International Women’s Day

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I thank the Speaker’s Office for its understanding every year in making time for me to read these names, and the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) for always securing the debate. This year, we are joined in the Gallery by Carole and Matt Gould and their son Zeb, and by Julie Devey. They are the families of Ellie Gould and Poppy Devey Waterhouse, whose names I read out in previous years. Both were brutally killed and taken from their families.

The act of remembrance that we undertake here every year is completely down to the work of Karen Ingala Smith and the Counting Dead Women project. She is the only person keeping this data, but her painstaking work over many years has meant that, unlike seven years ago when I first read the list, we are all more aware of the peril of femicide. That was not the Government’s doing, and they did not do the work; it was women, giving their labour away for free.

This week, I invited the families of the women I have listed over the years to come here to Parliament. I and the Labour party will be working with them to build a families manifesto for change. Each one of them had stories to tell: their daughters being murdered while their perpetrators were on bail; how their mother’s killer went away only for six years because he had taken drugs before he killed her; or killings that went un-investigated because the woman had taken drugs. Today, we live in a society where the excuse used by a perpetrator who kills, to get a lighter sentence, is used to victim-blame and diminish the innocence of a woman who has been killed, in the trial of her own death.

For every name that I am about to read, there will be a story about how better mental health services, even the slightest suggestion of offender management or the availability of quick specialist victim support, would have saved their lives. The perpetrators killed, but it is on us if we keep allowing a system where women live under the requirement of giving away their labour for free in the pursuit of their own safety.

The final name on the list when I stood here last year was one that we all know. Here are the names of the women killed since that supposedly watershed moment: Karen McClean; Stacey Knell; Smita Mistry; Samantha Mills; Dyanne Mansfield; Patricia Audsley; Phyllis Nelson; Klaudia Soltys; Simone Ambler; Emma McArthur; Sherrie Teresa Milnes; Constanta Bunea; Jacqueline Grant; Loretta Herman; Sally Metcalf; Sarah Keith; Peggy Wright; Charmaine O’Donnell; Michelle Cooper; Kerry Bradford; Julia James; Beth Aspey; Susan Booth; Mayra Zulfiqar; Maria Rawlings; Chenise Gregory; Agnes Akom; Wendy Cole; Caroline Crouch; Svetlana Mihalachi; Nicola Kirk; an unnamed woman; Agita Geslere; Alison Stevenson; Lauren Wilson; Peninah Kabeba; Jill Hickery; Bethany Vincent, who was killed alongside her nine-year-old son; Leah Ware; Esther Brown; Michaela Hall; Mildred Whitmore; Stacey Clay; Linda Hood; Marlene Coleman; Sophie Cartlidge; Gracie Spinks; Kim Dearden; Michelle Hibbert, who was killed alongside her husband; Sally Poynton; Catherine Wardleworth; Sukhjit Badial; Elsie Pinder; Catherine Stewart; Ishrat Ahmed; Tamara Padi; Katie Brankin; Sandra See; Beatrice Cenusa; Patricia Holland; Louise Kam; Yordanos Brhane; Amanda Selby; Malgorzata Lechanska; Megan Newborough; Diane Nichol; Maxine Davison; Kate Shepherd; Bella Nicandro; Eileen Barrott; Sharron Pickles; Helen Anderson; Jade Ward; Maddie Durdant-Hollamby; Fawziyah Javed; Ingrid Matthew; another unnamed woman; Sabina Nessa; Terri Harris, who was killed alongside her two children John and Lacey Bennett, and Lacey’s friend Connie Gent, who was there for a sleepover; Sukhjeet Uppal; Norma Girolami; Jekouki Jaboa; Nicole Hurley; Bonnie Harwood; Katrina Rainey; Marta Chmielecka; Ruth Dent; Josephine Smith; Dawn Walker; Yvonne Barr; Sarah Ashwell; Tamby Dowling; Pauline Quinn; Ilona Golabek; Alexandra Morgan; Tricia Livesey and her partner Anthony Tipping; Bobbi-Anne McLeod; Bori Benko; Jennifer Chapple and her husband Stephen; June Fox-Roberts; Malak Adabzadeh; Fernanda; Amber Gibson; Lily Sullivan; Caoimhe Morgan; Julia Howse; Beverley Taylor and John Taylor; Mary Fell and her husband; Kirsty Ashley; Brenda Blainey; Judith Armstrong; Freda Walker; Marlene Doyle; Yasmin Chkaifi; Lucy Powell, my constituent, who was killed at the age of 21; Marena Shaban; Lesma Jackson; Ashley Wadsworth; Charissa Brown; Katy Harris; Nicola Shaba; Dawn Trusler; and Valerie Warrington, alongside her husband.

I want to mention the names of four other women. Three women have been killed in the last month where no suspect has yet been charged. They are: Clair Ablewhite; Valerie Freer; and Naomi Hunte. Finally, a mention for Jomaa Jerrare, whose body was dumped and set on fire in a layby last August. Nobody has been charged with her murder.

Many women like Jomaa do not appear on our lists because no one is ever charged with their killing or because they die by staged homicide in a sudden death by falling from a building, overdose or suicide and we never look into the history of domestic abuse in their cases. The list is painfully long, but in reality it is much longer. We can make it shorter. Let us act faster.