Violence against Women and Girls

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Thursday 14th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) and I pay tribute to the leadership shown on this subject by the hon. Members for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy). We have heard compelling speeches from Members on both sides of the House and I was particularly struck by those from the hon. Members for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) and for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman). Notwithstanding that, I share the disappointment that has been expressed about the lack of vigour from those who sit on the Government Front Bench, in particular. When I asked the Minister of State, Home Department, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Mr Browne), this morning about the importance of statutory education in PSHE and violence against women and girls, I was told that it is voluntary and that schools can offer it if they want to. Everything we have heard in the debate this afternoon suggests that that is not enough.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that it is a problem that PSHE is not part of the curriculum in academies and free schools? As we have all agreed during the debate, the problem goes across society.

[Caroline Lucas]

I agree. I also agree with those who said we need a whole-school approach. Yes, PSHE is vital but such education should also be mainstreamed across all other parts of the education system.

The figures, tragically, are all too familiar. In Britain, 60,000 women are raped every year and two women a week are killed by a partner or ex-partner. That culture of violence is doing enormous damage to our young people. As the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) said, NSPCC research found that so-called sexting is linked to coercive behaviour, bullying and violence and has a disproportionate impact on girls. A YouGov poll for the End Violence Against Women Coalition found that more than 70% of 16 to 18-year-old boys and girls said that they heard sexual name calling towards girls routinely and, even more disturbingly, one in three girls said that they experienced groping or other unwanted sexual touching at school.

In a report published last year entitled “I thought I was the only one,” the office of the Children’s Commissioner found that in the space of just 12 months more than 16,000 children, mostly girls, were identified as being at risk of sexual exploitation. The report highlights that we need to ask why so many males, both young and old, think it is acceptable to treat both girls and boys as objects to be used and abused. That brings me to my key point: violence does not happen in a vacuum. We must recognise the impact of the wider culture, so I want to focus on just one aspect of that—the objectification of women in the media, whether it is in the newspapers, music videos, adverts and video games.

Women have been served up as sex objects in some of our daily newspapers for many years. They show images that would be prohibited on television or subject to the watershed, yet they are sold entirely without age restriction in shops, often at a child’s eye level. As the mother of two sons, there are shops I would prefer not to go into because of the eye-level material that they will see and have seen and because of the effect on them.

Every week we read in the papers cases of women who are killed by their partner or former partner. Every one of these cases should cause an outcry, but rarely warrants a paragraph because it is tragically becoming so routine. The problem was highlighted last year by women’s groups who gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry and later published a report called “Just the Women”. This examined how domestic homicide cases are reported as “tragic” one-off incidents, rather than as part of a well-understood pattern of behaviour. Rape cases in some papers are routinely placed next to pictures of half-naked women. Cases of forced marriage or so-called honour-based violence, a horrible misnomer, are explained in terms of culture or religion—anything but violence against women and girls. Lord Leveson himself suggested that a front-page report in The Sun headed “Bodyguards for battered Towie sisters” about violence against two women from “The Only Way is Essex”, which was accompanied by a picture of one of the women in an erotic pose in lingerie, may well infringe clause 12—the discrimination clause—of the editors code of practice.

No one is suggesting that the media are solely to blame for these attitudes, but their objectification of women and the treatment by some newspapers, for example, of rape cases go some considerable way towards explaining why prejudicial attitudes to women are so deeply entrenched and are so normalised. The chief Crown prosecutor for London, Alison Saunders, has expressed concern about the impact that the treatment of women in the media has on rape cases and jurors’ decision making. She believes that jurors are coming to court with preconceptions about women that affect the way they consider evidence and she says:

“If a girl goes out and gets drunk and falls over . . . they are almost demonised in the media, and if they then become a victim, you can see how juries would bring their preconceptions to bear.”

Fortunately, much needed work is being done with detectives and prosecutors, for example, to dispel myths and stereotypes about women who have been raped or subjected to sexual and others forms of violence, but Alison Saunders asks whether there is

“something more we should be doing”

so that people doing jury service are not being challenged for the first time, and the subject is not one that they are thinking about for the first time.

The answer to that question is, of course, yes. That is why our schools should be taking a lead. Work to prevent violence against women and girls must be an integral part of education policy, delivered in every school as part of the statutory curriculum. It is astonishing that in 2010 40% of 16 to 18-year-olds said either that they did not receive lessons or information on sexual consent, or that they did not know whether they did. Although PSHE education must now teach about consent, it needs to go further and cover all forms of violence against women, including teenage relationship abuse, forced marriage, FGM and sexual exploitation. It should also be linked to work on gender equality and challenging gender stereotypes; otherwise young women and men will never be exposed to education designed to reduce gender violence and to counter the damaging impact of cultural factors, such as the media.

The 1 billion women rising today want a world that empowers young people, rather than represses their sexuality, so work in our schools must allow young people to be more in control of their sexual identity, rather than being dictated to by the media or advertising. Crucially, it must address harmful notions of masculinity and present boys with positive alternatives. The Director of Public Prosecutions and the Deputy Children’s Commissioner have both spoken out about the impact of pornography on young men’s sexually aggressive behaviour, and there is evidence of the negative impact of porn on young men’s attitudes to women.

In my constituency, the domestic abuse charity Rise is an excellent example of existing good practice. It delivers a PSHE preventive education programme on healthy relationships to schools across the city. Our schools also subscribe to the whole-school approach recommended by the End Violence Against Women coalition, where heads take a lead, teachers are trained on the issues, and all students receive comprehensive sex and relationship education which deals with consent, equality and respect. If we are serious about preventing gender violence, those messages need to be reflected not just in our schools but across society as a whole.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in this important debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) on initiating it and on the work that she has done in this field.

The Government estimate that last year 85,000 women were raped or sexually assaulted. That is a shocking statistic. Clearly, this violence takes place in a cultural context. I want to build on the remarks of the hon. Members for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), for Devizes (Claire Perry) and for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) to suggest some concrete things that we might do to shift this culture which is portraying women in such a highly sexualised way.

During my adult life, women have made lots of progress in many respects. We have made progress at work, in education and public services, and in pensions and child care, but we seem to have gone backwards in the public portrayal of women and the impact that that is having on our self-esteem and on the way that men treat us. The all-party group on body image has looked into women’s attitudes to their bodies. That can appear to be at the soft and fluffy end of the scale, but it often drives into women’s sense of themselves and levels of self-esteem. People who have negative self-images can become extremely depressed and subject to mental health problems and eating disorders—so much so that 80% of women are unhappy with their bodies, 40% of children are concerned about their bodies, and 1.6 million people have eating disorders. People’s anxieties are strengthened by their being faced with a constant bombardment of images of perfection.

I thought it would be interesting to talk to two groups of young people about these issues. I went to a school in London to talk to a group of girls in year 10 and to a school in my constituency in County Durham to talk to a mixed group of boys and girls, also in year 10. They agreed that these were significant problems. The girls, in particular, drew a connection between the images portrayed in the media and the way they are harassed on the streets by complete strangers. They have now begun to airbrush their own photographs on Facebook—[Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Slough is groaning; I was appalled as well. There are some practical things that we can do about this. It is impossible to ban airbrushed photographs in advertisements, but we could label them as such.

The young people told me that they find such discussions valuable. As I said, they saw a clear link between sexualised imagery in the media and how they were treated in real life. The portrayal of such images should be covered in the PSHE curriculum. The Girl Guides have produced a fantastic pack about these issues. Another important aspect is that this is reducing trust between the genders. That is not a good thing, because obviously we want people to have happy, fulfilling long-term relationships, and they will not do that if they feel anxious and insecure.

The thing that most worried them was music videos that glamorise violence. They were particularly scathing of Eminem and of Rihanna’s video, “Love the way you lie”, which is about a woman who is apparently in love with an aggressive man. The girls were particularly alarmed by that.

We need to take some positive action, so I suggest that the Government consult urgently on introducing age-rating for music videos, which was one of the Bailey review’s proposals; that Ofcom look again at its rules for radio stations to keep sexually explicit and inappropriate lyrics to particular times of the day; and that we reduce the amount of on-street advertising containing sexualised imagery in locations where children are likely to see it.

A further problem that has been brought to my attention by ATVOD—the Authority for Television on Demand—is that R18 material is available on on-demand online sites that are not out of the reach of children. A survey of mine on The Huffington Post website is gathering people’s views on these issues, so Members should visit it if they would like to take part.

I know that the Minister will not be able to commit to my suggestions this afternoon, but we need seriously to take some concrete steps and move the policy on.