UK: Violence Against Women and Girls

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

I think it is a shame that the noble Baroness has tried to deflect what is actually an incredibly serious debate about violence against girls and women into some kind of culture war that she talks about in the House often.

Last Sunday morning at about 7.30 am, having dropped my husband off to get to Heathrow, I stopped for a coffee on the way home. As I crossed the road back to my car, a man stopped to let me cross the road, which was nice. He then slowed down next to me and through his window asked me if I was up for something or other—I hesitate to define exactly what. I was not interested and walked swiftly to my car. Disturbingly, he pulled up around the corner and turned to look at me. I was not sure what he was about to do—a U-turn perhaps—but, having locked myself in my car, I drove away, checking that I was not followed home, which I was not.

What do we do? Sometimes you make a joke of it, which I did when I was telling one of my Front-Bench colleagues about it. A 70-year old woman at 7.30 on a Sunday morning is not safe—for goodness’ sake. I admonished myself for not snapping his registration number, although quite what I would have done with it, I do not know. Actually, at the point where he pulled up around the corner, there is a bus stop with a camera, and he may end up with an £80 fine, so that would serve him right. The truth is, of course, that he may go on to do it again and again—and who knows where it might lead?

That is the everyday, low-level occurrence that every woman here today will recognise and have some experience of. It is frightening. Why should we live our lives being afraid that some bloke might feel he has the right to grope, shout sexist remarks, comment on our appearance, get nasty or violent when told to stop his unacceptable behaviour, and sometimes do worse: attack, rape, sexual assault or murder? These are the matters at the root of violence against women and girls in our society today.

When I look at my granddaughter and her friends, I worry about the oversexualised world they are growing up in, one where many boys learn about relationships and sex from watching porn, as many noble Lords have said. I absolutely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, who passionately explained the damage that this does.

So the debate today is important, and I thank all who have participated, and indeed the organisations which sent us briefings: the Girl Guides, Refuge, Women’s Aid and others. I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Warwick for stepping up so wonderfully as she did to take the place of my noble friend. I am also grateful for the comments of my noble friend Lady Gale; we have shared this platform on many occasions over the last 20 years or so that we have been here to talk about violence against women.

Like others, I want to start by looking at and thinking about girls’ experience. I was very grateful to the Girl Guides for the research that it sent us. I am also very grateful for the work it does in supporting young women and increasing their confidence. I was never a Girl Guide—I was only ever a Brownie—but they do a brilliant job today.

As noble Lords said, girls and young women regularly experience harassment and abuse in public places, such as on the street and on public transport. Some 53% of 11 to 21 year-olds do not feel safe when they are outside on their own, and over 60% have experienced unwanted attention. As other noble Lords said, they do not feel safe at school. This is a terrible thing—a place where they should learn and thrive is instead somewhere they do not feel safe.

Girls tell us that they regularly experience online harms such as harassment and abuse, including sexist and derogatory comments, also mentioned by many noble Lords. Some 79% of 13 to 21 year-olds have experienced online harms in the last year: sexist comments, cyberflashing, sexual harassment, catfishing—I suggest your Lordships look that one up—pressure to share nude pictures, and cyberstalking. Some 94% said that they experienced negative emotions as a result of online harms. However, the thing that really disturbed me is that only 15% of girls think social media is a safe place for them. That is terrible because, in this modern world, these girls need to feel safe on social media—of course they need to feel safe.

What these girls want is really modest and simple. They want public sexual harassment to be made a crime. They want their ideas to be listened to and their voices to be heard in the design and creation of safe public spaces. They want the reporting of sexual harassment to be made easier. They want—as many other noble Lords have said—the Online Safety Bill to be strengthened to address the issues of online harassment and abuse, and they want the Department for Education to renew its commitment to the delivery of RSHE and to aim for 100% of people to learn about consent.

When these girls become women, they will face the epidemic of violence against women and girls that has escalated, particularly in the last 10 to 15 years. Noble Lords have referred to the record 70,000 rapes reported to the police in the year to September 2022, just 2,600 of which resulted in a charge. Some 70% of the rape complainants who go to the police give up their case. There is a lack of trauma-informed police support, and most forces have scrapped rape specialist units through funding cuts. That means that experienced police officers who know how to deal with these issues have left, and young police officers who do not know how to deal with these issues are now having to do so, because the policy has changed and there has been a recognition that this is a serious issue, but they do not know how best to deal with rape. This is a problem. It is particularly a problem for black and minoritised women who, not surprisingly in recent times, do not trust the police in so many different ways. Independent sexual violence advisers are in short supply and rape crisis centres are underfunded. There are 10,000 victims on their waiting lists for rape trauma therapy.

The same set of abysmal statistics appears when we think about domestic violence. The criminal justice system is failing women and children who have experienced domestic violence and the current system is inefficient for domestic abuse spending. Women’s Aid research found that a minimum of £427 million per year is needed to fund specialist domestic abuse services in England. If domestic abuse services work and domestic abuse is reduced, that could deal with the fact that domestic abuse costs our economy £78 billion a year in England. Therefore, the economic as well as the social need is absolutely clear.

We now have what is being called the ground-breaking Victims and Prisoners Bill to address these issues. The Government may plan to attack the court backlog, increase charges for rape perpetrators and show that victims’ rights are upheld and supported through the system, but the problem is that none of those things is actually in the Bill. I hope that my honourable friend Anna McMorrin and her colleagues will deal with some of those issues in the Commons, and that when the Bill comes here we will deal with it. Without an enforceable victims’ code, it is nothing but words on a page, and without the legal support to guide survivors every step of the way through the system, from reporting a rape at a police station through to trial and driving up standards, the Bill is not worth it. So I hope noble Lords will join us in tackling those issues.

Labour has a mission to make our streets safe for women and girls. We have a Green Paper on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls which makes scores of commitments to tackle this epidemic, including specialist rape units in every police force, setting up dedicated rape courts, introducing minimum sentences for rape and for stalking, and making misogyny a hate crime. We will put specialist domestic abuse workers in the control rooms of every police force responding to 999 calls, supporting the victims of abuse, following the excellent example of Kim McGuinness as a Labour police and crime commissioner in Northumbria. We will also make sure that we have a Victims’ Commissioner. Since my friend Dame Vera Baird left, we have not had one of those—so that will be nice, too. We will lead the charge on the Human Rights Council for a global treaty to end violence against women and girls.

I thank all noble Lords for speaking in this debate. I particularly thank my noble friends Lord Winston and Lord Brooke for their distinctive and relevant contributions to tackling violence. My noble friend opened the debate with eloquence and force and asked the Minister about many issues. I am grateful for the outstanding contributions across the House. I do not envy the Minister his task, but do I know how seriously he takes these issues.