Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls

Ruth Cadbury Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Next Tuesday is International Women’s Day, when we could be celebrating the progress and achievements that we have made not just in recent years, but over decades to protect women and girls. I sadly feel, however, that we have gone backwards in so many areas, especially violence against women and girls.

Some 40 years ago, us young women marched the streets chanting, “Whatever we wear, wherever we go, yes means yes and no means no!”. Just over 30 years ago, as a young councillor, I led on a local strategy to bring the council, police and voluntary sector together to ensure that we had proper support for rape victims and a police suite that was staffed by women who had been raped. Gradually, particularly in London over the ’80s and ’90s, improvements were made and funding was made available. We saw improvements in schools, in the curriculum, in the police force and in local councils, and we saw the establishment and growth of many community-based organisations that built expertise and served the needs of victims of different forms of violence against women and girls. They had proper funding.

Today it feels as though we have not progressed much in 30 years—in fact, we have gone backwards. There are still not enough women officers to properly support raped women; police officers are sharing obscene comments and propositioning victims; and those specialist sensitive support services—the rape and serious sexual offences units and the community organisations—are closing.

There is a pattern in the experience of constituents who have come to me recently—victims of all ages, women experiencing domestic violence, stalking and serious sexual violence targeted by men—which is that they have been let down when they have done the right thing and reported their cases. Some 30 years after the strategy I worked on, the police, the probation service, the courts and others are frankly not working together. When one does act and raise an issue, it is not being taken up across the others. In the Minister’s opening speech, she mentioned the new stalking protection orders, but it is pointless having them in place if they are not enforced, if police officers cannot pull up the relevant data when a victim asks for immediate help or if a victim has to repeat the same information in the order again and again.

Breaches of those orders are not being acted on by the police. The police are not aware when a dangerous stalker or domestic abuser is released from custody, and police forces are not sharing information with each other. Of course, such crimes do not all happen with the victim and perpetrator within a particular police force area, and in London each basic command unit is the size of many police forces across the rest of England and Wales. Stalking protection orders—a piece of paper—are not an adequate shield for victims of violent, obsessive men.

The Opposition have called for multi-agency public protection arrangements to include serial domestic abusers and stalkers. We cannot continue with a piecemeal approach and with different agencies not talking to each other. The Government should heed our call and make street harassment a crime, as in France. They can also require police forces to record misogyny as a hate crime. We do not just need RASSOs to be established in every police force, but what about the four forces that have closed theirs? It is not surprising that 40% of victims are dropping out of the criminal justice process before their cases even get to a charge.

There should never be any question that a raped women should be seen by women officers who are properly trained in the care and support of rape victims. As I say, 30 years after we first established that in our London police stations, it is still not the norm.

Time is short, so I cannot cover everything, but I will mention one other aspect of violence against women and girls, which is so-called honour-based violence and abuse. Such crimes have not stopped, but the specialist support that those victims need has all but disappeared.

Over the last year, we have talked more in this place about violence against women and girls than in the past, which of course I welcome, but we need to go beyond talking and we need to see action. I wish we were building on the achievements of the past, not reinventing the wheel. We need action from the police, the probation service and the Government and we need proper support for victims.

There is no point having strategies and pilots, which the Minister mentioned in such detail, without support services for victims, proper criminal investigations and convictions for perpetrators. Nothing changes—the feeling of being beholden to somebody for a lift or of walking with our keys clutched between knuckles; the ever-growing fear that somebody is walking behind us at night; and the day-to-day acts of harassment that still plague the lives of many women. We deserve better, and we deserve change.