Stalking

Debate between Helen Jones and Elfyn Llwyd

Thursday 21st November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I congratulate all Members on both sides of the House who have spoken in this thoughtful and well-informed debate. I pay particular tribute to the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd), who not only has the privilege of representing one of the most beautiful parts of north Wales, but has done sterling work with the all-party group on stalking and harassment to bring the offences into law. He gave a powerful introduction to the debate.

The right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan), who is no longer in her place, made some important points about the role of the courts, the sentences handed out and the need for better training. My hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne) made some useful comparisons with the situation in Scotland, which I think we can all learn from. She also made a powerful plea to recognise stalking for what it often is: a version of violence against women, in particular, which we must not tolerate.

The hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel) talked about the personal suffering of victims. My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) outlined clearly what she suffered as a result of what is—let us give it its proper name—online stalking. The hon. Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris), in a short but useful speech, pointed out the manipulative behaviour of many perpetrators and how convincing they can be. She also referred to the need for relationships education in schools to tackle the problem, a point I will return to in a moment.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) made an important point about the role of the justice unions group in highlighting the issue. We often hear Government Members telling us what they think is wrong with trade unions, but we should also hear about their important work in such areas. I also congratulate those who worked hard to get the offences on the statute book: not only the all-party group, but my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary and my noble Friend Baroness Royall, who campaigned for that relentlessly.

However, it is not enough just to put an offence on the statute book; it must also be enforced. We have heard clearly this afternoon that the law is not being enforced properly. The freedom of information request passed to Paladin, which was referred to earlier, showed that from 25 November 2012, when the law came into force, to the end of June this year 320 people were arrested for stalking offences. That was all. Of those, only 189 were charged. That is very worrying because unless there are lots of spurious complaints—no one is arguing that there are, least of all me— there must be a real problem with the training of the police and Crown Prosecution Service, which needs to be addressed. It is even more worrying when we look at the completed cases—I accept that there are few at the moment. In those cases completed by the end of June, six people received custodial sentences, and 27 were dealt with by means of a community disposal. I want to make it clear that, except in very exceptional cases, community sentences are not appropriate to deal with stalking. Stalking wrecks lives, it damages people psychologically, it affects their physical health, and it affects their social well-being. Stalking is not something that takes place at a distance. Stalkers enter people’s homes, they get into their workplaces, and they go to the places where they socialise, so a victim of stalking cannot feel safe in any aspect of their life.

Stalkers often issue threats. What is more, half of those threats are carried out. In that sense, stalking behaviour is a strong predictor of future violence. It is even stronger in cases of very serious violence, with 40% of domestic homicides following stalking behaviour that has gone unchecked. In dealing with stalking, therefore, we are not just helping today’s victims; we may be preventing serious violence and often homicides in the future.

[Mr Llwyd]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful and a fresh point. I should like to inform the House through her that there are many criminal psychologists in the UK who are able to treat these people. They say that roughly 95% are treatable and can be turned away from this obsessive behaviour. That adds to the point that the hon. Lady makes.

[Helen Jones]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, which I will come to in a moment when I talk about prevention.

The appalling feature is the huge variation between the arrest and prosecution rates in police forces. Some examples have been given, but let me touch on a few more. Northumbria force arrested eight people and prosecuted seven. Powys arrested three and they were all prosecuted. The Met arrested 132 people, but only 71 were prosecuted. That is profoundly unsatisfactory. Whether victims receive justice should not depend on where they live. We cannot have a postcode lottery in law enforcement, and that, I am afraid, is what we are seeing at the moment. Part of the reason for that seems to lie in the failure to train police and Crown prosecutors adequately.

The National Policing Improvement Agency has produced a 20-minute online package of training—very little in itself—but up to the end of June only 27% of eligible officers had seen that package. The rates of training vary hugely among police forces, even neighbouring forces. In Greater Manchester, for example, 5,000 officers had seen it; on Merseyside, only 76. In my own area of Cheshire, it was 57. One can see a similar process with the CPS. Training has begun only this autumn, nearly a year after the law was put on the statute book.

I do not blame the front-line officers or the prosecutors for that. The blame actually lies squarely with the Home Office, which has to admit that if it cuts police numbers, as it has, there is less time to take officers off the front line for training or to update their skills, and that if it cuts 25% of the CPS’s budget, the CPS has to manage its caseloads differently and there is less time to develop training packages or to let people take time out for training. That is what we are seeing, and it is time that the Government started to take it seriously.

Another factor that needs to be clearly stated is that stalking is largely a crime against women. Yes, there are male victims and they suffer just as much as anyone else, but 80% of stalkers are men and 80% of victims are women. As such, it has to be seen as part of the continuum of violence against women—because stalking is violence. It is psychological violence that can spill over into physical violence, and it is part of the same perspective of harassing women and preventing them from speaking out, as we have seen online recently, and treating them as though they have no right to an opinion but are there merely to be controlled.

That is why I say to the Minister that although it is nice to see him here—he is a very good Minister—it would have been even better to see the Minister responsible for this area, who is the Minister for Crime Prevention, the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker). The Minister we have here is responsible for immigration; his colleague, who is not here, is responsible for antisocial behaviour and violence against women and girls. He is fast becoming the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Home Office. We see him in Committee and he disappears halfway through the debate; today, for a debate on his own area of responsibility, he is not present. The Government have to take this issue far more seriously than that.

The root cause of this sort of behaviour is an attitude prevalent in some sections of our society that, sadly, sees women as objects to be controlled and manipulated—as people who should not have an opinion of their own and do not control their own destiny. That is why the Government must not only deal with this crime but look at how to prevent it. They must consider having a proper, and compulsory, package of sex and relationships education in schools. I am sorry that they rejected our amendment to the Children and Families Bill to make it compulsory, because without teaching young people from the start that this sort of behaviour is not the norm and is not acceptable, we will never solve the problem.

The second plank of prevention, as the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd suggested, is in mental health services. There is no doubt that a small minority of stalkers are psychotic, and there is evidence that some might have a personality disorder, so their first contact with the criminal justice system ought to trigger a mental health referral. Mental health treatment will not be suitable for everybody, but there ought to be an assessment to see whether it is the appropriate way forward before someone’s behaviour spirals out of control and perhaps into violence.

The third thing we would like the Government to do is to make sure that sentencing guidelines are updated, because they have not been updated since 2008, and that police officers and Crown prosecutors are trained to ensure that the law is enforced. We cannot say to the victims of this crime, “You must simply put up with it”, or, “It’s not very serious.” We can no longer keep saying that there is no action we can take. This is the 21st century, not the 19th, and nobody should be subjected to this behaviour without the right of redress.

The Government have done the right thing by putting this law on the statute book in response to the campaign but, given that most victims face 100 incidents of stalking before they even report it, it is not lack of evidence that is preventing this crime from being prosecuted; it is lack of training and lack of will, and that is what we have to address. I hope that the Minister will be able to encourage us that the Government are moving towards doing so, because, to be frank, women in this country—and it is largely women who are affected—deserve better than to be told that this is behaviour that they just have to put up with. It is not, we will not and it needs to be addressed.