Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (Ratification of Convention) Bill

Michelle Thomson Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 16th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Michelle Thomson (Edinburgh West) (Ind)]

I aim to be fairly brief today. I commend and thank my hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) for bringing the Bill forward. She spoke most eloquently.

I want briefly to reference the speech I made last week and to give some thanks, first, to the Speaker’s Office and, you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for being very supportive of me, and to my friend and colleague, the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Roger Mullin), who has been a great support to me.

[Roger Mullin (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP)]

I am undeserving of any praise, but I want to say that the hon. Lady inspired my wife, three days ago, to talk for the first time of her sexual abuse at the age of only six years. It is a great tribute to the hon. Lady that she has done so much for so many people. [Applause.]

[Michelle Thomson]

I thank the hon. Gentleman very much for that. But, of course, I made my position very clear: it was not about this individual here; it was about women more widely, and indeed men, who have also been affected by sexual or physical violence. I spent most of last weekend personally answering the literally hundreds of emails I got, and it was truly humbling, because people, for the first time, were writing their own stories and sharing their own stories. One phrase jumped out at me. Somebody said that they recognised that “black burden that shadows a survivor’s back.” We need to keep that at the forefront of our minds at all times.

That is why we have debates about this issue—about legislation and so on. It is about our driving need for change and leadership, and I commend the hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen) for offering his perspective on that. It is leadership and the driving need for change that we must keep at the forefront of our minds all the time.

I again challenge the Minister that while warm words about a spirit of intent are incredibly welcome, we are looking for hard, specific dates by which something will be done, because we need to send a message that resonates with the wider world that these things are unacceptable. Our culture, in many areas of the UK, is completely unacceptable. If there is one thing I learned last weekend from reading all these emails, it was the extent to which these stories go unheard.

Again, I say thank you to everybody who has supported me—I wanted to put that officially on the record. Finally, I thank all those agencies that—day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out—give their support to people who are in the most difficult circumstances.