International Women’s Day

Debate between Florence Eshalomi and Jackie Doyle-Price

Thursday 9th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

May I thank the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) for the speech she has just given? I thank her for doing what she has just done each year because, by taking this step, she has drawn a huge amount of attention to this issue, and we are all talking about it a lot more as a consequence. Personally, I am grateful, and women up and down this country should also be grateful.

I am very pleased to see the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar) witnessing that speech in his place. I hope he will take this in the spirit in which it is meant when I say that I hope he was listening, because we still have a culture in this country in which our criminal justice system devalues women when it comes to being victims of crime. It is all very well for us to pass these wonderful laws in this place about equality, saying, “We’ve got the Equality Act, isn’t it marvellous”, but behaviourally there is still massive prejudice and discrimination against women, and nowhere is that more clear than with the murder of women. If a man murders his wife, he is treated less severely by the courts. That surely is wrong, and it is something we must absolutely tackle.

It is so depressing that when, over recent months, we have seen higher-profile cases of this nature hit the headlines, it is done in a very voyeuristic way. We still end up talking about these women, who have been victims of terrible violence, as if it is some kind of soap opera, and that just is not good enough.

[Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the hon. Member for her powerful speech on this subject. Does she agree with me about the role of the media in reporting these crimes? This goes back to that tragic murder, but essentially a number of these men are depicted as family men for whom something just went wrong, but they should be viewed as what they are—murderers.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

The hon. Lady makes her point very powerfully. The way the media reports these things is like a soap opera, not a crime. It is about creating a story out of someone being the victim of a hideous act of violence. She is quite right to highlight the fact that people say, “Oh, it’s a family man who has done this”, and “Well, they were feeling so diminished because they’d lost their job”. That happens, and at the same time we have female sex workers murdered every week of the year who do not even merit a mention. That just illustrates the pervasiveness of the culture in this country that still treats women as objects, and it is still very much a world that runs according to men.

I am standing here listening to myself, and thinking, “God, what happened to you, Jackie?” When I was growing up in the 1980s, I thought the battles of feminism were won. I never thought I would be standing here banging on about the rights of women, but as time progresses I just think we are going backwards. It is almost as if Parliament has passed these laws to establish equality, and that means it is all right—job done—but the job has not been done at all. In many respects, this has gone backwards. I do not want to be treated like a delicate little flower, but, because we have a law that does not do that and that establishes my rights, that has given a lot of men a behavioural excuse not to treat me with respect and not to recognise the fact that, being a woman, I do have vulnerabilities. I do have vulnerabilities, and I am quite happy to accept that. I know some of my male colleagues think that I do not, but I do.