International Women’s Day

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I see International Women’s Day as a focal point for men to recognise women’s contribution globally and for women to celebrate each other’s achievements as we continue to march forward.

Women like my mother—a force of nature—paved the way for my generation, but it was tough and she had to face many unbelievable adversities. I will always be eternally grateful to her for giving me the confidence to succeed. In two days’ time, I am going to Buckingham Palace to receive my damehood. I so wish she was still alive to accompany me. She would have been 94 this year. During her time, she saw progress, with some women of colour—but not all—breaking through the glass ceiling.

There has been progress towards equality for women. Yet, despite this, in the 21st century we are still witnessing reports of sexual and domestic violence against women. Most concerning is the sexualisation of young girls in a society where violent online pornography is only a mouse click away. Degrading behaviour by boys is forcing young girls, whom they see as sexual objects, to perform sexual acts they have seen online. They film this humiliating act and then shame the girls by putting it on the web. The girls, in turn, self-harm or even take their own lives. This has to stop.

Plan International UK, a leading children’s charity, asked young girls about their experiences. One 13 year- old said, “In my school there are a lot of boys who don’t really know how to treat girls. A lot of boys in my year talk about girls like an object—about the way they look; if they’ve got a big bum or big features—stuff like that”. Amazingly, only one in five secondary school teachers has received training in recognising and tackling sexism as part of their initial teacher education.

One way to correct this is for teachers to be better equipped and informed. Resources must be modernised, and school governing bodies and teachers empowered to take a zero-tolerance approach to sexism and sexual harassment. The PSHE Association trains teachers nationally to promote healthy relationships; this must be supported. It has to start in primary school. Recently, a distraught mother told me that her four year-old daughter was sexually abused by a 10 year-old boy at school. He told her: “I’m going to rape you and you’re going to like it”. Where on earth did he hear that language and get that behaviour from? Her daughter is now having therapy. Every time she hears the word “rape” on the news, she asks her mum, “Did she like it, mummy?”

Childhood lasts a lifetime, so what will these two victims of sexual exposure be like as adults, especially the 10 year-old? I want age verification on porn sites to be introduced to prevent children easily accessing pornography. At the moment, there are no age gates. When will the Government introduce age-verification legislation, which is ready to implement, to prevent the corruption of innocent children’s minds? How many more children’s lives are they prepared to witness being damaged? According to the Government’s own figures, 1.4 million children a month—some as young as seven—are accessing violent, graphic pornography.

Another worrying aspect of hyper-sexualisation through pornography is the increasing number of cases of the so-called “sex game gone wrong” defence in murder cases, whereby it is claimed that the deceased woman consented to violent sex which led to her death. This rough sex defence is an uncomfortable chapter in a long history of blaming women for their own killings, rapes and beatings. Sixty women in the UK have been killed by men who have then used the “sex game gone wrong” excuse as part of their defence. Nineteen of these men escaped a murder charge. Five were not charged with anything at all. In some cases, the deaths were not even investigated as a potential crime. Since 2010, the use of rough sex as a defence has risen by 90%.

We have a duty to stop what is clearly a dangerous situation for women’s safety and justice. Figures from the Centre for Women’s Justice show a growing increase in the number of young women who consent to violent, demeaning acts, normalised by extreme pornography. The industry is having to become more shocking in order to get clicks, as their audience becomes immune to previous scenes. Sexualised images of strangling women are becoming more common online. There has not been one single court case in the UK of a man being killed by a woman in a sex game gone wrong. Choking during sex is being encouraged and more women are being killed. Courts are not serving justice.

It is not just the porn industry that is the problem. Women’s magazines publish articles about how to spice up your sex life with what is innocently called “breath play”. This is another term for choking.

If light sentences for accidental death during sexual violent acts become the norm, what message does that send out to men, especially those who commit domestic violence? If a man planned to kill a woman, it would be easy to set it up as a sex game gone wrong, and he could reduce his sentence. The courts must not allow this. It is a huge betrayal to the women whom the law is supposed to protect—women such as Hannah Pearson. She was only 16 when she was strangled to death during sex by James Morton, 24. His defence was “consented rough sex gone wrong”. The jury cleared him of murder and instead ruled that it was manslaughter.

Attitudes in the justice system must be changed. Sexual violence against women must never become normalised in the belief that this is the sort of sex that people are up to in the 21st century. So can the Minister confirm that Harriet Harman’s amendments, in the other place, dealing with these disturbing issues will be included in the Domestic Abuse Bill?

How has the murder of women been reduced to a game? Sexual violence is not a game and must not be accepted as such by our courts. Men must take full responsibility for preventing a woman from breathing until death.