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

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, as all of us have said, we really appreciate this debate initiated by the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, in which we get to voice our concerns. Indeed, one way of framing our commitment to improving the status of young women is to help them find their voice and give them the skills and space to be heard. It is why campaigners complain about mansplaining or worry about young girls being bullied off social media by sexist trolls.

I want to talk about two categories of young women whose voices we seem happy to have muted because their stories offend contemporary political orthodoxies. Some women’s voices are definitely more equal than others. The demand to listen to women arguably reached its zenith with the #MeToo movement, even leading to the slogan “Believe all women”. This slogan sometimes dangerously dispensed with important principles such as innocent until proven guilty. Those who spoke out were often encouraged to elide serious sexual abuse with more trivial, if unpleasant, incidents of interpersonal advances.

Regardless, at the height of #MeToo, while Westminster and the media raged about predatory abuses of power, with acres of coverage telling those victims’ stories, the same politicians and commentariat ignored another group of young women at the heart of industrial-scale sexual abuse by grooming gangs operating across myriad northern towns such as Rotherham, Oldham and Blackpool. This week, the Telford inquiry revealed details of the horrendous catalogue of rapes and sexual degradation of thousands of young women over decades. When these largely white working-class girls turned to the authorities for help, schools, social services, councils and police officers dismissed the complaints, looked the other way, even victim-blamed. One survivor, Joanne Phillips described how they were dismissed as “child prostitutes”.

When one young woman went to Telford police about Shabir Ahmed abusing her, her complaints were ignored. Grotesquely, Ahmed went on to work for Oldham Council as a welfare officer, simultaneously leading an Oldham grooming gang now convicted of rape and sexual trafficking, crimes that could have been prevented if its original female accuser had not been contemptuously disregarded. More shamefully, despite inquiries, court cases and mealy-mouthed police and council mea culpas, polite society continues to sideline these young women’s stories. Is it not shocking that, despite these revelations, there is no clamour for Urgent Questions and emergency Statements about the issue here in Parliament? Where are those social justice activists taking to the streets chanting the name of 16 year-old pregnant Lucy Lowe, who died alongside her sister and mother in a house fire started by her abuser, Azhar Ali Mehmood?

Is this awkward silence due to political expediency? We know that the reason these horrendous incidents happened in plain sight was that those in authority feared that investigating the Asian male perpetrators could inflame racial and religious tensions. Council employees who tried to whistle-blow, with rare courageous exceptions, were silenced themselves by the threat that they would be labelled as bigots. Indeed, that message—“You can’t say that” for fear of being branded a hatemongering bigot—is silencing another group of young women who, ironically, simply want to discuss womanhood. In recent months we have heard of the 18 year-old who was bullied out of school by her fellow pupils, who accused her of transphobia. She was abandoned by her teachers for fear of guilt by association. Her crime was using her voice to challenge a noble Baroness who was speaking at her school when she quoted a debate in this very Chamber about the attempt to pass maternity legislation minus the words “mother” or “woman”.

While we all know about Professor Kathleen Stock, who was hounded out of Sussex University, less attention is given to those female students I have met who have confessed they were too scared to speak in support of Professor Stock in case of reprisals by activist tutors or having their academic prospects destroyed if dubbed a bigot. Such censorious intolerance of views that clash with identity politics has real-life victims. Today, law student Lisa Keogh should be attending her graduation at Abertay University, but after a two-month misconduct investigation for having the temerity to say “women have vaginas” in a gender and feminism seminar, she has been ostracised by fellow students, despite being cleared. Congratulations, Lisa—you should be there. No wonder the lesson of these and many other examples I could give is that young women in 2022 believe they should stay schtum and self-censor in order to avoid being branded a bigot. The old sexist dictum, “Be seen, not heard”, is back with a modern twist.

To conclude, here in this Chamber we must not simply proclaim our commitment to giving young women a voice. We must instead mount a vigorous defence of free speech; the freedom to voice dissenting, even unfashionable opinions. We owe it to the victims of grooming scandals to learn a bitter lesson: if we enable a culture that chills speech in case it offends or leads to demonising labels, it can lead to catastrophic, tragic results for women.