Violence against Women and Girls

Debate between Seema Malhotra and Fiona Mactaggart

Thursday 12th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Mactaggart]

The hon. Lady is right to say that we need to educate teachers. I used to be a teacher educator—a teacher trainer—and it is true that we gallop through so much training for teachers so fast that we do not train them in how to teach this. Primary school teachers in particular can feel anxious about teaching it, but in my view it should be mandatory at every level of a child’s education.

Children should have relationships education from the age of five. At five, children will be talking not about sex and sexuality, but about what to do about bullies and about sharing toys. Those are very important lessons about relating to other people that at the moment schools avoid. Not every school does so, but it is not mandated, as part of the national curriculum, that schools have to teach this, and many parents do not have the confidence to teach it. As a result, we leave our children vulnerable because they do not know how to protect themselves. The best form of protection against exploitation is self-protection. The police cannot be there all the time; mum cannot be there all the time. We need to develop young adults who can keep themselves safe and who know how to resist exploitation.

[Seema Malhotra]

My right hon. Friend is making a very important point in a powerful speech. I was struck by a story that I heard recently about the impact of sex and relationships education in school. A young boy went home after some classes and realised that the domestic abuse—the violence—that he was seeing at home was not normal. He then raised a challenge at home, which led to the mum disclosing the abuse. Given the impact that SRE can have, not just in raising awareness but in making a change, does my right hon. Friend agree that it is right that it should be compulsory and that it can be age-appropriate and safe to teach from the age of five?

[Fiona Mactaggart]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is also right to admit that dealing with such things is complicated for teachers. We need to support and educate teachers. I remember reading a story that a pupil of mine had written; it was obvious to me that she had been watching utterly inappropriate movies at home. I thought that they must have strongly informed her writing, because I did not believe that she could have imagined all the things that she had written about. As quite a young teacher, I did not really know how to respond to that situation. Young teachers will encounter that kind of thing, and we need to train them to deal with it.

Education is one of the keys to prevention, but I believe that there is another way of reducing violence against women and girls. Hon. Members probably know that I regard prostitution, as it actually happens, as usually being a form of violence against women and girls, particularly vulnerable women. I believe that the way to prevent that form of violence is to reduce girls’ vulnerability to being seduced into prostitution.

There has been much greater awareness of child sexual exploitation in debate and discourse recently, and that is an important step, but we need to reduce the number of women who are prostituted. As a state, we need to help women leave prostitution, and we need to deal with the demand for prostitutes. In my view, we should follow the Swedish example and criminalise the customers, who have choice, rather than criminalising the women, who have little.

I praise the Government for creating section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015, which makes controlling and coercive behaviour an offence. That offence has the capacity to play a role in the prevention of physical violence, because physical violence is often not the first step; it follows on from, and is bound up with, controlling and coercive behaviour. Will the Minister tell the House the exact steps that she will take to ensure that police forces deliver on that? Earlier in the debate, we heard how for decades we have had legislation against cutting girls’ genitals, but there have been no successful prosecutions. I want to make sure that section 76 of the 2015 Act does not follow that trend, and that it is instead used by police services as an effective way of preventing violence against women and girls.

The hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) referred to the additional £10 million of support for refuges announced in November 2014. I was glad to see that, but I have to say that, too often, services for women, whether it be Rape Crisis helplines or funding for refuges, are sorted out at the last minute with no time for people to apply. The requirements often mean that, as on this occasion, lots of brilliant services cannot get themselves together to access the money, because they get the rules and regulations too late.

We need to make sure that in the provision of such services, as with other things, women are not seen as an afterthought. It must not be a case of a Department—in this case, I believe it was the Department for Communities and Local Government—saying, “Oh, whoops, we have a £10 million underspend here, and we do not know where it came from. Let’s shush the women by giving it to them.” I suspect that that is what happened, although I might be wrong. That happens too often, and we need to make such services absolutely mainstream. If we protect women and girls, we will reduce violent assaults and cut by a third the number of women who are murdered. We must make sure that that is front and centre of everything we do.

The Minister will speak on Tuesday next week in ping-pong on the Modern Slavery Bill. I believe that the Bill gives us an opportunity to help a number of women who have come to Britain as domestic workers and who have been vilely exploited and hurt. I am glad that the Minister has agreed to take a step in the right direction on the Bill, and I hope that she might turn it into a leap and support the Lords amendment. The Bill offers us another opportunity to support a number of people, mostly women, who have been victims of violence and exploitation. I look forward to the Minister’s response on that.