Voyeurism (Offences) (No. 2) Bill

Anna Soubry Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 5th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Stella Creasy]

I want to put on record my tremendous respect for the very hard work done by Gina Martin to get this legislation before Parliament and by the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse). It is a testament to the power of a good argument whose time has come. All these women are right that we should not wait around for this legislation, but we should make sure that it works.

I also want to put on record my support for the work that the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) has done, and for her amendments and the case she is making. I will be voting for the Bill and supporting it wholeheartedly, but I will also be supporting all efforts to improve it, because I do not believe that those two things are incompatible. We should never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We should recognise that legislation with holes in it will inevitably return to us. It is in that spirit that I have tabled my new clause and amendment, which are about the context in which this crime takes place, and I am proud to see the support for them from across the House.

Let me be very clear that treating misogyny as something we should tackle is not about flirting. It is not about banter. It is not about telling all men that they are rapists. It is not even about new crimes. We cannot apply a hate crime tariff to something that is not already a hate crime. It is about something that has become so widespread that we treat it as a fact of life—but only for 51% of our population.

Across the UK, a huge majority—85%—of young women and nearly half of all women report experiencing sexual harassment in public places. Only one in 10 of them have ever reported receiving help after such incidents. Without recognising the role of misogyny in the day-to-day experiences of women in our society, our legal and criminal justice system masks the true extent of the hostility that exists against gender. This is not about criminalising wolf-whistling or flirting. It is about recognising existing crimes that are motivated by hostility towards somebody because of their gender, as well as recognising what they are—hate crimes.

Although women have protection in their workplaces under equality legislation, as soon as they step out of the door on to our streets, they are not protected. If somebody targets people on the basis of their faith or religion, they can receive a tougher sentence for their behaviour under the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Somebody who repeatedly targets women in the same way faces no such comparable sanction.

I hope that we all agree that our young women deserve better. It is particularly our young women who are reporting this as part and parcel of everyday life. One thousand women aged 14 to 21 were asked by Plan International about their experiences in public settings, whether on transport, walking on the street, just going to school or even going to work, with 66% saying they experienced unwanted sexual attention or sexual or physical contact in a public place. Some 40% said that they experienced verbal harassment and 15% said they had been touched, groped or grabbed at least once a month.

What does that mean in practice? It means the experiences of my own constituents, whom I asked about this issue. One woman was followed down the road by a man in a car demanding that she get in. She was then told that he was pranking her when she complained and called a racist for refusing to go with him. A mother wrote to me about her young daughter. Only last week, somebody had come up to her in a tube station, put his face right up in hers and shouted, “Sexy bitch, ” very aggressively. She had been sitting on a bus as men played videos of men masturbating, showing the phones to her to make sure she had seen them. As the mother said:

“This is not about trying to chat someone up—it’s a power play, exerting control and making women feel frightened and unsafe in their own streets.”

Girls and women are nervous about retaliation and worried about what might happen if they fight back. Women say that it is not about whether they are attractive, because violence is never far behind if they reject these advances.

This is about what makes a hate crime. It is not pleasant and funny; it is a way of keeping women and girls feeling on edge all the time and unable to move freely in their own areas. As the mother said, her children walk around “heads down, headphones in”, tensely and purposely avoiding eye contact or hassle from men. That is harassment—it is legally harassment. The women have said no, yet these men still persist. All of us worry what a man who behaves like that might go on to do if his behaviour is not addressed.

It is really important for us to be very clear that we are not talking about all men. Most men in this country do not behave like that towards women, and would be horrified to see that kind of behaviour happening to their mothers, daughters, wives, sisters or friends. In proposing my amendments, I want to defend the reputation of the men of this country. This is not about their behaviour; it is about some men’s behaviour—enough men’s behaviour to make women’s lives difficult, and enough men’s behaviour to mean that women experience hatred.

[Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

I am listening with great care, as ever, to the case that the hon. Lady is making, and I have some sympathy with it. My problem—will she help me with this?—is that I will be really troubled if we see all this offending as offences of hate against women, because much of it is genuinely in the category of sexual offending, which is often a deeper problem that must absolutely be stopped, prosecuted and so on, and sometimes it is harassment. I do not support the hon. Lady’s amendments; I think that we need to know more about this. Although my own view is that this absolutely needs to go to the Law Commission, I do not care where it goes, but it needs proper and full exploration so that we get this right. I am sure that she is right that some of the behaviour is misogynistic, but not all of it is.

[Stella Creasy]

As ever, I agree with much of what the right hon. Lady says. I think we need to say that the bigger thing she is talking about is misogyny. There are men out there who are hostile towards women and act accordingly. As a result, 51% of our population experiences harassment and a particular type of crime. At the moment, we cannot name, recognise and differentiate it, and therefore say, as we do with racially or religiously targeted hatred, that there is a premium on it. That is what the amendments would achieve.

This is also about what drives police behaviour, because if something is a crime, the evidence about it of course needs to be gathered. I have to admit to my honest frustration, as the first female MP for Walthamstow, where a number of people have tried to report their experience. Let me give the Minister some examples of the things we are talking about—the responses the women I have mentioned got back when they reported these crimes. In particular, in response to the woman followed down the street by a man demanding that she get into his car and threatening her with his behaviour when she tried to say no, the police said that the

“behaviour is only threatening, abusive, or insulting if the person…intended it to be so, or if he was aware…that it was so. The comments about his believing it to be a prank and being blown out of proportion would make that difficult to achieve.”

Let us think about that for a moment: the experience of the victim of this behaviour—their fear, their terror—means nothing because the man just said, “I was kidding”. We would not allow that for any other form of crime, so why do we allow it when it comes to men who harass women?

--- Later in debate ---

[Stella Creasy]

I completely agree. This is the point about changing the mindset. Let me reassure the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) that where police forces, particularly in Nottingham, have started to record misogyny as a hate crime—this is not a new idea—it is transforming the experience of women not just when it comes to street harassment, but when it comes to violence against women in total.

[Anna Soubry]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Stella Creasy]

I will happily give way to a Nottingham MP and then to the right hon. Gentleman, but then I really must make some progress, because I am conscious that other Members want to speak.

[Anna Soubry]

I rise purely to put on record that that has been done by Nottinghamshire police. I think it is the first force to do so, and we believe that the evidence is showing that it is having exactly the right effect on the police, in that they are taking this seriously and seeing it as an offence.

[Stella Creasy]

I desperately apologise to the people of Nottinghamshire for forgetting the “Shire”—I am not a fan of “The Lord of the Rings”. I hope the right hon. Lady will forgive me.