Male Suicide and International Men’s Day

Debate between Lucy Allan and Philip Davies

Thursday 19th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. If she had been a little more patient, I was just coming on to male suicide. I was setting the context for the debate, which, as she will see if she looks at the Order Paper, is also about International Men’s Day and is not just limited to male suicide. I am now coming on to the issue of male suicide, but I am glad to have been able to set the scene, and I am sorry that pointing out that men are sometimes badly treated in the world is so discomforting for her to have to listen to. However, that is part of the problem we have in this House.

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that gender politics needs to be more collaborative in style and that we should not antagonise either sex in order to achieve equality? Real equality is not achieved by causing upset or offence to either men or women.

[Philip Davies]

I very much agree. I hope that this will be part of a move towards a day when men’s issues are treated in this House as being as important as female issues. If that is what my hon. Friend is saying, I am all for it, and I hope that this debate helps us move towards that.

The motion that we are debating today, as my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) pointed out, specifically mentions male suicide. I want to deal with that subject in particular, as suicide is desperately sad and it is clear that more men than women take their own life each year. In fact, the figures show that around three quarters of all people who commit suicide are men. I would like to place on record the fact that although men are more likely than women to commit suicide, those left behind grieving will be of both sexes and often children.

[Philip Davies]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for picking me up again. The terminology may be important to some people, but if I am going to be chastised for using the word that, as far as I can see, is used by every member of the public whenever they discuss this issue, I do apologise. But let us not get bogged down in politically correct terminology. I would much prefer that we dealt with the issue that I am trying to raise.

[Lucy Allan]

As somebody who has had a family member commit suicide, I am perfectly happy with the use of that term, and I do think it is political correctness to use some other terminology to make it more acceptable to others.

[Philip Davies]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for that. Let us hope—

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. All such violence is unacceptable, whether the perpetrator is male or female, and whether their victim is male or female. That is my point 100%. We should criticise them all equally.

There is evidence of under-reporting among male victims of domestic violence. In the crime survey for England and Wales, victims of partner abuse in the previous 12 months were asked who they had spoken to about the abuse that they experienced. A third of victims told someone in an official position about the abuse, but nearly twice as many women as men did. Perhaps more significantly, women were nearly three times more likely than men to tell the police. Despite what we might think from the focus on male perpetrators of domestic violence, there are also many female perpetrators. When anyone says “domestic violence”, the first thing that springs to most people’s minds—including mine—is a poor woman being attacked by a bullying man. The figures show that it is much more complex than that, however, and that stereotypical image needs to be smashed if we are to tackle the problem as a whole.

Something else that needs to change is the reaction to violence against males, certainly when it comes to female-on-male violence. Some see it as almost a laughing matter, but nobody would laugh or turn a blind eye if a female was the victim. Anecdotal evidence suggests that male victims are treated differently from female victims by the police and other agencies. Considering the sheer numbers involved, male victims are given hardly any resources in comparison with female victims. Resources should be available to both male and female victims of domestic violence.

Issues such as the lack of places of refuge and the lack of support for men need to be addressed. The ManKind initiative, which works with men suffering from domestic violence or domestic abuse, says that it will run out of funding in January. It needs people to back it now so that it can provide the emotional support and practical information that male victims need. There are moving stories on its website from men who have suffered domestic violence. Although there seem to be more female victims of domestic abuse, each male victim is also a person, not a statistic, and it is only right and fair that help should be there for victims of both sexes.

I have gone on longer than I thought I would because I have taken so many interventions. The final issue I want to raise is sentencing, and how men are treated differently from women in our criminal justice system. I had a debate here in Westminster Hall three years ago, at which I had plenty of statistical evidence to show that women were treated more leniently than men, but that did not seem to be accepted at the time. Since then, progress has been made, because that fact is now broadly accepted. For far too long, those who peddled myths were able to get away with it because people simply repeated their mantra without question. Perhaps someone would like to try to explain why women should be treated favourably in the criminal justice system, but at least it is accepted that that is the case.

Since that debate, I have amassed much more evidence on the subject. I will not go through it all now, otherwise we would be here all day, but I want to put some of the key facts on the record. About 5% of the prison population at any time in recent history has been female, and the other 95% has been male, yet so much consternation, time and effort have been expended on the very small number of women in prison. For every category of offence, men are more likely than women to be sent to prison. That is a fact. I will give an example to illustrate that: 45% of men sentenced for an offence of violence against the person will be given a custodial sentence, compared with just 23% of women. Of those with 15 or more previous convictions, 39% of men but only 29% of women are sent to immediate custody. In Crown courts, which deal with the most serious offences, probation recommends immediate custody in 24% of cases for male offenders, and just 11% of cases for female offenders.

The average sentence length for an indictable offence is 17.7 months for men and 11.6 months for women. Men serve, on average, 52% of their prison sentence; women serve 46%. The average length of time that men spend in a prison cell each day is 14.1 hours, but that figure is 11.5 hours for women. The list is endless. I have spoken about domestic violence and have an additional fact on that subject: 3,750 male sentenced prisoners were victims of domestic violence, compared with 1,323 female prisoners.

There has been a rise in publicity surrounding female paedophiles. In a few high-profile cases recently, the sentences given to women were much more lenient than those that would be given to men. Just the other week, a babysitter who had sex with an 11-year-old boy escaped jail. There is no way on this planet that a male who had sex with an 11-year-old girl would have avoided prison—a point that the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children made about the case. There is no chance of that happening at all, and yet that was the sentence handed down.

The facts and figures that I have set out show that there are certainly questions to be answered about how men are treated in the justice system, compared with women. It seems that there is clear discrimination against men. If outcomes are all-important, what do people have to say about that? What will be done to deal with that balance? Well, the Under-Secretary of State for Women, Equalities and Family Justice has made an announcement. She has said that she wants fewer women in prison—not fewer people or fewer men. Yes, hon. Members heard me right: just fewer women. The Conservative manifesto read:

“We will improve the treatment of women offenders, exploring how new technology may enable more women…to serve their sentence in the community.”

Now, I am not somebody who supports prisoners, but where on earth is the equality in that? How does that fit in with the Equality Act 2010?

[Lucy Allan]

Does my hon. Friend therefore consider it desirable to have more women in the prison population, to achieve equality?

[Philip Davies]

Yes, I would like to see more people in prison, but that is a debate for another day. I would certainly like women who commit serious offences sent to prison in the way that men who commit serious offences are. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for allowing me to make that point very clear.

Where is the equality in the current sentencing regime? It is just like the example I gave of female prisoners not having to wear a uniform. Somehow, the fact that hardly any women are in prison in the first place seems to be a problem, because it just is—because they are women. If there is to be true equality, this cannot be allowed to continue. We should be gender-blind when it comes to sentencing, if that is what the equality agenda is all about. If women commit serious crimes that are enough to warrant prison sentences, they should serve them in prison. We need to stop pussyfooting around when it comes to female offenders. A judge in my local Crown court recently said to a female offender:

“I have every sympathy for your children but the biggest burden they labour under is that their mother is a drunken thug”,

before rightly sending her to prison. I could not have put it better myself.

There are so many other areas where men are being discriminated against, or are suffering more than women. Unfortunately, I cannot go through them all now. If they are not raised by other Members today, I hope we will have similar debates in the future, so that I can highlight the further problems faced by men. Some of the issues that I do not have time to get to include: male circumcision and its effects on some men; the fact that men suffer from anorexia and bulimia, too; the health effects of men not seeking help early enough to prevent their conditions from getting worse; the fact that men tend to live shorter lives than women; and the fact that boys underachieve in school.

To conclude, this debate is a fantastic opportunity to deal with the issues that affect men. This Parliament should not be hijacked by those who constantly want to perpetuate myths about men and women that are simply not accurate. Some people cannot see common sense for the blur of their rose-tinted, politically correct glasses.

I hope the message goes out around the country that politicians are not all blind. I also hope that many of the men who contacted me today to say that they have never felt that anybody has reflected the problems that they face feel reassured that they have a voice in Parliament on all issues that affect them, just as much as everybody else has. For a parliamentary democracy to work, everybody in the country has to feel that somebody is speaking up for them. Today, lots of people feel that their voice, at last, is being heard.