Crime: Women's Safety

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Desai]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, in the light of the publication on 10 January by the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics of An Overview of Sexual Offending in England and Wales, what steps they are taking to protect women’s safety in the United Kingdom.

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, it is my pleasure to introduce an important theme in our series of Questions for Short Debate. I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have put down their names to speak. Peers from all sides have joined; and not too many, so we all have enough time to discuss this issue.

I was in Delhi when the horrible gang-rape incident happened on 16 December. I observed the amazing upsurge of movement among men and women in India, which later spread to other parts of the world, about the very urgent question of women’s safety as they go about the ordinary business of life—both inside and outside their homes. That is very important. This is not just a local Indian problem but a world-wide one. When I got back, I saw that the Government had issued an excellent document. The Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the ONS had published a statistical bulletin, An Overview of Sexual Offending in England and Wales, which I want to use as a background to introduce the question of women’s safety.

First, although it is a very good document—it lays out the complexity of the issues, the different statistics, and the different sources and definitions with which we have to deal in judging the extent and seriousness of crime against women—parts of the problem are not covered in it. It relates mainly to adult women, aged 16 to 59, and therefore avoids the important question of children. There have been scandals in Rochdale, Derby and Torbay relating to the grooming of young girls and their exploitation. Perhaps other noble Lords will take up that issue. There is also the question of the abuse of elderly women. There are many other facets of the problem, which I hope other noble Lords will bring out.

The way the document lays out the issues emphasises one thing. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, only 15% of the victims of adverse sexual events actually report the case to the police. What we have in the statistics of police action on complaints is a very small part of the total problem. We ought to give some thought to how we can increase the rate of complaints and encourage women not to withdraw into a shell if they have had a horrible sexual experience and how we can encourage them to come out and complain.

A major difficulty with rape and other sexual assaults is that 85% to 90% of the perpetrators of the crime are known to the victim. They are partners, somebody in the family or somebody the victim knows very well. Part of the reluctance to complain may be that you might be harming a family member or friend. We ought to set up ways, perhaps after asking experts, to make the extent of the problem more visible to the police and the criminal justice system than it is at present. If we do that, we may be able to find out even more than before.

One rather tragic example is that of Frances Andrade, who was abused when she was a student at a music school. The case came to light many years later and she tragically died while the court case was going on. That shows us that women undergo a huge amount of bad experiences but somehow or other they are reluctant to, forbidden from or cajoled against complaining. We ought to deal with that as a first step.

If you bring together rape, sexual threats and indecent exposure, one woman in five experiences something sexually unpleasant. That is a very large number. It seems to be that practically every woman has an unpleasant experience in their life and somehow we do not find ways of getting around it. Half a million adult women are victims of sexual offences. Typically, according to the survey, the women who are more vulnerable to such attacks are young—16 to 19 years-old—are single or separated, have a low income, are sometimes students and are often physically unwell or disabled, as well as economically inactive. We have a profile of a vulnerable person who is more likely to be predated upon, and when we devise our systems for encouraging them to complain, following through what has happened to them and getting justice for them, we ought to look at this profile very carefully and find out how, based on that profile, we can add better things to protect these women’s lives than we have otherwise done.

I have very little complaint about the way the police operate and the courts go through with a complaint after it has been made. Perhaps other noble Lords will know more about that. There is of course a problem of delay. It seems that it takes more than a year from the beginning, when the police register the complaint, to the end of the process. It may be that this is inevitable—you must not hurry a process in such a way that may make injustice more likely, and we want to be scrupulously fair both to the victim and the offender and not prejudge the issue. Have the Government thought about any means for speeding up this process, while preserving the scrupulous care with which we administer justice? The victims would have some guarantee that there would be a somewhat speedier resolution to their problem than at present.

I do not want to take up all my 10 minutes, because I think other noble Lords will want to say more. I am looking forward to hearing the Minister say what the Government are doing to tackle this problem.