UK: Violence Against Women and Girls

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe]

That this House takes note of violence against women and girls in the United Kingdom.

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, for health reasons my noble friend Lady Drake cannot be here today. She has asked me to deliver on her behalf what she wishes to be said in opening this debate, and I share her views.

The UK Government have labelled violence against women and girls as a national threat. The prevalence of violence against women and girls in the UK is not only unacceptable but frightening. Such violence covers a depressingly long roll-call of crime types, including domestic abuse, stalking and harassment, modern slavery and human trafficking, rape and sexual offences—which show a particularly large increase—spiking, child sex abuse and exploitation, female genital mutilation, adult sexual exploitation and so-called honour-based abuse. The exponential advancement of technology has fuelled the opportunities for sexual harassment and abuse. Such violence accounts for at least 15.8% of all recorded crime. Domestic abuse makes up a third of violence recorded by the police. In the six months from October 2021 to March 2022, at least 507,827 offences against women and girls were recorded. That equates to two crimes per minute.

Even these figures are an understatement. The National Police Chiefs’ Council’s first strategic threat and risk assessment of such violence confirms that many crimes remain hidden. Victims do not report them. ONS data reveal that only one in four women who are victims of rape or penetration before the age of 16 told someone about the abuse at the time. More than half give “embarrassment” as a reason. Just under half thought that no one would believe them. Some 1.7 million women aged 16 and over experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2022, and while 81% of female victims of partner abuse told someone, mostly a friend or relative, only 18% contacted the police. Between April 2020 and March 2021, 5,395 women and girls attending a hospital or a GP had FGM identified.

The impact of violence extends to experience of the criminal justice system. Women from minoritised groups and immigrant women are particularly fearful of engaging with the police. Victims’ experience in the court process too often serves to enhance the impact of the violence. Public trust in policing has eroded over recent years. A series of high-profile public cases has clearly affected women’s confidence in how policing responds to crimes affecting women and girls. The impact of the violence is complex and long lasting. Girls who experience abuse before they are 16 are much more likely to experience abuse later in life.

Sadly, the burden of harassment and abuse on girls from a young age has for a long time been invisible. The Children’s Commissioner recently surveyed more than half a million children in the “Big Ask”. Young girls wrote about feeling unsafe and intimidated in public spaces. It is a compelling read and reveals a deeply disturbing reality for our children. It describes a society that downplays and accepts harassment as a norm and leaves perpetrators unpunished.

I will take noble Lords to that reality through the girls’ own voices. A girl of 16 said:

“There’s no safety for young people: harassment and crime, no-one feels safe, girls in uniform get catcalled by creeps … We deserve better. We deserve for things to change”.


Girls as young as 11 feel responsible for their own protection strategies, avoiding certain areas or routes home, or planning escape or self-defence. One girl of 11 wrote:

“I think that lots of girls are afraid of things that will happen to them. For example, harassment or assault … most girls my age (including me) do not know what to do when this happens. I think we should be taught what to do, like a form of self-defence. This is very important to me”.


Another little girl of 11 said:

“The fact that girls all over the country have to always have an airpod out to listen for danger, to carry self defence skills, to always go home with friends, to wear trainers more often to run away from trouble. Girls are constantly thinking of this at school and it frightens us”.


Boys and girls are increasingly exposed to pornography from a young age, which is normalising violence against women and girls and warping young people’s perceptions of what healthy sexual relationships are. Reports by the Children’s Commissioner, including Evidence on Pornography’s Influence on Harmful Sexual Behaviour Among Children, vividly capture these voices. A girl of 18 who first saw pornography aged 11 said that it had

“affected me in my adult relationships and my body image and how my sex life is currently”.

A 19 year-old girl who first saw pornography at the age of 10 said:

“You see a lot of stuff like barely legal teens on porn sites and it’s not nice. They want us to act like porn models but we can’t change who we are, what we like, what we are afraid of”.


Pornography depicts sex as a transactional, one-way interaction in which women perform as objects for male gratification.

The survey also captured boys’ views. A boy of 18 who first saw pornography at the age of 13 said:

“Males can be led to believe women are purely for sex”.


A boy of 18 who first saw pornography at the age of 12 wrote:

“Many heterosexual men grow up to have certain expectations of how to treat women when having sex, and in general. A lot of that is actually just abuse”.


The reports find a link between specific acts of sexual violence commonly seen in pornography and those reported in official documents on the investigation of children who have abused other children.

Building on this research, the commissioner has been speaking with girl victims of peer-on-peer abuse about the impact of pornography. Key things emerged. One was toxic relationships: “He would just lose it quite a lot, and he could be quite violent”. Another was negative role models for boys: “I got catcalled by this guy, and I remember telling the boy I was with and he was like, ‘Yeah, like, that’s funny, me and my dad do that’”. There was the sharing of intimate child abuse images—“My friend said, ‘Basically, he’s filmed like you’re having sex with him and he’s been showing everyone at school’”—and rape and sexual assault: “He came round and it was all fine, and then it just got a bit not fine very quickly”.

Girls often do not tell. They often believe that they will get a poor response from professionals and adults. Reporting a crime to the police can be as traumatic as the event itself. To share one abused girl’s advice to her abused friend: “I don’t even want to turn round and go, ‘Go to the police, get justice’, because it’s not going to make her feel any better. I think if I could do it again I wouldn’t, because I’d get over the abuse much faster. I only reported it because I wanted the perpetrator to not do it again”. The court process is not always child-centred and trauma-informed. One victim of peer-on-peer abuse observed that it feels like punishment for the victim.

These experiences are confirmed by recent Girlguiding attitudes surveys, which show that 53% of 11 to 21 year-old females do not feel safe when they are outside on their own, 79% have experienced online harms and 67% of 13 to 18 year-old girls experience sexual harassment at school. The 2021 Ofsted Review of Sexual Abuse in Schools and Colleges found that nearly 90% of girls and 50% of boys said that being sent explicit pictures or videos of things that they did not want to see happens a lot or sometimes to them or their peers. Sexual harassment of children is commonplace. The frequency of harmful sexual behaviours means that some children consider them as normal.

By failing to protect our girls from the increasing prevalence of violence, we continue to fuel the level of violence and harassment experienced by women in our country. I have focused on children’s experiences because they highlight for us all the appalling and fundamental challenges they face and what that bodes for the future, However, I want to end by briefly reminding the House of some statistics. Two women are killed by partners or ex-partners every week. Rape prosecutions and convictions are at a record low. One rape per school day is reported as taking place on school premises. The Crime Survey estimates that approximately 1.7 million women over 16 experienced domestic violence last year. The position of women from minority groups is even more precarious; they have no recourse to public funds, which is a significant barrier to accessing support, including safe accommodation such as a refuge. Too few women experiencing domestic abuse can find a safe home with the support that they need to rebuild their lives.

There is so much more that we need to do, and some things will of course take time, but I want to make some proposals to the Minister for immediate action. Will he strengthen the Online Safety Bill to ensure that all platforms and service providers, including user sites and pornography providers, are subject to stringent requirements to protect children and women from online pornography? Will he strengthen the Victims and Prisoners Bill to ensure that every child victim is entitled to support, including specialist advocacy, if they are a victim of sexual abuse? Will he ensure that the code of practice sets guidance on how children’s rights will be met? Will he ensure that training in relationship, sex and health education teaching in schools takes a “safeguarding first” approach? Teachers should receive training on delivering sensitive topics, including pornography. Will he fund vital community-based domestic abuse services? Will he take immediate steps to rebuild women’s and girls’ confidence in our police and criminal justice system? These proposals are only a start but urgent action is needed now if women and girls are to be free to live and thrive in Britain today. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. I also thank the Children’s Commissioner, Girlguiding, Refuge and others for their very helpful briefing, which I know that we have all taken advantage of. It has been a passionate but very thoughtful debate, dealing with so many different facets of violence against women and girls and recognising how widespread it is and, indeed, how damaging.

I will not even attempt to summarise the debate, particularly given the time, but I thank the Minister for his very detailed response and his clear determination to try to approach, assess and deal with every one of the issues raised. So many proposals for action and change were put forward during the debate that I will have to read his response very carefully, as indeed I suspect we will all have to do, to judge whether it is strong enough to deal with the size of the problem. As several noble Lords have said, we have debated this many times, yet things seem to be getting worse rather than better.

In conclusion, it is vital that we recognise the need for urgency, particularly in protecting young girls from these behaviours. I again thank everybody for their contributions to the debate.

Motion agreed.