Women: Equality and Advancement

Lord Patel Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate initiated by the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, particularly when, as the only male Peer to be speaking, I am in the company of such distinguished noble Baronesses. Yesterday, I asked the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley of Nettlestone, what I should speak about. In her usual forthright and direct way, she said, “Speak about men”. When I first met her when she was Secretary of State for Health, that was how she dealt with me then too. It is a pleasure to see her.

I was delighted to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, speak about her experiences on the CSW. It was informative but I was disappointed to hear that she felt that the CSW could do more than it had been doing. Having read the annual reports, including the most recent one, my impression has always been that the CSW was the driving force behind making sure that the MDGs progressed and achieved the outcomes described. I always believed that it was the CSW that made that happen, and I hope that that is the case.

As we have already heard, today in London we have had the Girl Summit, supported by UNICEF. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister both made speeches on the elimination of FGM in our generation. The summit also addressed child marriages. We all know that female genital mutilation is violence against girls. It is child abuse.

I am going to speak about some of these issues but in the context of some of the millennium development goals. I shall reflect on the meetings that I recently had with some remarkable women in Africa and in this country. The story I am going to tell your Lordships about concerns a young lady whose name is Talanesh. I am involved with a charity in which I work to set up centres for the management of women with fistulas and to provide training for local doctors and nurses, teaching them how to repair fistulas to relieve women’s suffering.

Talanesh’s story—I saw her recently—is that at the age of 12 she was betrothed to a much older man. At the age of 13 she was married. At the age of 15 she became pregnant. She had a long labour lasting four days in a remote part of a mountainous region, and she delivered a dead baby. She was relieved because her pain and suffering had ended. Little did she know that two days later she would discover that she was wet all the time. She realised that something was wrong. She smelt, and her husband left. Her parents took her back but, because she smelt, she could not stay in their small hut, so she stayed in a separate one. Years later, the family discovered that it might be possible for her to be treated. They undertook a four-day walk—all this is absolutely true—to reach a hospital, where she was looked after and her fistula was repaired. She is now dry and has her dignity back.

Two million young girls are affected in this way. They are married early in their childhood when their pelvis is not developed. They become pregnant at a very young age and are lucky not to die in obstructed labour, but they end up with fistulas—sometimes double fistulas—and the tragedy is enormous. Some of them have had female genital mutilation carried out, which produces further problems in pregnancy. In sub-Saharan Africa, 250 million are married under the age of 15. Michelle Bachalet has called child marriage a violation of a girl’s human rights. It halts education and produces the health risks that I have just described. If we end child marriage by 2030, it will make it easier to deliver six of the eight millennium development goals.

The second lady I met was called Leymah Gbowee. Most noble Lords will probably have heard of her. She is Liberian and in 2011 she was the joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to stop the second violent war in Liberia. In the context of rape and violence, she was once asked to speak in Libya. She thought that she would be making the speech to women but found that 98% of the audience consisted of men, so she changed her speech. Her key topics were: acknowledge that there is inequality; help to promote working partnerships; and protect the victims of violence and rape. She told me that she suggested that women who were raped and then had a child ought to have legislation allowing them to choose the name of the father on the birth certificate, otherwise the child would not have a father’s name. I understand that Libya is the only country that has such legislation.

She told me something else that was very interesting. She saw rape and violence in a conflict situation as merely an extension of the violence, with a greater brutality because of the presence of weapons and the hype related to war that legitimised greater brutality. It was the same violence against women that existed in normal life outside of war. I thought that that was very telling. She made that speech in London.

However, there are other gender inequalities. I went to a school recently on the same visit when I met Talanesh in Africa. I was bitten badly by tsetse flies. I hope that none of them will infect me, but if noble Lords notice me dozing off it is a sleeping sickness. The school I visited was a secondary school. I thought that it was a boys’ school. It was a mixed school—I saw some girls afterwards—but because it was a secondary school there were very few girls there. I was told that they mostly leave after primary school. That is the problem. They have to pay a small fee, so the parents decide that they cannot afford it. Primary education is free but secondary education costs a small fee. We have to address that issue in the aid that we give, particularly as we will now have a law in this country that all our aid should be based on gender equality. We should promote gender equality in education, too

I believe that the UN report is right. The indicators monitoring the outcomes of MDGs are not desegregated by sex and other factors providing information about the situation of women and girls, so it is not possible to say whether gender inequality is being properly addressed. I hope that we will promote that. I also hope that the next goal, beyond 2005, will be a stand-alone one on gender equality underpinning all other goals. I hope that the Government will support that.