Violence against Women and Girls

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I am glad that we are discussing this most important issue today. The National Police Chiefs’ Council rightly stated last year:

“Violence against women and girls is a national emergency.”

Action must be taken against our societal epidemic of violence, including sexual violence, against women and girls, and I am glad that the Government are committed to halving it in a decade. I will do my part to ensure that promise is delivered.

We rightly talk a lot—although not nearly enough—in this place about victims. They must be at the heart of our work. Society has reached a place where most of us can accept the fact that we will all know victims of domestic or sexual violence. How could we not, with the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s statistics showing that approximately one in 12 women will be a victim in any given year, and as many as one in three over the course of a lifetime? Violence against women and girls is endemic in our country. It happens all around us and is committed by people—mainly men—whom we all know, and often trust and love. Societally, that is the aspect with which we have failed to grapple.

Even though we accept that we know victims, far fewer people can accept that they know perpetrators. Instead, the 3,000 offences that happen each day, which leave behind psychological wreckage, seem to be rhetorically and conceptually driven by some sort of mysterious, passive, abstract force. It may be tempting to imagine that predators and perpetrators are unusual and could be identified if only we ditched our politically correct attitudes. However, that ignores the majority of abuse that takes place. Worse, it leads to a complacency that makes women and girls more vulnerable. It is easier, psychologically and societally, to hold to the idea that sexual violence is a rare thing, perpetrated by monsters that we can spot a mile off. Finding any excuse to delegitimise those who come forward—for example, by victim blaming, or by having preconceived ideas about how a “real” victim would behave—is key to upholding that. We see excuses made constantly for such behaviour, including in this place, and often by people who claim to be feminist or Christian, but who do not demonstrate any of the values that they claim to hold when it comes to having to confront the behaviour of someone in their circle.

It is easier to immediately accept the abuser’s wholesale narrative and deflect, minimise, deny, defend or rubbish the victim’s credibility than to accept that someone we know is not only capable of that type of violence, but has perpetrated it. That tendency is at its most egregious when there is an institutional failure of reckoning, but all institutions are made up of individuals who share in and perpetuate that culpability. Even in the vanishingly rare cases in which someone is successfully convicted for domestic or sexual violence, we need only look at the comments online about how they had been “hard done by” or were “such a nice neighbour” and “couldn’t possibly have done it”. We all know that the vast majority of cases will never even make it that far, so what then?

Let us be clear. According to the National Police Chiefs’ Council,

“1 in 20 people are estimated to be perpetrators of VAWG per year”.

Many of those will be repeat perpetrators. We will all know at least one of them. They hide in plain sight. They may very well be the last person we expect to be a perpetrator, and they know exactly what they are doing. Failure to acknowledge that means forcing victims to carry the shame that belongs to their abusers. We cannot say that we support victims coming forward if we cannot reconcile the fact that everyone here and everyone watching will know perpetrators of that form of violence.

If we are to turn the tide, we need better education. We need more honest discussions of women’s safety and men’s roles. We need cultural change to identify and call out abusive behaviour. We need structures that believe women and girls and take misconduct seriously. We need investment in mental health and victim support services far above that currently on offer, including in the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, and support from independent sexual violence advisers and independent domestic violence advisers. We also need a justice system that works, that can deliver timely justice and in which women can have faith that they will not be further traumatised, as happens all too often, when seeking justice. Fundamentally, we all—in this place and right across society—need the courage to be more honest with ourselves about what we collectively look away from because it is too difficult. If we are ever going to hold perpetrators accountable and create and sustain a culture where women’s and girls’ safety is the norm, not the exception, that is where we need to begin.