Sexual Violence in Conflict

Fiona O'Donnell Excerpts

Thursday 14th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Nicola Blackwood]

I do indeed, and I thank the former International Development Secretary for his intervention. I know that he was a great champion of women’s rights when he was in that role. I hope that when the Foreign Secretary speaks, he will update us on progress at the G8 on this issue.

All the statistics and stories tell us that women are most vulnerable to the worst human rights abuses imaginable, but they are more than that. Among the women I have met are those such as Jineth Bedoya, a Colombian journalist who will not stop challenging arms dealing in her country, despite being abducted, tortured and raped by paramilitaries and then being told that there would be no prosecutions, but that she could have either bodyguards or a ticket out of the country.

Then there is Ikhlas Mohammed, a Darfuri survivor who speaks out continually about the abuses that women and girls have undergone in her community. The story she told still haunts me and demonstrates that practical solutions such as the preventing sexual violence initiative are not just western follies that tinker at the edges, but exactly what those who survive sexual violence are calling for. She told me this story: “I was in Tawila town when a girl’s primary school was attacked. The little girls in the school were raped, some in front of their families. Many were less than 10 years old. How do you stand being made to watch while someone rapes your daughter, or your mother or your sister? It is better to die than that. They use rape as a weapon. Now the women who were raped are pregnant they are unacceptable in their families. Most of the girls did not tell anyone they had been raped because of the stigma. If there is no justice, if there is no law, then everything has collapsed. We cannot stop women’s violence. We cannot stop rape. We cannot stop any kind of sexual violence towards women. We need justice. I am a representative of Darfurian women and we are looking for justice.”

Those women who speak up after they have survived sexual violence and who challenge it regardless of the risk are not just victims. They are not even primarily victims. Many whom I have met have become exceptional human rights defenders and leaders in their own countries, calling for their right to live free from the fear of all kinds of violence, for their right to access services and, just as importantly, for sustainable stabilisation. They are calling for women to be considered and included in peace processes so that they can hold their own leaders to account. Those women are indomitable agents for change whose determination and strength of purpose is a resource for peace and security that we can ill afford to ignore. They are, in short, a good investment.

I am delighted to welcome the Foreign Secretary’s preventing sexual violence initiative. I know from discussions with him and with the PSVI team that tackling sexual violence in conflict is a genuine personal passion of his, and I thank him for his leadership in driving the matter up the international agenda in a way that we have not seen since resolution 1325 was signed in 2000.

[Fiona O’Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that we in the developed world also need to address this issue? Is she aware that 20% of US female veterans report that they have experienced sexual assault during their careers?

[Nicola Blackwood]

There is no question but that sexual violence is a problem in every country, and every country needs to take responsibility for tackling it. It is also a fact that in certain countries the rule of law has entirely collapsed, and in those countries there is much more scope for capacity building and support. The G8 countries and the international community can offer support in a way that will make an extraordinary difference to women’s lives.

The all-party parliamentary group and our co-ordinating group—Gender Action for Peace and Security—have already taken every opportunity to engage with the PSVI team as the initiative develops. We have been making the case for participation, as well as protection and impunity, to be part of the PSVI package. We have emphasised that, in this sensitive area of policy, we need to take a “first, do no harm” approach, particularly by ensuring that support and protection are in place for the survivors of sexual violence and for those women human rights defenders who are brave enough to stand up but who face extreme intimidation and abuse.

We must also ensure a sustainable impact by integrating the PSVI with the national action plans developed around resolution 1325, with the building stability overseas strategy and with other DFID and peace-building programmes so that there is no risk of duplication. I hope that the Foreign Secretary will give us an update today on his progress on the PSVI with the G8 member states, and on his plan for taking the initiative forward following the April Foreign Ministers’ meeting and beyond.

The practical measures that the PSVI offers are the missing link in our international response to the risks that women face in conflict. A frequent problem is the failure to understand the risks in the first place. Much of the rhetoric around women in conflict-affected states fails to address the full range of roles that women might have played in the conflict. Some take part as combatants, others as field operations supporters and some as sex slaves. Their inclusion in peace processes, in disarmament, demobilisation, reintegration, repatriation and resettlement programmes and in intelligence networks is every bit as important as the inclusion of their male counterparts, whom we would not dream of excluding.

Women represent 80% of refugees, along with their children. The number of war widows and female-headed families increases exponentially immediately after conflict, and those groups continue to face survival crises in post-conflict situations, making them even more vulnerable to sexual violence. They need access to employment programmes and to health, education, social and justice services if they are to protect themselves and, if they are already victims, to recover. However, post-conflict reconstruction and development analyses rarely prioritise and target women in conflict-related scenarios.

This is a matter of seeing the protection and inclusion of women as an integral part of the security challenge of stabilisation. For example, roads and ports are needed for commerce, but they might not help women to access local economies if they do not connect to the smaller, rural markets that the women frequent. Employment programmes almost always target young men, to absorb them, away from conflict-related activity, but that can leave women without assistance of any kind. One capacity solution is to focus on recruiting women to front-line services such as criminal justice, health or education. That would serve the dual purpose of ensuring that women found the employment that they needed to prevent poverty and vulnerability, as well as ensuring that they had access to those services. Both those outcomes would offer stability and security benefits in peace-building efforts.

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[Fiona O’Donnell]

I welcome all the action that the Foreign Secretary is driving forward and the leadership he is giving. Does he agree that it is vital that the Prime Minister, in his leadership role in agreeing the post-2015 framework, should ensure that women’s rights are always on the agenda?

[Mr Hague]

Yes, absolutely. The Prime Minister is supportive of the initiative and determined that it should be part of that agenda, too. Our initiative is focused particularly on sexual violence in conflict and we should maintain that focus. Of course, we can add more to it but it is important to make great progress—and to show the world that we can make progress—on this aspect of sexual violence with the particular characteristics of rape when systematically used as a weapon of war.

At the same time as taking the other actions I have mentioned, we have significantly increased our support for the UN Secretary-General’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict. We have provided £1 million in funding to her office and this week I announced that we will contribute an additional £500,000 to the International Criminal Court’s trust fund for victims, bringing our total support to £1.5 million in the past two years.

Thirdly, we have pledged, as I mentioned briefly, to use our presidency of the G8 this year to seek new commitments from some of the world’s most powerful nations. We have consulted UN agencies, the International Criminal Court and NGOs on how to make the most of that opportunity, and we have listened to the views of 75 experts from more than 26 countries who attended a conference we ran at Wilton Park in November, which I also attended. On the basis of those consultations, when I chair the meeting of G8 Foreign Ministers in London in April I will ask them to declare that rape and serious sexual violence amount to “grave breaches” of the Geneva conventions, signalling that we are prepared to pursue domestic prosecution of such crimes on the basis of universal jurisdiction.

We have also proposed a set of practical commitments to promote greater accountability and to overcome the most significant barriers to progress in this area. Those barriers are the poor quality of investigation and documentation of incidents of sexual violence in conflict; the inadequate support and assistance to survivors; the failure of wider peace and security efforts to address such issues; and the lack of international co-ordination.

In developing the commitments we have been careful to identify suggestions that we believe will have a real practical impact and will make concrete progress on the ground. Our proposed new international protocol, for example, on the investigation and documentation of sexual violence in conflict, should improve the evidence base from which investigations and prosecutions can be drawn.

We will suggest that the G8 provide greater protection and support to women human rights defenders, one of the target users of this new protocol, which will result in better documented cases, further building the evidence base. Doing so will also strengthen the support they provide to the survivors of sexual violence, as would broader G8 support for health, psychosocial and rehabilitation services, which will result in survivors feeling readier to pursue prosecutions.

We will also press the G8 to ensure that an improved response to sexual violence is reflected in their own security and justice sector reform programmes, as well as in any support that they provide to national legislative reform. Such actions would help to provide the domestic legal and institutional framework within which survivors can act which, if supported by more coherent international support to strengthen UN efforts, would further build this national capacity.

These commitments are ambitious. I am firmly of the view that taken together they will begin a comprehensive global response to tackling impunity for sexual violence through a combination of legal and practical interventions which complement existing international activity, but target gaps in the current global response. We have had encouraging and supportive responses from G8 partners and from others, including Australia, New Zealand and countries most directly affected by the issue, such as the new Government in Somalia. There is also enthusiasm to do more in the OSCE, the African Union and NATO. This is a time to take the issue forward. I believe we can develop a critical mass of support which will lead to serious concrete progress over the next couple of years.

What we started nine months ago and what we are going to do at the G8 is just the beginning of a long effort. We will do our utmost to galvanise greater collective action. We will take this cause to the United Nations, including to the UN Security Council in June when we hold the presidency of the council, and at the UN General Assembly in September, when we will hope to increase support for the concept of a new international protocol on the issue. I hope that the Government will have the support, advice and encouragement of Members across the House in taking forward this vital issue at a moment in world affairs when we genuinely have the opportunity to pursue it and to make a difference, for the sake of hundreds of thousands and millions of people affected by these appalling crimes.

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[Fiona O’Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I shall show myself to be the mistress of self-discipline.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price). I am particularly glad that she referred to the war in Bosnia. Amnesty International’s report, “When everyone is silent”, was published last October and sets out for the Foreign Secretary—I am pleased that the International Development Secretary is also present—the scale of the challenge that we face in ensuring, first, that women feel able to come forward and tell their stories and, secondly, that justice will be done if they find the courage to do so.

I also congratulate the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) on securing this debate, and I am sure she will not mind me mentioning that, although the Order Paper does not reflect it, there was cross-party support for it. She should not apologise for not talking much about violence against men, because I remember following her when she made her maiden speech in the Chamber in which she spoke with passion about a project in her constituency for men who were suffering domestic violence. Although the prevalence of men who suffer sexual violence in conflict zone is not as great, the stigma for them is considerable. They can even find themselves criminalised and imprisoned because they are deemed by the nation to have taken part in an immoral crime.

I am pleased to be speaking in this debate because I am a member of the International Development Committee, which is currently undertaking an inquiry into violence against women and girls. I know that the Foreign Secretary said that it was important to realise that we are talking specifically about sexual violence in conflict zones, but we wanted to broaden our report to make it more general. I do not feel like we have had two separate debates this afternoon because every issue that was raised in the last debate affects our capacity to have an impact on sexual violence in conflict zones. If women are not supported by the justice system in their state or know that they will have to return to a community where they will be stigmatised, they will not come forward or seek justice.

I wrote to a Minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office about a woman who was raped in Egypt. When the doctor was collecting the forensic evidence, he could not find the correct instruments and used a pair of scissors to try to take swabs. The woman said that that examination was worse than the rape. We need to be honest and admit that that is the situation in many countries. Although we want to support women, there is a lot of work to be done not just by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but by the Department for International Development and the Ministry of Defence to ensure that women, girls, boys and men who are victims of sexual violence get the justice that they seek when they come forward.

I welcome the Foreign Secretary’s speech and his commitment. It is clear that he has real passion for this issue. However, I have some questions and hope that we can get a bit more detail about how he intends to achieve his aims. I am glad that he told the House that he will be working closely with DFID. I do not intend to be critical or to score party political points, but it is important that we are honest. What does he believe would be an indication of success? Does he have any numbers in mind or any particular areas that he wants to concentrate on? How is he working with DFID? It is important that the resources are given directly to projects in other countries that support women and girls who are the victims of sexual violence. It would be helpful to have more detail on how the two Departments are working together.

It is important, unpleasant as it is, for us to try to get inside the minds of the men who carry out these dreadful violent crimes. We must understand that when a soldier comes from a country where there is no respect for women and where women have no rights and are excluded in every way, it is much easier for them to take the final step of committing an act of sexual violence. That is why it is vital that the work with DFID continues. We must try to effect change in those countries. If we do not change the situation with regard to sexual violence against women and girls in peace and in conflict, at home and in developing countries, we will not achieve the laudable aims that the Foreign Secretary has set out.

[Margot James]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful speech. Without wishing to compromise the focus of the Foreign Secretary’s initiative, which I support wholeheartedly, as I am sure she does, I agree with her that women’s unequal status and the misogyny that exists in many societies are both a cause and a consequence of the sexual violence that we are discussing this afternoon.

[Fiona O’Donnell]

I thank the hon. Lady. I would go even further and say that countries that have such an attitude toward women are far more likely to be involved in conflict in the first place.

Let us call today for a swift and just international response to sexual violence against women, girls, boys and men. We have to acknowledge that the most effective way for us to improve the lives of women and girls, so that they can live free from the fear of violence and its devastating effects, is to work to bring about change across a whole range of issues—education, training, employment, access to finance, health care and justice. Those are the ways in which we can protect women and make it possible for them to come forward and tell their stories, so that we can deliver justice and so that their daughters will have a different story to tell.