Crime: Women's Safety

Lord Bishop of Derby Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Derby]

My Lords I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Desai, for introducing this very important topic in your Lordships’ House. I speak as somebody who supports an organisation in Derby, where I am the bishop, called Safe and Sound Derby. It works particularly with women who are the victims of sexual exploitation, violence and abuse. In this debate, I feel that I really need to speak as a Bishop. It seems less obvious to do that when we are discussing pensions, public service and such things but in this debate I want to speak specifically from these Benches as a Bishop.

That is because the Government have the unenviable but vital and necessary task of trying to regulate behaviour. Ever since JS Mill in the 19th century, we have seen Governments trying to regulate behaviour to protect the individual’s right to be who they want and to do what they want. It is difficult to regulate people’s behaviour without—and this is where the church has a role, so I speak as a Bishop—looking at the ideas, imaginations and inner motives within people that lead them to claim freedoms which, in the terms of this debate, have such terrible consequences upon other people, such as violence against women and abuse.

In their attempts to regulate behaviour, the Government need to be in dialogue with faith communities and churches, which are particularly concerned with people’s inner motives and moral values, and the framework within which to try to live their lives. Our culture is dominated by people’s right to feel something, express it and be who they want to be. That has many great effects and outcomes but it also has some terrible ones, as we are hearing in this debate. We have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, about the terrible profusion of pornography and the freedom to access, make and trade it—and to involve people in it. Starting from the base of what people feel they want has seen an inordinate explosion of promiscuity in our society in the past 30 or 40 years, and enormous stress in personal lives. My right reverend colleague the Bishop of Worcester referred to the sexualisation of young people and a sexualised society.

Most violence and sexual abuse takes place in a private space. That is why it is difficult for the Government on their own to legislate about behaviour. Motives, ideas and imaginings can be explored in private spaces, and that creates an atmosphere where people feel intimidated, disoriented and unsure what private space should be about. There are no public norms; you are suddenly in a very small space if you are subject to this kind of abuse and violence. So, besides the Government working with agencies, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, has said, and the structures in proposals in the excellent report, I invite us to think about how the Government can work with a problem that largely takes place in private space, below the radar—people claiming their freedom to be who they want to be.

One way of entering into the private space where most of this abuse takes place is through voluntary groups. The Safe and Sound project in Derby, which I support, works with victims and parents in their domestic settings, trying to help them understand what has happened to them and what values those domestic settings need to be about and to defend. In the past nine months in Derby, which is not a large city, Safe and Sound has dealt with 117 young people as well as older women.

We should note that not all these women and girls come from difficult backgrounds. I know that the statistics point that way but this very week in the Derby Telegraph, our local paper, there have been articles on three consecutive days about cases of children from very established and well-off homes being groomed and drawn out of those. The whole ethos of being a teenager, really, is to be uncomfortable in the private space that your family creates and to want to find your own private space; that is what teenage life is about. People who enter that through the internet and other ways, such as taking girls to parties or whatever, begin to create an attractive alternative private space that does not seem to have many moral guidelines. It is called grooming, and young people are increasingly being groomed into sexual exploitation, abuse and trafficking.

Our experience in Derby shows that grooming and abuse are not just happening in an ad hoc way; sadly, in our culture of freedom for people to behave as they think they want to and feel, grooming and abuse are highly organised. They are organised by gangs and by older men grooming younger women. It is a very scientific and commercial operation, sadly, for many people, and young women are manipulated and taken advantage of.

In this context, despite the excellence of the report, its analysis and suggestions, all the evidence shows that there is a significant shortfall in the availability of therapeutic services to deal with women who are confused about what private space is, how to defend one of some quality and how not to get drawn into private space that is abusive and damaging. I hope that the Government will take very seriously, first, the proper resourcing, as other noble Lords have mentioned, of the formal services and agencies that work in this area. Secondly, I hope that they will take seriously the resourcing of the work by voluntary groups such as Safe and Sound, which can enter into that private space of young people and their families and friendships to help people to engage and find a way out of the terrible places into which they are drawn.

Thirdly, and this echoes what the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, was saying, what steps can the Government take to be proactive in the world of education, of the formation of people’s values, priorities and a framework for those inner feelings and imaginations that are powerful in all of us? That partly includes working with schools, as the noble Baroness says, but it also includes working with faith communities and those who give priority to the values that we carry around inside us that guide us, discipline us and challenge us

Speaking as a bishop, I shall end by saying that something that is distinctive about the Christian faith is that it does not begin from saying, “I wish to decide how I feel and that’s who I’m going to be”. It begins from saying, “Love God and your neighbour as yourself”—that is, put others first and yourself second. That is the kind of moral and spiritual discipline that forms an adult person: not to love yourself first and do what that is about but to love others first and put yourself second. That is what Christianity is about. It is that kind of moral and spiritual discipline that is the only chance of complementing the Government’s task of providing models and guidelines of behaviour with encouraging people to learn and carry around within themselves some kind of respect and understanding of what human life is about that is based on some kind of discipline, some kind of self-denial and some kind of honouring of other people rather than oneself. I ask the Minister to comment on how the Government can complement faith groups and others to ensure that better standards of behaviour emerge not just from regulation and agencies but from moral conviction and the culture of self-discipline that make adult people proper citizens and would be a major step in bringing this terrible problem under control.