Women and Girls: Economic Well-being, Welfare, Safety and Opportunities

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Gale for securing such an important debate. It has thrown up many interesting issues already. I also congratulate my noble friend on a lifetime of service to her community, her party, this country and the continuing, vital cause of women’s equality. She is a veritable lioness of a woman, if I may say so; I send my congratulations to the Lionesses on their fantastic displays in Euro 2022. It is nice to be positive for a change because what those young women are doing on the pitch for little boys and girls in terms of their belief in equality and in what women can do has been so inspiring. I continue to be riveted and inspired by this tournament.

Less happily, I have to talk about rape. According to Rape Crisis England & Wales, one in four women has been raped or sexually assaulted as an adult. That is 5 million women in this jurisdiction. One in six children has been sexually abused. One in 20 men has been raped or sexually assaulted as an adult. In 2021, the police recorded the highest-ever number of rapes reported to them: 67,125. However, only one in a 100 of those reported rapes resulted in a criminal charge in that same year. Charge rates and conviction rates have dropped to their lowest in our country since records began. That is totally unacceptable in one of the wealthiest countries on earth in the 21st century. It represents a veritable pandemic of rape, in particular against women, and we are failing. After all these years of austerity, our criminal justice system is failing women when they are raped.

Half of these rapes against women are by a partner or ex-partner. There is a lot of talk at the moment about rebalancing the relationship between Parliament and the courts, wicked old judges and activist lawyers, but I remind noble Lords that marital rape was only outlawed in this country as late as 1991 and it was the House of Lords Judicial Committee—not a Government or a Parliament but the judges who stepped in—that did this. Let us just remember that when we are trying to put judges back in their boxes and be proud of ourselves for being parliamentarians.

Five in six rapes against women are by someone they know, 98% of prosecuted sex offences are against men and five in six women who are raped do not even go to the police. Some 40% of them say they are embarrassed, which is understandable, but 38% of those who do not go say they do not believe the police can help and 34% think it would be humiliating. Every year in England and Wales, 618,000 women are raped. That is based on the March 2020 crime survey, which is the latest crime survey. That is one in 35 women. Whether we realise it or not, each of us probably knows a woman who has been raped in the past year. This is the scale of the problem. I hope the noble Baroness has some notes from the relevant officials that tell us what the Government plan to do about this. We need a fundamental reset of policing and the justice system on these matters.

Noble Lords may remember a wonderful film from 1980 called “Brubaker”. Robert Redford played a prison governor who goes undercover as a prisoner to expose the corruption and abuse in that system. I wish the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner well in his task, but he might want to consider an investigation that drastic, because the situation is so bad.