International Women’s Day and Protecting the Equality of Women in the UK and Internationally

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I first thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, for leading this important debate. I have great affection for her and it has been wonderful to see her becoming such a strong and powerful voice on the government Benches, the other side from me. It shows how we can all come together positively to talk about issues such as the importance of addressing the ways in which women’s lives are still undermined by misogyny and discrimination and the ways in which women around the world suffer.

I am a lawyer and much of my work is now in the international field. I could have easily made this speech about my work as I see it, day in, day out, on genocide, sexual crimes in conflict and empowering women as parliamentarians. I chair a group of parliamentarians from the MENA region under the Helsinki forum, which helps to address the legislation they would like in their own countries and how they could emulate what happens in other jurisdictions. But today I am going to speak about the domestic situation. I want to ask all in this Room when the last time was that you consciously altered your behaviour, when you were at the bus stop or walking home. A man might struggle to answer that question, but a woman will probably have an example from this week, last week or the week before—or even from going home late last night.

The business of self-safeguarding is built into a woman’s life from an early age. We listen to footsteps. We avoid the shadows. We carry our keys in our hands. We avoid roads that are ill-lit or tree-lined. When I leave this House and go home late at night, I walk up the middle of my road that leads to my house from the Tube station, because I do not want to be close to the dark bushes and shadows on the pavement. As children, girls as young as eight or nine are warned to take care, not to be alone when they are coming back from the park or school, to stay with their friends and to keep to strict timetables. By internalising those messages from our parents, women learn that, unfortunately, there are bad men out there. We hear the message about what they might do to us, which is about sexual violation and the possibility of rape. It is about impregnation. Little girls learn that stuff, and it stays with you for the rest of your life. The lessons that women learn, as they receive that care from their parents and caretakers, is that, if they do not keep to those steps, somehow or other, it will be their fault if something goes wrong. Again, the idea of shame and blame is internalised when women are ill-treated, abused, assaulted or worse. Blame often centres on the victim.

A year ago now, the Scottish Government asked me to form an independent working group to decide whether adding sex to existing hate crime legislation would be an effective way to protect women or whether there should be a stand-alone remedy to deal with misogyny. I was clear from the outset that we do not criminalise thought; it is very important people realise this. There is talk of misogyny being a crime but, fortunately, it cannot be. I hope we hold true to that, because it is the conduct that flows from hate that we address. Modes of thinking, and what happens in that forum internum between our ears, is very precious and has to be protected. Freedom of thought is protected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in our human rights conventions and laws. Freedom of thought is protected because that is where our ideas, creativity, imagination and ability to deal with the world’s challenges come from. It has to be protected, but we do not have to protect the ills that come from hatred, which are also harboured in that space. As I am making clear, it is the conduct that flows from hate that we have to address.

Soon after we embarked on our task, Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa were brutally murdered and women up and down the country demanded that something be done. Women were correctly making the link, which I emphasise today, between serious misogynistic crimes such as rape, domestic violence and other serious transgressions that women experience, and the other things they experience which are deemed too low level for police attention. Women were saying that, if you do not deal with the men who rub themselves up against people on the Tube or flash at women in public places —and at little girls; they flash at children from school—or the other ways women experience abuse, whether verbal abuse or touching, groping and so on, unfortunately you then create a normalisation which makes it much more difficult to address the more serious stuff. The crushing weight of those experiences for women cannot be dismissed as too trivial to engage the law.

When I started my legal career, men convicted of rape could often walk out of court with a suspended sentence. Domestic violence was described as six of one and half a dozen of the other. Sexual harassment was laughed at. I have spent a lot of my energy arguing for reform of gender-based law, because it was created from a male perspective—not with any conspiracy in mind, but that was the nature of things. A lot has happened, but not enough has changed. These issues are now being treated much more seriously at policy level, but we are still having difficulty with the outcomes. Outcomes are still poor, and you have to ask why. A lot has changed, but the underlying attitudes within the criminal justice system and society as a whole make it very difficult to secure justice for women.

The questions that my working group addressed in the past year came about by examining the testimony of many women and organisations about the verbal insults, denigration, humiliation, gropings, undermining or patronising behaviour, online trolling and sexual objectification they experience. I have to tell you that, cumulatively, it is a horror story. There is no male experience that is comparable—there really is not. I know young men experience violence on the streets, and so forth, but it is very different. Men do not come out of the pub saying, “Text me when you get home, Charlie”, because getting home might pose a serious problem. But women do it all the time; for young women, this is daily practice. As a result, we have proposed that a new misogyny and criminal justice Act for Scotland should be created that will include a new statutory misogyny aggravation. That is something that we in this House voted for but, unfortunately, it was rejected when it went to the other place.

We really should be looking seriously at what women experience. What we have advocated is law for women, challenging the default position that all law is neutral, because that is not working. Women are being targeted by certain kinds of behaviour, and you need targeted law to deal with it. The default position is that, for example, men can be raped and suffer domestic violence too. However, men are not experiencing stuff such as standing at a bus stop where, if a man comes up and starts engaging with you and you ignore him, you start receiving the foulest torrents of abuse. Men just have no idea what women put up with, including talk of the most salacious and disgusting kind and language that would make your hair curl.

I believe that the internet has created a disinhibition, so that people can say things anonymously. But it is now travelling off the internet and out of social media onto the streets. Young women are receiving this in playgrounds, student unions, bars and clubs—talk of sexual matters of the most explicit, crude and horrible kind. Then, when women reject it, they face discussion of how unattractive, fat and ugly they are and that they therefore do not deserve any sexual interest. They go home feeling wretched and miserable. Is it any wonder that they then do not feel able to ask for equal pay or promotion at work or that they do not take up positions in public life? Is it any wonder that they do not make a success of themselves in many of the areas where they should? This really has to be addressed.

We have advocated that an offence of stirring up hatred against women should be introduced into law, that public misogynistic harassment should be made a crime, and that the issuing of threats or invoking of rape or disfigurement, online and offline, should be criminalised. I say “invoking” because online algorithms often create pile-ons, so that a woman, who might be a Member of Parliament, a journalist or a campaigner, receives a threat of rape in language that is difficult for the police to deal with, because it says something like, “Somebody should rape you”, or, “You deserve to be raped”. They do not say, “I’m coming after you”, they are saying, “Somebody should rape you”, but the terror created in the hearts of women is still the same, because they know that there are people out there who are likely to take up that sort of invitation. Those women start not to go out as often and do not participate in public events in the way they might.

I do not think that older age groups understand what is going on, and I do not think that men have any idea that this goes on. It is really important to look at the stuff we looked at as we took evidence. I do not do social media, and I am glad that I do not—the poor noble Lord, Lord Farmer, is going to receive a whole lot of communications as a result of his speech today—because I take part in too many things that I know will incite the aggressions of folk out there. All I can say is that, when you are required to do it in gathering evidence, it is a shock to the system to see what women in Parliament, women standing for Parliament, women who are journalists, and women who are campaigners are exposed to. The other day I was with the scientists who took part in the Covid matter. Absolutely horrible abuse and insults were poured over them. I heard that the mother of the child who died of a terrible asthmatic attack, who has been campaigning on reducing pollution levels, has also received abuse online. It is unbelievable that any woman who seems to say anything publicly has this happen to her.

I hope that the UK Government will look at the steps being taken in Scotland. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, that it is very nice to hear a paean of praise about women, but we need to bring up our boys better so that they have some of the attributes he gave to women—sensitivity, caring and thinking about the other. I am afraid our boys are now seeing this porn that comes up on their phone willy-nilly and presenting it to girls. They think that intimacy looks like that and that that is how you perform sexually. They are introducing that kind of thinking into their own behaviours.

This is serious stuff. I hope the Westminster Government will at some point follow Scotland’s lead. I hope we will make the necessary change. Most decent men—they are here in this House—do not behave like this and are willing to be our allies in creating a gear-shift, but we need to start looking at the perpetrator and get off this business of examining the women. Let us look at the perpetrators who are doing this and start dealing with these crimes differently.

[Baroness Cox (CB)]

My Lords, I am very grateful for this opportunity to commend many women in dire situations who exhibit inspirational courage, resourcefulness and resilience. I am also grateful for the opportunity to request that our Government provide urgently needed support for some priority areas.

My small NGO, HART—the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust—was founded to provide aid and advocacy for victims of war, conflict, oppression and/or persecution not reached by major aid organisations for political and/or security reasons. We work with local partners, who use the very limited resources we can provide to make transformational changes for their communities. Time allows only two examples of situations where we are privileged to provide such support: Shan Women’s Action Network—SWAN—in Myanmar’s Shan state; and central belt Nigeria, where massacres by Islamist Fulani militants continue unabated. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, for highlighting the very serious situation in South Sudan. We also support partners there. The situation is dire, as the noble Lord has highlighted.

In Burma—I use this name because it is strongly preferred by our in-country partners—in healthcare, there is currently chaos as a result of the military coup and brutal military offensives against civilians.

I have visited Shan state in Burma many times with HART. As we speak today, its people are trapped in protracted conflict, ruthlessly supressed by the military regime. Among the thousands of displaced, 70% are women and children, including pregnant women, teenagers who have just given birth and the elderly. They have fled with minimal possessions. Some have lost their farmland and homes, forced to flee to remote villages or into the jungle, and are suffering from hunger and cold, lacking shelter and medical care.

It is within this context that HART’s inspirational partner, SWAN, continues to operate. SWAN is a female-led organisation dedicated to gender equality and justice. Staff provide life-saving emergency aid, antenatal care, postnatal care and counselling. They also run safe houses for women and girls affected by domestic violence and provide vocational training sessions for practical support in an emergency.

Without organisations such as SWAN, many more female lives would be lost. Yet SWAN receives no support from within Burma and almost no international support, other than from small organisations such as HART.

I also raise another serious issue faced by health workers in many parts of Burma. In a recent Zoom call arranged by the Tropical Health and Education Trust, I was privileged to talk to nurses inside Burma who are desperate for supplies needed to provide healthcare. Many hospitals are now owned by the military, and attacks on civilians have caused many deaths, injuries and massive displacement.

There is an urgent need for aid for healthcare workers who, in spite of personal danger, are striving to provide healthcare to sick and vulnerable people. Many have been arrested, some have been killed and many more are living in dire conditions, working without funding or essential equipment.

I understand and greatly appreciate that the FCDO has been providing some funding, but I also understand that this funding for nurses is going to stop. In reality, it is even more needed as the situation deteriorates and the impact of Covid becomes more serious. I highlight that very serious problem. Any reduction or cessation of UK support for the Burmese nursing profession would create even more massive problems in the provision of healthcare, especially in remote regions. For example, there have been reports of hundreds of thousands of women deprived of care during childbirth which they would have received before the disruption inflicted by the military coup. This has led to a large increase in maternal and infant deaths. Also, effective treatment of most common conditions—for example, dengue and pneumonia—has become almost impossible, leading to great suffering and many more deaths. Therefore, I urge the FCDO to consider, as a matter of urgency, the provision of significant funding for Burmese healthcare professionals and, in particular in this context, nurses.

I also urge implementation of a policy of working with reliable agencies across national borders to reach those in dire need in remote areas who will not receive aid sent to Yangon. For example, in the past DfID, as it was then, provided cross-border life-saving aid to SWAN. DfID also enabled HART to supply life-saving funds to civilians in Chin state suffering from the Mawta famine, caused by the flowering of bamboo, attracting a massive invasion of rats, which devour all food supplies.

I mention those examples to highlight the fact that we have well-established relationships with health professionals in-country and across borders who have demonstrated integrity and professionalism. They are now all desperate for funding to provide life-saving supplies to some of the many thousands of displaced people driven from their homes by the military offensives and living in terrible conditions in remote jungle areas. I therefore make a passionate plea to the Government to provide life-saving cross-border aid to reach such civilians living in dire need. As I said, these people will not receive aid sent to Yangon.

I turn briefly to the middle belt region of Nigeria, where tens of thousands have been killed or wounded in horrific Islamist attacks, and where millions are displaced. Just a few days ago, I returned from a visit to some of the worst affected regions and witnessed the ruins of homes, farmland, food stores, churches and an orphanage—all attacked by Islamist Fulani militia in the past seven months. We heard detailed accounts of children slaughtered, a 98-year-old woman burned alive, and people hacked to death by machetes as they ran from rapid gunfire.

Islamist Fulani militia attacks continue to escalate against predominantly Christian villages in Nigeria’s middle belt. Thousands of killings have occurred since 2009, with countless others suffering life-changing injuries. It is estimated that around 3 million people in the central belt alone have been displaced by the destruction of their homes, insecurity and fear. Many Muslims who refuse to adopt the Islamist ideology of Boko Haram and the Islamist Fulani militia are also killed. According to Christian Solidarity International, at least 615 people were killed in just the first three weeks of this year by Islamist militants. The number has increased greatly since, as the killings continued during our time there.

The perpetration of atrocities also continues. These are a tiny proportion of the examples. A widow called Beatrice, aged 25 and from Plateau state, told us:

“I returned in the morning but everything was burnt. I went to my home and saw my mother and siblings butchered and burnt.”


A young mother called Ruth shared a similar story:

“Fulani militia burnt everything including animals. Hardly anything survived. Ten people were killed … some were burnt, others shot, others macheted.”


Janet, a mother of four children, told me this:

“I found my husband had been killed. I cannot go back to my village. It has been burnt. We are barely managing.”


Although Nigeria represents 2.4% of the world’s population, it contributes to 10% of global deaths for pregnant mothers and has the fourth-highest maternal mortality rate in the world. Its suffering is impossible to fathom.

So, too, is its courage and resilience. I give just one example: during my many visits to central Nigeria, I have been privileged to witness the phenomenal work of Gloria Kwashi, who is married to the equally inspiring Anglican Archbishop Ben Kwashi of Jos. They are both survivors of horrific Islamist violence and torture. However, Gloria’s enormous capacity for resilience and love is shown by her ever-expanding family. In addition to her own children, she and Archbishop Ben have adopted 57 orphans in need of care. She also runs a clinic and established a school for about 400 children, and gets up at 4 o’clock in the morning every day to prepare food for the hundreds of students. It makes me feel very humble.

Yet, like so many others in central Nigeria, she receives no support. Despite the escalating needs in the middle belt region, the United Kingdom does not provide any humanitarian assistance apart from a small interfaith mediation programme. Such a minimal response from the British Government is in no way appropriate to the scale and urgency of the humanitarian and security crises in central Nigeria. HART is responding to desperate requests to help with the provision of education and healthcare by supporting the provision of vehicles that take educational supplies to the displaced people forced to flee to remote areas. It will soon provide similar vehicles to take healthcare to these destitute civilians.

Therefore, while I commend the Government on their expressions of commitment to empower women and girls and prevent violence against them, I urge the Minister no longer to turn a deaf ear to the massive suffering of victims of violence in Burma’s ethnic states and Nigeria’s middle belt. There is an urgent need for an immediate humanitarian response to enable women to receive the aid they need and to maintain the inspirational contributions of the many valiant women who are working to alleviate suffering and promote human rights, freedom, democracy and peace. They are an inspiration and make me feel very humble.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

You are an inspiration too.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

Hear, hear. First, I apologise to the Committee for my seated comments to my noble friend Lord Young. I want to say something to the noble Lords, Lord Farmer, Lord Young and Lord Clement-Jones, who all meant very well by what they said—and I think we could all agree about the need for careful and respectful debate, and not taking for granted or assuming what people might think or what they might be saying. The only thing that I would say to them is that I have been a feminist all my life. One thing that you learn as a feminist, and as someone who has been active in women’s politics, is that you need to be in control of the battles that you fight. I say to them that it is great that they feel as strongly as they do, and please support me and my feminist friends in any way you can, but actually the fight is ours.

I intend to make a speech that is about breaking the bias and about ending the prejudice and discrimination that women face on a daily basis in 2022. As other noble Lords have said, of course, who could not be absolutely choked up when we heard little Gabriella saying “Mummy” to her mummy? Goodness me, is it not wonderful that that family is reunited? I pay tribute to my honourable friend Tulip Siddiq, the MP for that family. I also wish everybody a happy St Patrick’s Day.

I thank the Minister for getting us this debate because, like other noble Lords, I am sure that she will agree that it deserves to be in the main Chamber; so I will just ask her to put it in the diaries of the Leader of the House and the Chief Whip for next year and mount a campaign—one that we will all join her in—to make sure that we get the debate that we want on the special day on which we want it. I did, however, visit Central England Co-op’s wonderful International Women’s Day debate at the National Memorial Arboretum last week, and spent a very lovely morning there. It was not New York, but it was actually a great event. My job there was to speak about bias in my life and lessons to be learned, so I thought I might mention a few biases that I have known and experienced.

The first example I want to mention involves my late mum, Jean Thornton, the eldest of 11 children in a working-class family in Batley and Spen. I cannot remember a time in my life when I was not aware that my mum was top of her class in her primary school. She was very ill and failed to be able to take her 11-plus exams, and despite the fact that her teachers were really very keen that she should take it, her family did not arrange for her to re-sit it, but they did send her brother to the grammar school the following year and could not afford two sets of uniforms. She felt that missed opportunity literally all her life, which is why I can remember it: I have always known this story about my mum missing that opportunity and suffering from that bias.

Even though she made a great success of her working life and her public life and had seven children of her own, it did make her very ambitious for us, her six daughters. I am the eldest of seven. When the head teacher suggested—and it has to be said that I was definitely a troublesome, campaigning sixth-former—that I might not be university material, and should settle for a teacher-training college, I was not actually sure that he would escape with his life. I did, indeed, head to the LSE.

When I was in my early 30s, in the 1980s, I decided to take a pop at getting selected as a parliamentary candidate in Bradford, when one of our Labour MPs had died. Those of you who have subjected yourself to the ordeal of trying to be selected to fight a parliamentary seat will know that you have to attend a lot of meetings to sell yourself to the members of the local party. However, two of the meetings for this parliamentary selection were held in local working men’s clubs in Bradford, and I, as a woman, could not enter. I had to be signed in and escorted through the club; so while I watched all the other candidates, who were all men, waltz into the selection meeting, I had to wait until the secretary came to sign me in and escort me to the meeting.

At the time, I probably did what most of the women here would have done: I just got on with it. I made the best speech that I could and, needless to say, I did not get selected. It did, however, harden me, and it gave me a campaigning zeal to change the Labour Party selection rules and to ensure that there would be a great pipeline of women ready to stand for election. So in 1997 we saw the 100-plus Labour women, and now more than half of our Parliamentary Labour Party are women.

We have all experienced bias, be it minor but annoying. For example, I am fairly sure that when I came to your Lordships’ House in 1998, Conservative women here in the House did not wear trousers. I do not know if there was a rule or what, but it simply was not done.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

It was the same in the courts.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

Yes, it was the same in the courts. In 1998, women Peers had two little toilets that were by the Chamber. The men still had the splendid Victorian ones, but we gained the one just around the corner within a few years.

Then, of course, the bias goes to the downright dangerous and discriminatory. I have an admiration for the organisation Pregnant Then Screwed. This is partly because, when I was pregnant with my first child, I was without doubt the most senior person in the whole co-operative movement to have ever taken maternity leave; I was not that senior, actually. The chair of the committee for which I worked simply thought that I was being awkward and unco-operative by not saying exactly when I would return to work after my baby was born. Today, I would have known to take out a complaint and have them in a tribunal as quick as you like, but I did not know and so just had not as happy a time during my pregnancy as I should have had.

In the medical and health world where I work, there is still a clinical bias whereby medicines and devices are designed for and tested on men. This is changing but, of course, it is potentially dangerous and certainly can be very uncomfortable. The bias, otherwise known as misogynism, in our police, which has been mentioned already, has appalling consequences for both individual women and their treatment. We know about Sarah Everard but, more recently, a young girl was strip-searched at her school, including the removal of her sanitary wear, by two police officers. She was traumatised by her treatment, which took place without her mother or an adult present.

We have the lowest rape convictions for an age, as noble Lords have mentioned. As Dame Vera Baird said, 1.5% of rape cases reach court, meaning that 98% do not. We have long argued for the inclusion of domestic abuse and sexual offences in the definition of “serious violence”. We argued for violence against women and girls to be a strategic policing issue, given the same prominence as terrorism and organised crime. We argued for safeguards to be set out on the extraction of data from victims’ phones. We argued for a lifting of the limit for prosecution of common assault or battery in domestic abuse cases. We argued for a review into spiking, so that we can get to the bottom of this appalling practice. None of these measures were included in the Government’s original Bill. They are all there as a result of the campaigning work of women’s organisations, the Labour Party and, I have to say, the Liberal Democrats and other Members of your Lordships’ House. We have changed the law for women for the better. The Government have been asked some pertinent questions by my noble friend Lady Kennedy about ensuring that misogyny is made a hate crime and publishing a perpetrator strategy at the end of the month, as the Domestic Abuse Act requires. The Government must adopt these measures.

Turning to health, the area in which I work, we need the women’s health strategy to be produced. I am pleased that the Secretary of State has now said that it will be. The UK has been found to have the largest female health gap in the G20 and the 12th-largest globally. Research has shown a gender health gap in the UK where many women receive poorer healthcare than men and are routinely misunderstood, mistreated and misdiagnosed. There is still a great deal of work to do.

I want briefly to turn to the international issues mentioned by several noble Lords. I just want to add my voice and say this: what a short-sighted, counter- productive decision it was to reduce funding for women and girls across the world at every single level. This was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, my noble friend Lady Armstrong—virtually everybody. We need to return the funding for women and girls to its pre-2020 level; this requires the return of the £1.9 billion in programming. We need it now. We cannot afford not to find it.

I want to mention two other issues. One is to do with bias and tone. Both the current Secretary of State for Health and his predecessor have called out my honourable colleague Rosena Allin-Khan at the Dispatch Box because they did not appreciate her tone. That makes me quite angry because when men do that and say to women, “You’re not using the right tone, my dear”, what they are actually saying is, “You shouldn’t be speaking at all. Please speak only with our permission”. I place that on the table but, do not worry, my honourable friend Rosena is absolutely aware what is happening: those men are saying that she should not be speaking.

Finally, the Labour Party is the party of equality. We are the party of the Equal Pay Act, the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equality Act. We understand that our society, our economy and our country are poorer if women cannot play their full part. Women hold the key to a stronger economy. My noble friend Lord Sikka was quite right and I have been asking, all the time I have been in the House, for gender impact assessments. We have been asking for them for many years, so I plead with the Minister to add that to her to-do list.

International Women’s Day is always a bittersweet moment. It celebrates how far we have come, which is a great distance—certainly a great distance in the time I have been in your Lordships’ House—but also notes, with regret, how far we still have to go. It is a chance to recommit ourselves to the struggle for women, the girls of today, and our daughters and granddaughters of tomorrow. Women across the country and the world deserve security, prosperity and respect. We think a Labour Government would give them that but, for as long as we are still on these Benches, we will push the Government to deliver it.