Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Andrew Selous Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading - Day 1
Monday 15th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con) [V]]

I strongly support the points about pet theft made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). As Second Church Estates Commissioner, I also strongly welcome the addition of faith leaders alongside sports coaches, both of which have been added to the list of professions in the Bill—that also includes teachers, social workers and doctors—for whom it is illegal to have a sexual relationship with a 16 or 17-year-old in their care. This is in line with the recommendations of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, and it is absolutely right.

I want to spend the rest of my remarks giving voice to the everyday experiences of one of my female constituents in her early 20s. The cumulative impact of these incidents amounts to very serious and wholly unacceptable antisocial behaviour of the very worst kind, which can lead to a severe lack of self-confidence and wellbeing.

Over the last year or so, my constituent has told me that she has endured: being touched inappropriately and called a prostitute by a strange man on her own doorstep; being continually cat-called while walking down the street; being groped without consent in a nightclub; being cat-called in a seriously offensive manner from the street while fully dressed in her own property; being harassed by a group of men in a pub; having her bottom commented on by an older man while filling her car up with petrol; having her figure loudly commented on by three boys while on the underground, with no one else in the carriage asking them to stop; being followed by a much older man in an unwanted manner over coffee after a church service; and having a man lie to her about his singleness, when he was married and asking her to meet under false pretences. If a young woman in today’s society is not free from sexual harassment in her own home, in public, in a pub, in a nightclub, at a petrol station, on public transport or after a church service, where indeed is she safe?

The tragedy is that these experiences are all too common for many younger women, and it is vital that male Members of Parliament call them out. Although there is so much that we properly expect of the law, the police and the courts, they cannot change a whole culture on their own. That is where our common community life, our families, and indeed every single one of us, has a role. It is up to all of us to set a culture to uphold the values of decency, respect and honouring women that should be commonplace. In particular, it is up to all of us—especially men—to challenge the unacceptable behaviour of other men. The behaviour that I described earlier is not manly anyway; it is cowardly, bullying, pathetic and wrong.