Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Bill

Christine Jardine Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd February 2023 Public Bill Committees

I have probably said enough. My final comment is about victims, to whom the hon. Member for Walthamstow alluded. Our focus must be on intent and reasonable behaviour. We cannot have a situation in which a woman is put on trial for not getting the joke. Too many times, I have to listen to the phrase, “It’s just banter.” It is not banter; it is harassment. Let us make sure that it is recognised as such.

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

I will make only brief remarks. I could not agree more with the hon. Member for Walthamstow and the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North.

I was struck by what the hon. Member for Walthamstow said about her daughter being three. Before my daughter was born, a number of us at work found it immensely frustrating that we constantly had to face “banter” in the office. We were called unreasonable if we did anything about it, because it was just “reasonable banter”. We might miss the significance of the Bill and think it a small step. In a way it is, but in another way it is huge and important, because we have put it on record that such “banter” is not the reasonable thing; being offended by it is the reasonable thing. The reasonableness is with the women.

The hon. Lady’s mention of her daughter being three reminded me of the situation we faced daily in the workplace before my daughter was born. It struck me that my daughter is now 26. The workplace situation has improved, but the so-called banter continues. Those offensive statements and that harassment fall below the level of violence, but they are just as damaging because the issue is cultural. It affects women’s self-esteem, what we do and where we go in the evenings, even with our keys between our fingers. It is important to recognise today that we have to draw a cultural line, as the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North said. It is a cultural problem that we have to continue to fight daily. I hope that when the daughter of the hon. Member for Walthamstow is 26, we will have made more progress than has been made in the past 26 years.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

People always say this, but I actually mean it: it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Gary. I express my thanks and those of the Labour party to the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells for the opportunity to have this longed-for conversation and to start to build the legislative framework.

The right hon. Member was drawn out of the legislative lottery, which is an odd quirk of this place. At the time, I noted—I mean no offence to him—that there were more people in the top 10 called Greg than women on the list. Hearts sank somewhat for some of us in the room, as they did for charities such as Plan and Girlguiding that have been working on the issue and trying to find a sponsor, so it was a relief that the right hon. Member immediately and clearly wanted to do it. I thank him for allowing us to have this conversation and move the legislation forward.

As we have heard in today’s very reasonable debate, including in the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow, the Labour party stands ready and willing to work with the Government before the Bill’s final stages so that we can all agree without dividing the House. Nobody wishes to divide the House on the issue; we wish to sing with the same voice. I make that offer to the Minister.

I am not blessed with daughters, unlike others who have spoken. I am blessed with sons—I have two teenage sons. My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow made an important case about what people ought to know and how they ought to be reasonable. My sons know that you don’t shout at women in the street and that you don’t find your way into their heart by touching them up in a crowded place. My sons know that, not out of any spectacular parenting on my part but because they are reasonable human beings.

When our children were young teenagers—they are basically adults now, which I do not like to admit because it makes me feel old—my husband and I were in a park in south London. A woman was jogging past us. There were two men sat on a bench: it was 4 o’clock and they were drinking cans of lager, having a perfectly nice time. The woman jogged past and they started shouting at her about her arse and her physique. She was none the wiser: she had headphones in, though not out of design on her part, I should have thought.

I did not even notice that this bad thing was happening, because I am so used to it—I am so used to this sort of thing happening. My husband turned on his heels and absolutely blazed the two men, not even for what they were doing to the woman, but for doing it in front of his sons: “Don’t teach my children that this is the way to behave. Don’t ever do that.” Obviously they gave him some lip back, but the next time they go to shout at a woman, they will look around in that moment and they will stop. It is not reasonable, and they ought to know that it is not reasonable, but it made me feel incredibly sad that because that behaviour is standard, I did not even notice it.

On the reasonableness of men, I should mention that after the Sarah Everard case, women came forward and described all the stuff they have to do to keep themselves safe. They described the keys in the hands, the headphones in, the heads down on the train—“Don’t talk to me, don’t touch me.” We all know that; we have all done it. It is important to say that the huge weight of that burden falls on young women. A school uniform is a red rag to a bull, which is terrible.

When we were all saying that we did all this stuff—thinking about how we were going to dress and how we were going to get home, tagging our friends, calling each other—my husband said to me, “If you had the time back, and you had the level of detail that you have lived your life at since you were about 10, you could make a feature-length stop-frame animation film as good as ‘Wallace and Gromit’. That is the level of detail and time that has been taken off you as an individual.” That was labour that he did not have to do, as a man.

In the arguments that my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow is putting forward, all I think we are asking for is not to make the victim do the labour. We have done enough labour and put in the work to provide security for women. As individuals, we have done the state’s work for generations. In every rape case and every sexual violence case, there is still the problem that the person doing the labour, both in the investigation and on trial, is the victim. We have an opportunity to take that labour away.

We all want to see this legislation on the statute book. Anyone who says it will mean loads of people ending up in prison has never been at a trial relating to violence against women and girls. Hope springs eternal that anyone will go to prison for anything! We have a real opportunity here, but as the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North says, we have to make sure that this legislation is the beginning and that we make it as good as possible. What we should not do is put the labour on the shoulders of the victims.

I think I have been positively manny in my response. People come back at me saying that harassment is “banter” and that boys will be boys, but I hate that idea because I think much more of men than that. I think men are capable, brilliant human beings who can make choices. When they make choices to do bad things, it is nothing to do with boys being boys. They are not base or inhuman. They can control themselves. They are cracking—I raised two of them! They are not without control over their own faculties. It is not “boys will be boys”; it is “abusers will be abusers”. That is the top and bottom of it. I thank all hon. Members, and we obviously support the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Miss Dines]

May I make a little progress? Things do evolve. Perhaps some people in the 1970s would have thought that following somebody closely in a car to pay them a compliment was acceptable. We now know that it is totally unacceptable; things evolve. Quite rightly, we know that such behaviour is certainly not benign. The climate is thankfully very different now and there is much greater awareness, but there is always more to do. If it can be plausibly claimed that somebody who does that was doing it without intent, we would have to get to the reasonableness defence.

[Christine Jardine]

I accept entirely that things have evolved since the 1970s, but they did not evolve on their own. It took a lot of work, like that which we are trying to do today on reasonableness. If we allow the opportunity to pass, people will look back and say, “How did they let that slip through the net? Why did they not address it? Why is it still reasonable for someone to be burned with an iron, or strangled during sex, or accosted in the street? Why is that still acceptable?” Evolution in this area does not happen on its own. It takes a lot of work.