Violence against Women and Girls

Jess Asato Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jess Asato (Lowestoft) (Lab)]

I wish to acknowledge that I have had the privilege of working alongside the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), for a number of years while I worked in the domestic abuse sector. She was a one-woman safeguarding service. Members from across the House would ask for her advice, so frequently she would advocate for victims when others were unable to do so or when no other service would come to their aid. She has done more for abused women than anyone at X or in the Reform party, Members of which have not appeared here today. I therefore add my voice to those condemning the attacks on her and on others who have spent so long trying to fight for victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence.

Having spent my career working to prevent violence against women and girls, I am dismayed and frankly disgusted by the way the issue of child sexual abuse, mostly against vulnerable girls, has recently been exploited by political opportunists for their own gain. To see the way people both in and outside the House have spoken about this issue, as if victims and survivors were a political football to be kicked about because of the passing interest of social media-crazed billionaires and their political servants, has been disgraceful. We do not need empty rhetoric or opportunism; we need action, and we need it now.

The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, led by Professor Alexis Jay, published its report in 2022, after a seven year-long process that engaged with more than 7,000 victims and survivors, many of them girls. It processed 2 million pages of evidence and published 61 reports and publications. It spent two years working on an inquiry into child sexual exploitation and grooming specifically. In the last three years, I worked closely with colleagues across the children’s sector, including survivors of child sexual abuse, to ensure that the previous Government implemented the inquiry’s recommendations. I am grateful to the Government for having said that they will take many of them forward, but as organisations such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the National Association for People Abused in Childhood have argued, what we need now, and crucially what victims and survivors urgently deserve, is for the recommendations to be implemented.

I have been shocked by the lack of progress that we have made as a country in tackling violence against women and girls. I pay tribute to hon. Members across the Chamber who have made a number of big steps to ensure that women and girls are safer, most notably through the Domestic Abuse Act, but despite the changes that we have made in this House, the problem is only getting worse. It has been driven by technological changes and exacerbated by cuts over the last few years to the provision of support for victims and survivors and those at risk.

The financial situation facing local specialist charities, for example, is acutely concerning, particularly as many, such as Suffolk Rape Crisis in my area, have been forced to close. I totally understand the financial pressures facing the Government due to the huge black hole the Conservatives left, but charities such as Women’s Aid and Victim Support have raised real concerns after cuts were made to grants in the core victim services budget for police and crime commissioners, at the same time as they are having to grapple with national insurance contributions increasing. After terrible cuts for many years, services are faced with the spectre of having to think about whether they need to close, just as we start our mission as a Government to halve violence against women and girls.

Victims deserve to be, and should have a right to be, adequately supported and kept safe from further harm. Services such as the Waveney Domestic Violence and Abuse Forum in my constituency support hundreds of victims without any statutory funding, yet the work that they do is high risk and specialist, and saves women’s lives. Specialist services need long-term, sustainable funding arrangements.

We in this place should look to formulate a new statutory duty to commission services for victims of domestic and sexual abuse, both adults and children, and thereby end the postcode lottery that leaves too many vulnerable women and children to fend for themselves. That would meet a key recommendation of the IICSA review, which was to ensure that all child victims of sexual abuse are offered specialist therapeutic support. Similarly, given the significant harm and trauma caused by growing up being exposed to domestic abuse, we need to address the critical shortage of child independent domestic violence advisers. One in five children experience domestic abuse growing up, yet there are barely any services to support them. The domestic abuse charity SafeLives has estimated that an additional 1,900 CHIDVAs are needed to meet the needs of children identified in domestic abuse cases.

We also need to look at the drivers behind men’s violence against women and girls. As an officer of the all-party parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation, I would like to raise the issue of pornography. Women are the targets of both physical and verbal aggression in 94% of scenes in pornographic content, and most of the time the aggressors are men. One woman involved in the pornography industry describes her experience:

“I was being hit and choked. I was really upset and they didn’t stop. They kept filming. I asked them to turn the camera off and they kept going.”

I am hopeful that the Government will look more closely at online pornographic content that depicts sexual activity with adult actors made to look like children, and content that depicts sexual activity between family members. Children’s charities such as Barnardo’s are concerned that such content acts as a gateway for some viewers who, after repeated consumption, end up needing ever-more-real content, leading them to seek out child sexual abuse material. What is the purpose of pornography that dresses adult women as children—girls, with lollipops and teddy bears, in school uniform?

Widely accessible violent pornography is normalising abuse in everyday life, warping the perceptions of both young men and women of sex and healthy relationships, and fuelling the rise of a misogynistic incel culture. Illegal pornographic content is found across the internet, from the most popular pornography websites to social media apps that children still have access to. Ensuring that the Online Safety Act’s age verification checks for children are brought in properly this year, and that websites are held accountable by Ofcom, are paramount in tackling this issue. If necessary, we need to close any loopholes that might allow websites such as Pornhub to swerve their responsibilities under the Act. The Government should also require all online platforms to verify that every individual featured in pornographic content on their site is an adult, consenting to publication, and should bring the regime of online pornographic content regulation into the same system as offline pornography, which is regulated by the British Board of Film Classification.

We know that online pornographic content is normalising strangulation. Devon and Cornwall sexual assault referral centre looked at a five-month period in 2023. Of the referrals in that period, 31%—53 out of 172—were of victims who had suffered non-fatal strangulation as part of the sexual violence that they had experienced. Only seven of those cases involved a stranger. Three had to go to A&E due to the severity of their symptoms. Pornography has repositioned strangulation as “breath play”, and so minimised the hugely detrimental health implications: seizures, stroke, paralysis and death.

I am, however, particularly glad to see that the victims Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), has this week confirmed that the Government will introduce legislation to create a new offence for creating sexually explicit deepfake images. New deepfakes are having an increasingly insidious impact on children’s lives in particular, as well as the many women and girls who experience it every day. I have been campaigning alongside organisations such as Internet Matters to ban the nudifying tools and apps that create deepfakes. We know they have only one purpose: to violate women and girls; 99% of the images created on the apps are of women, and many do not work on images of men. I see no reason why they not only are freely available to use, but are free to advertise themselves to young people on platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, and app stores, where there is no true age verification. Even with age verification, it is up to the app stores to determine whether content meets an adult’s level of age verification, and I urge the Government to look closely at the regulation of app stores to ensure that the content is independently verified as being suitable for our children to access every day.

We are failing our women and girls, and men, if we continue to ignore the public health crisis generated by violent and addictive pornography and the porn culture it generates. I know just how committed the Government and our Front Bench are to tackling violence against women and girls, and I am honoured to be here to support the—I hope—cross-party work we will do to truly end the huge trauma that too many women and girls face.