Vote 100 and International Women’s Day

Rushanara Ali Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

The hon. Lady will know about the limitations on my announcing any such statement, but may I nevertheless take the opportunity to thank her for the good work that she has done in this area, including in ensuring that, for the first time, the women of Northern Ireland have access to abortions? We now have a new system—a centralised system—for those women so that they find it much easier than ever before to access the health support that she, like me, thinks is so vital.

The consultation will last 12 weeks, and I urge every Member of the House to engage with it. Domestic violence is not the only type of violence that demands our urgent attention, though. Internationally, too, we must continue to combat violence against women and girls. Globally, one in three women are beaten or sexually abused in their lifetime. We are generating world-leading evidence through our £25 million “What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls” programme. This year, results from 15 innovative interventions being evaluated across Africa and Asia will provide new global evidence about what works to stop violence before it starts. We want this evidence to be a game-changer in supporting more effective UK and international support for ending violence against women and girls globally, and it is essential that we put what we learn into practice.

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

I welcome the announcement that the Minister is making about the international dimension to protecting women against violence. Will she assure the House, as part of the consultation on tackling violence against women here at home, that refuges will be properly resourced? Many have closed down in recent years, including in my constituency. Women need proper support when they have to go to refuges because they face violence. Can she assure the House that she will make sure that happens?

[Amber Rudd]

Quite simply, I can assure the House that ensuring that women have the right support at refuges is an essential part of the support that we will provide women when they become victims of domestic abuse. I know that there are concerns in the sector about funding, and there is a consultation ongoing, but we will not oversee a reduction in beds. We are looking for the most efficient, effective way of delivering that support, and nothing is off the table.

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[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup) and to hear so many inspirational speeches across the House today. In particular, I want to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) for her moving tribute to the victims of violence in our country.

It is fitting that we should mark International Women’s Day alongside the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act 1918. My constituency has a proud history of women being pioneers and fighting for women’s rights and workers’ rights, going back to the matchwomen’s strike of 1888 and to the establishment of the East London Federation of the Suffragettes, led by Sylvia Pankhurst, which was based in Bow and had branches all over the east end. The suffragettes grounded their campaign in the everyday reality of working women’s lives and fought for a living wage, decent housing, equal pay, food price controls, adequate pensions and much else. They saw the vote as just one aspect of the struggle for equality, and while it was an important step towards equality, it represented a partial victory rather than a complete one. We owe a huge amount to them for giving us the opportunity to stand here today and speak in this debate, and to make a contribution to public life in our country and internationally. Much progress has been made since then, but we have so much more to do in relation to women’s status, safety, rights, pay and representation.

I am incredibly proud of the fact that I am one of the three Muslim women elected to Parliament in 2010, along with my hon. Friends the Members for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) and for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood). I am also proud of the fact that many other Muslim women and women from other faith backgrounds and from black and minority ethnic backgrounds have entered Parliament, but there is much more to be done to increase the number of women and those from other backgrounds in our Parliament. I want to pay tribute to the women in Parliament who enabled us to get here. They were the pioneers who first arrived here, and I want to single out two in particular.

The first is my Labour predecessor, Oona King, who is now a member of the House of Lords. She was only the second black woman to be elected to this House. The other is the former deputy leader of our party, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who has done so much for us and for our country, and who commands the support of women across the House. I certainly would not be here were it not for the encouragement and support from her and from many other women in public life.

I hope that we can continue to build on that by ensuring that women have the confidence, the encouragement, the support, the networks and the back-up to enable them to charge ahead and to stand for positions in public life. That is why I took the step of setting up the UpRising leadership charity, which has cross-party support. It supports women and men—particularly women—from white working class and ethnic minority backgrounds to enter public life in the professions and, particularly, in politics. We work in different constituencies so that the next generation can have the support it needs and does not have to struggle in the way that previous generations have done.

I have heard many stories of people deciding to stand for Parliament and being told, “You can’t do that because people won’t support a woman.” Having the audacity to stand is still a challenge for many women. Too often, they are told that they cannot make it because they will not have the support of the people in their communities or that they will not have the support of the men. It is when women push forward and stand, as I and many others have done, that those preconceptions and prejudices are shown to be wrong. That is why we must continue to encourage young women to stand for public life and for positions in politics locally and nationally, despite all the online abuse and all the stories of abuse and injustice that we have heard in the past year. I hope that we can all continue to work together on that effort.

We have achieved a great deal, as we have heard today, but the focus on progress must continue. Progress comes with pressure. Over the past year, we have seen the #MeToo campaign and other campaigns relating to the plight of women emerging in countries where we do not expect women to suffer in this way, and that tells us that we still have much to do. Around the world, women continue to bear the brunt of poverty, of war, of sexual violence and of climate change. There are 130 million girls not in education, and 15 million girls of primary school age who will never get the chance to learn to read or write in primary school. Globally, more than a third of women are subject to violence, and 750 million women and girls are married before the age of 18. Far too often, women still bear the brunt of the conflicts around the world. They are exposed to brutal attacks, often as deliberate tools of political and ethnic violence. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, women are far more likely than soldiers to be victims of violence. In Sudan, rape has been used as a weapon of war by Government and opposition forces. A report published by the International Rescue Committee last year stated that the scale of violence against women and girls in South Sudan was double the global average.

[Justine Greening]

The hon. Lady is making an important point. A longer-term consequence of children in those communities growing up with violence around them is that domestic violence rates, even after peace is secured, are way higher than in other countries. It is vital that she makes that point, and she is quite right to do so.

[Rushanara Ali]

I thank the right hon. Lady for that intervention and for her work when she was International Development Secretary. As a former shadow International Development Minister, I cannot stop being affected by the experience of women in conflict zones and other parts of the world. The ongoing crisis in Syria has forced the displacement of women, who have fled to other countries in the hope of finding safety. However, as the right hon. Lady points out, women continue to experience violence long after they have fled the instability in their own countries. The women living in temporary refugee settlements in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere have limited access to support and live in constant fear of further violence and forced marriage.

[Emma Little Pengelly (Belfast South) (DUP)]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful point. Does she agree that much more should be done to encourage more women to take part in making peace? There should be greater recognition of the valuable role that women can play in creating peace agreements and trying to end conflict. In Northern Ireland, very many women helped to bring about the peace that we enjoy today.

[Rushanara Ali]

I could not agree more with the hon. Lady. We have seen the important contribution that women can make, but they are too often left out of the negotiations. Our Government must continue to push forward and ensure that women have a strong voice in peace negotiations.

Many girls whose lives have already been devastated by conflict in their own countries are being forced into situations that no child should have to face. They are living cycles of abuse, exploitation and trauma. Some 70% of the Rohingya who have fled to Bangladesh from conflict in Myanmar are women and children, and the United Nations has identified what has happened in Myanmar as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing and that genocide cannot be ruled out. It is increasingly apparent that the Burmese military has systematically used rape and violence against Rohingya women as part of their campaign of terror. They have torched villages and tortured civilians, particularly women. According to a UN report, girls aged as young as five or seven were raped, often in front of their relatives and sometimes by three to five men taking turns, all dressed in army uniforms. The report goes on to detail accounts of summary executions, torture and disappearances. I have visited the region several times in recent years and have spoken to refugees who have fled violence and who have shared stories of rape and violence against them. As the world watches on, our Government must ensure that those who have perpetrated the violence—the Burmese military—are held to account and that a referral is made to the International Criminal Court.

Violence against women is a violation of human rights, and we have a collective responsibility to protect women here in this country and around the world from the appalling suffering that they face and to address the implications of that suffering for their children. Britain has a proud history as a leader in international development, and we must continue to press for progress. As other hon. Members have pointed out, the millennium development goals galvanised efforts from countries around the world to meet the needs of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, particularly women. We must also continue to support the sustainable development goals and encourage other countries to do the same. The 2030 agenda for sustainable development, which has gender equality and women’s empowerment at its heart and which was adopted by world leaders in 2015, offers a significant opportunity for progress. The first SDG aims to end poverty in all its forms everywhere, and the fifth seeks to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. I urge Ministers across Government to champion the need to achieve those goals and to continue to support our aid effort.

In conclusion, I want to share a personal story. I was born in a country, Bangladesh, that was born out of a conflict in which millions of people lost their lives. Rape and violence were used as weapons of war, and that continues to be the case in many other countries today. We must all continue to work hard to ensure that we bring an end to sexual violence in conflict.