Sexual Violence in Conflict (Select Committee Report)

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, as another non-member of the committee, I congratulate it on the report. I congratulate all those who have advanced and are advancing work on this issue such as, of course, the Minister and her predecessors concerned in government with it. I knew the word “tireless” would be used. That is perhaps appropriate but actually, if you analyse it, it is a very odd word because I am sure that the people who do this work must get very tired.

I need to declare an interest. One of the committee’s witnesses, already mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Black, was Dr Michael Korzinski, a psychologist and psycho-social expert who has been deployed twice to Bosnia as part of a team of experts. He is also co-author of a training module for judges, prosecutors and others on wartime sexual violence, developed with the support of the UK Government. As a friend, I have been aware of his work and talked to his colleagues about it as well. This has of course informed my thinking.

I want to say a word about the PSVI teams of experts. Multidisciplinary teamwork is a productive way of working in most fields and it is often productive to transfer knowledge between fields. Perhaps marginal to this debate but not to the big picture, I wonder how much learning, particularly with regard to support for survivors and witnesses, has been made available within this country to those engaged in work on sexual abuse, including and perhaps particularly trafficking, and vice versa. It is essential in both situations to understand why, for instance, a victim did not struggle or how his or her memory and recall are affected by trauma. That is relevant to how evidence may be gathered and to how a witness presents in court. As all those involved in the criminal justice system need to understand, what a witness says in response to a question may not be what a witness thinks. Indeed, the witness may not know what he or she thinks.

Noble Lords will know how important it is to capture the experience of those who work on the front line. I welcome the Government’s agreement to explore how to strengthen mechanisms for feedback from teams of expert members and to apply this to policy-making and disseminate it. There is a lot of scope for this and I urge the Government to pursue it. It is probably the cheapest and easiest recommendation in the whole report. I also welcome the Government’s encouragement of our embassies and high commissions,

“to think more ambitiously and creatively about how they may use the ToE’s expertise”.

The very nature of trauma requires an integrated approach. I understand from a lawyer recently a member of such a team that the teams currently generally comprise lawyers and gender experts but no trauma experts. An integrated approach and a sustained commitment to those concerns is required. The whole system needs to be attuned to it. I include in this not just victims. I already mentioned the range of people involved in criminal justice systems. They come from the same communities so it is more than a matter of the women or men who are victims knowing their own perpetrators—something to which the right reverend Prelate alluded. Witness support officers need to understand the impact on victims, and their own reactions; so do those working in the so often underresourced but pivotal local organisations. Relentless exposure to the horrors takes its toll. The lawyers need support and training.

Rape in conflict is not new. It was not new when it was widely used in the conflicts of the previous century. If its use is in part because of the concept of women as property, that is hard-wired—as old as the hills, maybe, but that is not to be defeatist; wiring can be changed—but so is the response hard-wired, which is why it is such a powerful tactic. It humiliates, as has been said. It undermines morale, as well as being used as a form of ethnic cleansing. My noble friend Lady Tonge called it a step towards genocide. Stigma and ostracism are not accidental outcomes, and I was struck by the observation of the noble Lord, Lord Bates, that those who are injured in different ways in war are often regarded as heroes.

Of course, support has to be culturally appropriate. If a survivor is to be supported and empowered to give the best evidence and not to be re-victimised or re-traumatised, it is critical to appreciate how his or her culture shapes the presentation. Our understanding of the neurobiology of trauma is also critical. That may sound like cutting-edge understanding, but the application may seem quite homespun. For example, a group of women in Afghanistan could not articulate their experiences and so could not access appropriate medical help—until they focused on something quite different. They sat together knitting, and gradually they began to be able to articulate it and to start the journey to recovery. That work was led by a team which understood trauma.

I have one more story as a proxy for all those who are stigmatised. A woman, who I know is not alone in her experience, was in her home city of Aleppo at a friend’s house when she got news that her home had been hit by a bomb. Distraught, she rushed out, forgetting to cover her head. Because of this “transgression”, she was raped and was then disowned by her husband. She was assaulted by the very people she thought were there to protect her and her children, who witnessed the assault. Long-term support following such experiences is a very real requirement.

I do not for a moment dismiss the experiences of men and boys, but women and girls who have been in such situations, who have lost family through war, who are themselves very vulnerable, and who find themselves bread-winners, need practical support. I will end with something that is part of the support landscape—not the end of the story but one thing that can be done. I was cheered to hear that DfID is engaged in setting up skills training for women refugees in the Middle East. This is support and prevention.

I have deliberately confined my remarks to something rather low-level, perhaps, in a topic which is very broad and deep, as the report and the debate have illustrated, but that says to me that the depth of expertise and determination that is required is also very great.