International Women’s Day

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, said she would deal with international issues when she wound up and so, tempted as I am to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, in political anecdotage by talking about the revolution I have seen in women in politics in the UK since being one of 27 women Members of the House of Commons in 1974, I shall in fact stick to my last and speak about women in the developing world.

I do so because today’s debate may be a week early for International Women’s Day but it is perfectly timed for me. I am less than 48 hours out of Kathmandu and a parliamentary placement with VSO, volunteering in Nepal. I would like to record my thanks to VSO for enabling me to undertake that work—it has been in that country for nearly 50 years now—and particularly to record my admiration for the young volunteers, most of them women from the UK, who I saw working as part of the International Citizen Service scheme in deprived and remote isolated communities in Nepal, teaching sexual and reproductive health, far from their own comfort zones, in partnership with Nepali volunteers in a way that was truly impressive and made me extremely proud of then. I also declare my non-financial interest as a trustee of the Sabin Vaccine Institute.

That visit to Nepal reinforced my belief that the empowerment of women is a hugely powerful driver of growth, both economic and general. One has only to look at the contribution of women in the tiger economies of Asia to understand how that has happened. Yet within the context of the developing world, I hope noble Lords will forgive me if today I speak less about economic empowerment in action and more about the barriers to that economic empowerment. There are women with debilitating, disfiguring and blinding neglected tropical diseases; women who are tied to water and fuel collection for hours every day; girls who never make it to the start of primary education, let alone the completion of secondary education; women who are trafficked; women whose migrant husbands infect them with HIV; girls who are married off at obscenely early ages and bear children when barely in their teens and then suffer from obstetric fistula or prolapse—and are then rejected by those husbands. These women have no opportunity to pursue their aspirations, or to contribute to the economic development of their communities.

I would like to say a word or two about forced marriage, a fundamental breach of the most basic rights of self-determination. It is a global problem, on every continent, with perhaps 10 million cases a year, including an estimated 8,000 in England alone. Too often and in too many countries the legal age of marriage is a number on a statute in a capital city, but far from the reality of life for girls in the villages in that country.

I pay tribute to the work that the FCO, DfID and the Government Equalities Office are doing to combat forced marriage throughout the world, and I particularly welcome the Prime Minister’s personal commitment in this area. Forced and early marriage cannot be written off as simply a cultural or religious practice that we should avoid confronting out of some misplaced sense of respect. No major world religion condones forced marriage, and silence serves to keep the issue hidden and unchallenged. Predominately, forced marriage reflects and drives poverty. Families struggling to get by may see it as a way of reducing the number of children to feed or receiving a dowry for those who remain.

We must build on the progress that was made at CHOGM last October and with the recent call for action at the UN in New York. Countries from Sierra Leone to Pakistan are passing relevant legislation, and international NGOs are working to ensure that our collective efforts prevent forced marriage and do not just prosecute it. I pay particular tribute to the work of Plan UK; in countries such as Bangladesh it has worked with local people on a sustainable campaign to achieve community support for the right of young girls to a childhood and thereby the chance of an education, health and, ultimately, economic empowerment.

I came back from Nepal intensely conscious not only of the affluence and comfort of my own life but of the barriers that women face and of the tremendous use that they make of opportunity when it is given to them. I saw a project run by an NGO, the Social Action Centre, where women had been encouraged to be open about their HIV status, to gain treatment and then to undertake livelihood projects and thus revolutionise their lives.

However, I also heard of women and girls who are banished from the home to the cowshed every month during menstruation and who sometimes freeze to death when they are there. I heard of women who are trafficked to brothels in India, women who never make it to school because of hookworm, elephantiasis, trachoma or other neglected tropical diseases that are cheap to treat. It is only when we achieve the basic rights for those women that we will allow them the opportunity to contribute economically to the development of their own communities and countries.