Stalking

Cheryl Gillan Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Llwyd]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. In fact, the all-party group is currently working on ensuring that we have a code of conduct and a means of disseminating information on identifying when those offences start and nipping them in the bud. The right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham has said on several occasions that she wishes to see not only MPs covered, but our staff, and she is right.

[Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the right hon. Gentleman for his pioneering work in this area, but does he agree that the purpose of having an all-party group on stalking and harassment is to ensure that we get information right across the board to all parliamentarians in both Houses and, through them, to their staff and the people beyond, because it is true that we often experience that, or constituents who have experienced it come to see us in our surgeries? We need to be able to help our own people as well as our constituents who come to us.

[Mr Llwyd]

The right hon. Lady is absolutely correct and I agree with every word she has said. The group’s strength is the fact that it is all-party, so Politics—with a capital P—plays no part in our deliberations.

The reason that stalking is hard to delineate is that it consists of a catalogue of incidents that, when taken alone, can seem innocuous enough to begin with. It is only when they are taken together that their cumulative and sinister effect can be seen. In many stalking cases the perpetrator will never issue an overt threat, but rather plagues his or her victim with flowers, phone calls, letters and gifts. It is thought that victims tend to wait until the 100th incident of stalking before reporting the matter to the police.

The advent of the internet also provides perpetrators with far greater opportunities to attack their victims—for example, on social media websites such as Twitter and Ask.fm and on online forums. Individuals can shield their true identity by adopting pseudonyms and hiding their IP address. More and more, the phenomenon of internet trolling is becoming an issue of concern. Multiple individuals can target a victim by sending them abusive messages, sometimes hundreds at a time. The recent examples involving Caroline Criado-Perez and the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) are cases in point.