Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (Ratification of Convention) Bill

David Nuttall Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 16th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I am very grateful to the hon. Lady. As I have said, we can go back to the drawing board and bring back a Bill that all of us can support. We have had four speeches so far, and I think I have heard only one passing reference to men. The whole thrust of this debate and argument, and the whole point of this Bill today, is simply about the unacceptability of violence against women. That is all we have heard so far. It is no good now trying to redraw the nature of the debate, because I am raising the point about true equality. If people really believe in equality in this House, let us go back to the drawing board and bring back a Bill that makes that clear.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

Although it is true that article 4, which has just been quoted by the promoter of this Bill, says what she says it says, article 2 is the relevant article, because it sets out the scope of the convention. Paragraph 1 of article 2 quite clearly states:

“This Convention shall apply to all forms of violence against women.”

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will also come on to article 1, which makes it clear that discrimination against men is absolutely fine as far as the convention is concerned. It flies in the face of the impression that the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan wants to give. There is an easy way to deal with this, as we all seem to be in agreement: we can go back to the drawing board and bring forward a Bill on which we can all agree.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

Yes, my hon. Friend is absolutely right, and he makes a good point. As I made clear, our definition of domestic violence is very different from that used in most other countries. However, there are other reasons, which I will come to, and article 1 contains something I fundamentally disagree with.

We are in the ridiculous situation where 66% of men convicted at Crown Court in England and Wales of violence against the person are sent to prison, compared with 37% of women. If we really want to send out a message—I heard a number of Opposition Members say that that was the purpose of the Bill—of zero tolerance of violence against the person, the first thing, and perhaps the main thing or even the only thing, we should do is press for much tougher sentences for people who are found guilty. One way to prevent and eliminate violence is to send people to prison for longer, because while they are in prison, they cannot perpetrate any violence against anybody in their households, or anywhere else for that matter.

The Labour party, which is apparently so concerned about violence against women and girls, actually introduced a law in a previous Parliament whereby somebody who is sent to prison for committing violence against a woman or a girl has, by law, to be released halfway through their prison sentence, whether or not it is considered that they will go straight back into the household they came from and commit the same crime again. By the law of the land, those people have to be released halfway through their sentence. The last Labour Government introduced that, so it is no good Labour Members coming here today and saying how committed they are to stopping violence against women and girls, when they are the ones who are responsible for these people being let back out on to the streets and back into their houses much sooner than the courts originally intended.

If people want to do something worth while to prevent violence against women and girls and against other people, let us all press for stronger prison sentences. Let us all press for people to spend more of their sentence in prison, rather than being released out on licence. How many people are up for that in the House today? They all go amazingly quiet, because when it comes down to it, they want to huff and puff about being tough on violence against women and girls. When it comes down to the actual thing that most of our constituents would recognise as being tough on violence against women and girls—tougher prison sentences—Opposition Members run away, because they do not like people being sent to prison.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a very valid point. Does he not feel that there may be some correlation between the fact that the figures for violent crime are increasing and the fact that, as he has just pointed out, criminals know they will be let out halfway through their sentence?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is not rocket science: the more criminals who are in prison, the fewer criminals are out on the street committing crimes. That is not really a massively difficult concept to grasp, although Opposition Members appear to be struggling with it. It is not that difficult to understand that if the people who commit these crimes are in prison, they cannot be committing these crimes. My hon. Friend must therefore surely be right in his suspicion.

The convention does not just cover violence, as article 1b mentions, and that is one of the reasons why I have a fundamental problem with the convention. Article 1b wants

“the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women”,

but I do not see how introducing a specific duty to eliminate all forms of discrimination against just women is not discriminatory in itself—I sometimes wish people could see the irony of their proposals. Surely, we should want to eliminate all forms of discrimination—full stop. Article 1b is, in effect, saying that discrimination against a man is okay because all we want to do is end discrimination against women. Well, it is not okay; no discrimination is okay. If this convention said, “Actually, what we want to do is end all forms of discrimination—full stop,” I would be the first to support it, but it does not say that. It talks about discrimination against women only. Surely, Members cannot support that form of discrimination. It flies in the face of everything we are supposed to believe in if we believe in true equality.

Then we have the phrase “including by empowering women”. This is obviously a legal document, and I am not entirely sure what the legal definition of that is supposed to be. We have some very respected people of the law in the Chamber today, and they may be able to help us out with the legal definition. I genuinely do not know, and I will bow to other people’s superior knowledge. The English dictionary definition of empowering is

“approving having qualities that give a person or a group of people the means to take more control of their lives and become stronger and more independent”,

and we are all in favour of that I would like to think.

Most concerning to me, however, is the fact that this whole strategy seems to be based on the premise that all this violence against women is committed by men. Why else would it link discrimination, stereotyping and violence? That certainly seems to be the thought of many of the people who are supporting the convention and the Bill. The impression people might be under is that the perpetrators of all these crimes against women are men. Indeed, on the website of one of the campaigns endorsing the Bill, women were holding up placards with the slogan:

“Together we can end male violence against women”.

So it would seem that they are not interested in ending all violence, regardless of whether the victim is male or female, or even in ending all violence against women.

Despite what people want to believe, violence against women is not caused only by men. Indeed, there is no evidence to support that underlying assumption. A letter I received from the Crown Prosecution Service said:

“We are unable to provide information on your specific requests of ‘the sex of both the defendant and the victim’... This is because we record the sex of the defendant and victim as separate statistics rather than as a joined statistic.”

So today’s Bill is based on an assumption that can quickly be proved wrong. We only have to look at the individual cases that come to our courts to see that there are plenty where violence has been committed by a female offender against a female victim. Let me just give a flavour of those cases.

How about the case of Samira Lupidi, who stabbed her two young daughters to death in a refuge in November last year? Lupidi had been placed in a refuge with the girls after she called the police to their house, claiming her partner had been violent. Speaking about Lupidi’s relationship with the father, the judge said:

“You reacted to this very difficult situation by saying ‘If I cannot have them’”—

the children—

“‘neither can he’… This is a crime which speaks of rage and I sentence you on the basis that you killed them in anger and out of a desire for revenge.”

A jury of six men and six women found her guilty of murder after only 90 minutes’ deliberation.

What about the case of Sadie Morris, a female paedophile who was sentenced to five years in jail after photographing herself abusing a three-year-old girl? The offences took place between 1 and 31 July 2013, with photographs involving one category A image—the most serious level—and one category B and one category C image. What about the case of a Romanian sex gang led by women who trafficked vulnerable women into Britain and forced them into prostitution? The gang raked in more than £15,000 a month and forced the prostitutes to deposit the cash across 14 separate bank accounts.

Ending male violence against women would not have prevented any of these cases, as the offenders were also female. Crime does not discriminate. We have to get real: instead of speaking of female victims of male perpetrators, we should speak of all victims, regardless of sex, and all offenders, regardless of sex. Why do so many Members find that so difficult to do?

There are many female perpetrators of violence against both men and women, according to official Ministry of Justice figures. Its report, “Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System 2015”, says that violence against the person and theft were consistently the two offence groups with the highest number of arrests for both females and males. In fact, violence against the person accounted for 34% of all male arrests and 36% of all female arrests in the criminal justice system—we have not heard any of that in the speeches so far—while theft offences made up 21% of male arrests and 26% of female arrests.

Again, this is not restricted to women but also applies to girls. In 2015-16, violence against the person was the most common offence group for which juvenile females —10 to 17-year-olds—were arrested. In fact, 40% of arrests of girls aged 10 to 17 were for violence against the person. It is no good people shaking their heads; these are the facts—the official statistics—although they might be inconvenient. I am not surprised that Opposition Members have not heard about it; we never hear any of this in this place because we are so blinkered in only wanting to look one dimensionally at all these issues. I am not surprised that it has come as a shock to Opposition Members.

This is backed up by reports of cases such as that of Katie Neild, a 27-year-old mother of two who was rushed to hospital after a woman bit her and ripped a chunk out of her face, which left the victim with permanent scarring, even after an emergency skin graft. A case heard at my local court, Bradford Crown court, was that of a female who burgled a 79-year-old woman’s house in August last year. In her defence, the defendant’s barrister claimed that she would be extremely vulnerable in prison with a baby due in less than three months, despite her not being pregnant at the time of the burglary. However, Judge Thomas at Bradford Crown court—a fine man—said that his duty was to the pensioner whose life was so significantly affected that she had not left her home since.

This just gives a flavour of the vast array of cases where female offenders target female victims. The discriminatory underlay of this Bill is pointless and wrong, because not all victims are female and not all offenders are male. We should be bringing forward gender-neutral legislation that seeks to help all victims of crime—men and women—and to punish all offenders, men and women. Even in cases where people may assume that all violence is male on female, such as domestic violence, this is not so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

Yes, I am very much saying that—that is the thrust of my point. I absolutely would support the Bill if it were gender-neutral, but it clearly is not, and we need only read the convention to see that fact and to have heard the speeches we have heard so far today to realise that it has nothing to do with gender neutrality.

In 2008, Stonewall found that one in four lesbian and bisexual women have experienced domestic violence in a relationship, with 49.3% of bisexual women experiencing severe physical intimate violence. On abuse during childhood, the recent MOJ report, “Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System 2015”, notes:

“The perpetrator of physical abuse against females was almost as equally likely to be the mother as the father (33% and 36% respectively).”

This is not as clear-cut as some Members would want us to believe, but the Bill supports the narrative that they want to keep talking about. What they say bears no relation to the facts, but it very much helps a narrative that they want people to take away. At some point, some of us have got to say, “No, we are not prepared to allow these distortions to continue. We are going to argue what the actual facts are, not what people would want the facts to be.”

If people do not want to listen to me—which I understand that they often do not, because I say things that they do not want to hear—perhaps they might have more sympathy for a marvellous lady called Erin Pizzey. In 1971, Erin Pizzey opened the world’s first women’s refuge in Chiswick specifically dealing with all victims of domestic violence. Perhaps because of her background, she has the credentials, which I am not afforded the luxury of being granted, to be given a hearing. She went to the United States at the invitation of the US Government and embarked on a Salvation Army-sponsored tour of 21 cities to help set up shelters for victims of domestic violence. She did the same when she moved to Italy, and she returned to England in 1997. More recently, in March 2007, she opened the first Arab refuge for victims of domestic violence in Bahrain. I hope that people may listen to her if they will not listen to me. In 2011, she said in a press release on the international day for the elimination of violence towards women:

“25th November 2011 is the international day for the elimination of violence towards women. Like everybody else who reads this statement I am of course totally in favour of the elimination of violence towards women but unlike the instigators of this event I believe that we should be eliminating violence against everyone and that includes men and children.

“I applaud the efforts of Viviane Reding who is the Vice-President and Commissioner responsible for justice, fundamental rights and citizenship, Cecile Grebolvel who is the Secretary General of European Women’s lobby and Mikael Gustatsson who is Chair of Parliamentary Women’s Rights and gender equality commission in their efforts to protect women but I am puzzled as to why this enormous empire of women with the huge self important titles manage to avoid any discussion of the effects of violence upon the family, fathers and children.

If we have any hope of tackling the tragic effects of domestic violence we have to face the facts that women can and are also guilty of violence against their partners. To concentrate only of women as victims is to deny the fact that children are also abused by their mothers. We can no longer afford to cover up the huge scandal that has existed for the last forty years where only men have been held up as perpetrators of all violence.

My hope is that sufficient political pressure will be brought to bear upon these women who sit in great positions of power to acknowledge that we do indeed need to make November 25th a day when we all agree internationally that there should be zero tolerance for violence against anyone and that we will all work to make the family a safe and harmonious place.”

I think that we should listen to that very carefully indeed. It sums up entirely my view on this issue. That is a woman who has far more credentials than many people in this place, having set up the world’s first women’s refuge.

In response to a parliamentary question asked by the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands), the Government said that they remain committed to ratifying the convention and set out what more needs to be done:

“The previous Government signed the Istanbul Convention to show the strong commitment it placed on tackling violence against women and girls and this Government remains committed to ratifying it… The UK already complies with the vast majority of the Convention’s articles but further amendments to domestic law, to take extra-territorial jurisdiction over a range of offences (as required by Article 44), are necessary before the Convention can be ratified. The Ministry of Justice is currently considering the approach to implementing the extra-territorial jurisdiction requirements in England and Wales and will seek to legislate when the approach is agreed and Parliamentary time allows.”

According to the Library, article 44 of the convention, on which the Government were placing great weight, states:

“Parties shall take the necessary legislative or other measures to establish jurisdiction over any offence established in accordance with this Convention, when the offence is committed:

a in their territory; or

b on board a ship flying their flag; or

c on board an aircraft registered under their laws; or

d by one of their nationals; or

e by a person who has her or his habitual residence in their territory.”

Paragraph 2 states:

“Parties shall endeavour to take the necessary legislative or other measures to establish jurisdiction over any offence established in accordance with this Convention where the offence is committed against one of their nationals or a person who has her or his habitual residence in their territory.”

Paragraph 3 states:

“For the prosecution of the offences established in accordance with Articles 36, 37, 38…and 39…of this Convention, Parties shall take the necessary legislative or other measures to ensure that their jurisdiction is not subordinated to the condition that the acts are criminalised in the territory where they were committed.”

Paragraph 4 states:

“For the prosecution of the offences established in accordance with Articles 36, 37, 38 and 39 of this Convention, Parties shall take the necessary legislative or other measures to ensure that their jurisdiction as regards points d and e of paragraph 1 is not subordinated to the condition that the prosecution can only be initiated following the reporting by the victim of the offence or the laying of information by the State of the place where the offence was committed.”

Paragraph 5 states:

“Parties shall take the necessary legislative or other measures to establish jurisdiction over the offences established in accordance with this Convention, in cases where an alleged perpetrator is present on their territory and they do not extradite her or him to another Party, solely on the basis of her or his nationality.”

Paragraph 6 states:

“When more than one Party claims jurisdiction over an alleged offence established in accordance with this Convention, the Parties involved shall, where appropriate, consult each other with a view to determining the most appropriate jurisdiction for prosecution.”

Paragraph 7 states that

“this Convention does not exclude any criminal jurisdiction exercised by a Party in accordance with its internal law.”

It is, apparently, because of article 44 that the Government are dragging their feet.

[Mr Nuttall]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for putting that on the record. I think it worth also noting that article 36 refers to “Sexual violence, including rape”, article 37 refers to “Forced marriage”, article 38 refers to “Female genital mutilation”, and 39 refers to

“Forced abortion and forced sterilisation.”

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight the subjects of those articles. It was probably remiss of me not to do so myself.

It seems that the Government are hanging their hat on article 44. Perhaps the Minister will be able to explain more about the difficulties that they are experiencing in relation to it and the other articles mentioned in it, to which my hon. Friend has just referred.