Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls

Rosie Duffield Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)]

It is a year since the nation held its breath, prayed in hope, and then received the terrible news. It was a body blow felt by women everywhere. Those grim headlines alerted us to the enormity of the problem, the sheer scale of male violence against women and girls. Women shared stories, organised and collectively shouted “No!” Every one of us had had, and has had, enough.

In a country such as ours, there is no acceptable excuse or reasonable explanation on earth for the rise in violent crime against women and no excuse or explanation for the abysmally low prosecution rates. Most women never receive justice for rape; most do not even get to try. Author Julie Bindel, a lifelong feminist campaigner, wrote this morning:

“If conviction rates for rape fall any lower in the UK, it might as well be decriminalised.”

That has also been said many times in this place by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips). Why is that still the case? Whatever the reasons are, they cannot be used as excuses. They must be fixed urgently. We need to see changes immediately.

If every person who has been raped lay down in the street as though they had been murdered, we would be tripping over the bodies. If the bodies of women who had been killed by their former or current partners were there too, we would run out of space to walk. I welcome the Minister’s launching the Enough initiative as part of her Department’s strategic changes and Operation Soteria, but we in this place are all on notice. We cannot just allow the scale of male violence against women and girls to keep growing. It is our problem, it is society’s problem, it is everybody’s problem, but it is largely our responsibility.

In the meantime, the Office for National Statistics data released at the end of January showed that police forces recorded the highest-ever number of rapes and sexual offences last year—more than 63,000 rapes, 13% up on the previous period. Perhaps we need another lockdown so that women and girls can just live out our daily lives without the risk of being brutally hurt? Should women all stay quietly at home after dark, or maybe carry weapons?

The men who commit those crimes need to know that they will be caught, stopped and locked up. If they ruin a life, they should live with that action every single day, as their victims are forced to. Instead—what? They just go home after work, rape a woman, go to bed, catch a train the next morning, plan a bit of DIY at the weekend, knowing they will not be caught or prosecuted. Meanwhile, the person that they have brutalised slowly opens her eyes, tries to move her limbs in order to stand, walks slowly in a state of shock, checks her injured body, and then sits motionless, her brain attempting to make any sense of what happened to her and reliving the bits she remembers over and over. Stuck, paralysed and alone, she will have to piece together her sense of herself and the world anew. Every decision and thought will now carry weight like never before. A new way of living will be hers, her life interrupted and broken because a man decided to use his body to hurt, control and violate her.

Some of those women are able to speak up—they attack the useless system we have in the hope that that might bring about change—yet the majority will carry on being daughters, mothers and workers, changed for ever, mostly unnoticed by others who will not know their story. But we are here to make things better. Women should not simply have to accept that violence is a real and daily threat to bear in mind constantly. Male violence against women and girls should be seen as being as socially unacceptable and shocking as kicking an animal. The pursuit of justice must be a priority, reflecting the punishment lived by victims.

Dame Vera Baird reacted to today’s grim figures by saying:

“Much as we hope each year to finally witness the green shoots of a recovery, we are once again faced with the crushing reality that the criminal justice system is continuing to fail rape victims in ever-increasing numbers.”

Let us treat that as an emergency, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said, and fix this broken system once and for all.