Violence against Women and Girls Strategy
Debate between Jess Phillips and Monica Harding(6 days, 16 hours ago)
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Jess Phillips
The backlog in our courts is one of the stickiest, most difficult issues, and it covers lots of different Departments that need to get this absolutely right. It is probably the problem that drives our collective work more than almost anything else. We are due to have 100,000 cases in the backlog by 2028 if we do not put in place real, radical change, keeping at its heart the experiences of women and girls. There are things in the strategy around legal advice for victims and greater support for independent sexual violence advisers. All those sorts of things are there, but this will require a radical change.
Monica Harding (Esher and Walton) (LD)
I pay tribute to the Minister for her work on violence against women and girls. I welcome what she said to my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman) about her commitment to holding tech companies to account for their behaviours. However, during the passage of the Online Safety Act, the Minister and the Victims Minister, who was also instrumental in the development of this strategy, were at the forefront of calls for a code of practice to protect women and girls online. Now they are in government, why are they not delivering on it? It is in the Government’s gift to amend the Act to make Ofcom’s guidance the code. With the best will in the world, guidance will not make any difference to social media companies’ behaviour, nor their profit-driven models, which are the source of so much misogynistic influence, which teachers are now being expected to deal with. Why are the Government afraid to use all the tools at their disposal to hold tech firms to account for their role in fuelling misogynistic behaviour?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Jess Phillips and Monica Harding(1 year ago)
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Jess Phillips
A massive thank you to Aylesbury Women’s Aid for the amazing work that it is clearly doing. I am afraid that my hon. Friend and victims are exactly right in their assessment. That is why we must have a completely cross-Government approach to ensuring that no matter where a victim stands up, all services take responsibility for their role in the lives of those who are suffering.
Monica Harding
As the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles) pointed out, coercive control is a criminal offence but it is often overlooked, despite research suggesting that it is the third highest risk factor in domestic homicide. In my surgeries in Esher and Walton, victims have told me that there is not a sufficient understanding of coercive control in police interviews, particularly when other crimes are being investigated. What assessments are being made of the effectiveness of the roll-out of the domestic abuse risk assessment—DARA—toolkit, which was introduced by the College of Policing in 2022?
Jess Phillips
A number of different risk assessment tools are used, whether DARA or Dash—the domestic abuse, stalking, harassment and honour-based violence risk assessment—which has a more historical grounding and is used more widely. I want the hon. Lady to know that it is impossible to read any domestic homicide review in our country for the past decade and not think that risk assessments, and how well they are used and operating, is something that we should look at.