleansing, or the ethnic reconfiguring, of a population. We saw it in Rwanda, and have seen it since in Congo and Darfur: tens of thousands of rapes, and women profoundly traumatised as well as physically damaged internally, mutilated and infected with disease. We have heard the descriptions of the tearing of organs and the vagina. They are unbearable to hear and to read.

For those women and girls who become pregnant, their suffering is prolonged. They face increased rates of maternal mortality, and when they are forced to resort to illegal abortion it often leads to infection, scarring, sterilisation and frequently death. If left pregnant by the enemy—we must think about this—the women are often ostracised by their own communities, abandoned by their spouses, and experience physical violence from parts of their communities who are ashamed of them and who see them as the carriers of the enemy’s seed. The children produced are despised as the product of the enemy. We must see this as being carried on through generations. What these women suffer, as the noble Lord, Lord Lester, said, is torture—cruel and inhumane treatment. Women must be able to make choices about their lives after such unimaginable horror. They need good medical care, and advice must be afforded to them. None of us should be the people who decide whether they should have an abortion. It must be a matter for them.

The United States of America is still putting abortion restrictions on humanitarian aid, as other people have said. It is for that reason, one can be sure, that the Red Cross is falling in line with its policy, because it is anxious not to alienate major players in the international field. I am afraid that the United States holds that trump card. It must be persuaded by partners—by other nations like our own—that what it is doing is an affront to international law. It is a violation of women’s rights under international human rights and humanitarian law, including under the Geneva Conventions.

When I speak to women of religious conviction and describe to them the testimonies that I have heard from women—just as my noble friend Lady Kinnock described—I never hear from them that women in extremis should be denied the right to make a choice. It is for those individual women to make peace with their God, and not for us to do it on their behalf.

The United Kingdom Government should be pressing for change in the US policy, and should have a very clear position with regard to our policy and those of the organisations that we fund in these terribly conflicted parts of the world. This is not just about humanity and compassion; it is about violations of rights and international law. If the rule of law means anything, we must be upholders and champions of it throughout the world.

Female Genital Mutilation

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, this is undoubtedly a human rights issue of a very serious kind. The practice continues despite the criminalising of the process both here and back in most of the countries where it is widespread. I want to reiterate what my noble friend Lord Parekh said: it is very clear what the purpose is. It is about preparing women for marriage. My experience is that it is not often performed on babies nowadays; it is performed on girls, usually prepubescent girls between the ages of eight and 12, and it is done because there is still, if not child marriage, the betrothal of girls when they are still that young.

The idea is to keep women chaste, to remove their opportunity for sexual pleasure and to remove concerns that women with a clitoris will somehow be more promiscuous. Not all circumcision involves the removal of the clitoris, but for most women, it involves the stitching of their vagina and labia. Sometimes it even involves the removal of the labia. In Africa, I have heard practitioners and older men and women claim that it makes girls less wild, more placid and therefore exactly marriageable material.

I have gone to Africa with the charity SafeHands for Mothers and, like the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, I have heard the testimony of women and men and seen how traumatised women are having gone through that experience, especially if you talk to girls who have escaped the possibility or who have just undergone female genital mutilation. I have visited hospitals in north London to see photographs taken of the damaged and mutilated vaginas of women who attend hospital because they are pregnant. Obstetricians have to give them guidance on what to expect in labour and tell them that they will have to have an episiotomy in order to give birth. After giving birth, the women beg those same doctors to stitch them up the way they were in order to please their husbands. Doctors have to explain to women that they will play no part in that practice, but they know that those women return to them with a second pregnancy, and their vagina has been restitched. We have to ask ourselves how that is coming about. Doctors in this country are satisfied that women in the communities here perform these practices.

In Africa, I have heard doctors saying that a practice current there is the performance of symbolic cutting where there is no removal of the clitoris and it is simply, they insist, a small nick that answers the community’s cultural demand for the continuation of the practice. I hope that those in authority, in the medical profession and in the police are making it clear that a medical practitioner performing even the small nick will not be endured in this country and that prosecution will ensue. It must contravene the belief that we should do no harm.

I want to hear from the Minister about what is being done about reaching general practitioners, doctors in private practice and cosmetic surgeons to find out whether things are being done to women who want their vaginas restitched after birth. I want to hear what efforts we are making to breach the silence on this issue and whether we are doing enough in our outreach to the communities.

Finally, an absence of prosecutions is usually an indicator that there is something not happening, so I thank my noble friend Lady Rendell for keeping this matter before the House, and I hope that we will see greater activity on this issue.