Violence against Women and Girls

Sorcha Eastwood Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sorcha Eastwood (Lagan Valley) (Alliance)]

I just want to take a moment, because I found it incredibly distressing to sit and listen to the brilliant remarks from the hon. Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato). Why would I find that upsetting? I find that upsetting because I am a survivor of abuse myself. Northern Ireland is one of the most dangerous places in Europe to be a woman. I have to say that I am upset that no other Members from Northern Ireland are here at the minute. Eight women were murdered last year and over 20 in the last four years. But why should I feel like this? It should be the people who are out there perpetrating these crimes—people who are in this building, people who are everywhere. As previous Members have stated, statistically speaking, there will be people in this building who are the perpetrators. More often, the people doing this are people we know, people we love, and that is what makes it even more traumatic, upsetting and disgusting.

We live in a society where it was only in 1991 in the case of R v. R that marital rape was made an offence. It took until March 2000 for a Belfast man to be convicted for raping his wife. I could talk of the case of Alexander McCartney, a prolific paedophile, which speaks directly to what the hon. Member spoke about. Thousands of children were abused. Whenever I, the hon. Member and other Members across the House met big tech companies just a number of weeks ago, I put it to them:

“Are you aware of the case of Alexander McCartney? We have heard from you that you’re a self-regulating industry and that you take this matter of child abuse seriously. Have you heard of the case?”

Not one of them, bar the one who happened to own the platform where Mr McCartney was so prolific, had heard of the case.

We are living through a crisis where women are having their rights eroded every day. My mum was brought up during a time whenever she could only dream of having some of the rights that I and others in my generation were promised. We did get some of them—we did—but we have seen more rowed back in recent weeks, months and years. We are now literally having to fight for our lives.

Northern Ireland remains an outlier in Europe for violence against women and girls. There are many reasons why that is the case. One of them is the legacy of our troubled past, and we have heard from other Members about the impact of war and conflict, and Northern Ireland is not exempt. We have to deal with that legacy of trauma and conflict. Layered on top of it, we have to deal with the issues that every other woman and girl across the globe faces.

One thing that really disturbs me, terrifies me for my life, is incel culture. I am an elected rep in Northern Ireland. I stood for election for the first time in 2017, and that was whenever I received my first rape threat—my first. That should not be normal. In recent days, Members have sought to put forward a narrative that it should be taken as part and parcel not just of public life, but particularly of the lives of elected reps in this House. [Hon. Members: “Shame!”] I profoundly disagree with them.

Many trolls, no doubt online, will later consider my contribution to the House to be a self-indulgent rant—shrieking, shrill. I am a privileged woman. What can I say to my constituents in Lagan Valley? I do not know what to say to them. As the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley), said, this is a societal issue and not one person will tackle it by themselves. However, various individuals in our society at this point in time are playing an outsized, toxic and disturbing role. I would like to put on the record my thanks to the Safeguarding Minister, the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), for the role she has played not just in recent days and weeks, but for years in protecting and standing up for women and girls.

Only a matter of months ago, another Member of this House said to me whenever I talked about wanting to do more on violence against women and girls that it was “topical”—a passing interest, bit of a fleeting thought, topical. Sorry, no. We have been dealing with this for years, and it is now turbocharged. That means our response must be turbocharged. But I have to be honest that, like other Members, I am torn because I do not want to give oxygen or a platform to these hatemongers and women abusers. How can we even deal with what is in front of our faces if we do not call it out in the most explicit way? That does not demean us or bring us down to that level. I do not think for a second that it takes away from the import of what we are saying or doing. It is actually essential, and we should not be ashamed because every single one of us in this House has to stand up for our constituents.

I see many women come across the door of my office in Lisburn who have been through years of systemic abuse, failed at every cut and turn by statutory agencies and others who had a duty and did not report. They are left in a position where we have to build up trust with them, not just in terms of their life but the societal and statutory response. I know every single person in the House today will commit to doing that, and I am delighted to see the seriousness with which this new Government have taken and gripped the issue.

We need to address the root causes, including online abuse and harmful cultural norms. We would see a lot of school groups coming through the constituency. We previously did a lot of visits to the Parliament Building in Stormont whenever I sat there in the Northern Ireland Assembly. During one school visit, a member of the public came up and said that they wanted to rape me.

There were two people there, and we were just kind of paralysed in response. That was not the right response—not from me, but from the people around—but it is so normalised that that was exactly what people thought. That is not good enough. If people have an issue with champions of women and girls, and of marginalised communities, standing up and using their voice to call that behaviour out—if it makes others feel awkward, and if others see it as creating a fuss or causing a big deal—that is not my problem. Otherwise we will never deal with the cause of it.

Sometimes there is a narrative that these murders are a tragic inevitability. That is not the case. Those deaths are preventable—so preventable—yet we are living in an age when, as the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) said, women dying is just seen as a normal phenomenon. That could not be further from the truth. I feel saddened that I have let myself down a bit by being so emotional at the start of my speech. [Hon. Members: “No.”] That is not my usual style. But like many other Members of the House, I feel that the abuse we have received in the last number of days, preceding the incidents in the House last night and over the hours afterwards, has compounded our feeling of being under attack simply for standing up not just for ourselves, but for the people across the United Kingdom that every single one of us was elected to serve.

I simply implore Members not to forget Northern Ireland in this. We have an incredible Justice Minister in my party colleague and friend, Naomi Long. She and our First Minister and Deputy First Minister are all desperate and anxious to act. But we cannot do it alone; we need the help of every single Member of this House. Human rights are not devolved, and on a technical point, the regulation of social media is certainly not devolved. I stand ready to partner with the Government to tackle this work. I simply and honestly ask that others help me and the other Members who represent Northern Ireland to end this epidemic of violence against women and girls.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Sorcha Eastwood Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 29th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron]

I had better not.

To be fair, no safeguards would be possible, even if we were not going through this hasty process. First, there is the risk of self-coercion. Many of us will have heard older relatives utter words similar to, “I am a burden to you. You would be better off without me.” We all know reasonably instinctively that people will present it as making a sovereign choice, but it will be a choice born out of coercion. Unless there is a clause in the Bill that I have missed to employ mind readers, no amount of doctors, safeguards or bureaucratic mechanisms will prevent those who self-coerce from opting to die simply because they assume that no matter what their loved ones say, everyone would be better off if they were dead.

To add to the stats we just heard from the hon. Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy (Melanie Ward), we know that in Canada more than one in three people opting for assisted dying gave as their reason for choosing to die that they felt they were a burden on others. Honestly, I do not see how we need any further discussion to push us into the No Lobby than that clear evidence from where it is legal.

Secondly, there is coercive control. In the last Parliament, we passed groundbreaking and long-overdue legislation on domestic violence. As society’s understanding of that often hidden evil has developed, our eyes have been opened to one horrific factor in particular: that of insidious, manipulative coercive control. Thousands of people have been—and are today—victims of those who seek to manipulate their will, take over their lives and coerce them into believing that their perpetrator’s will is actually their will. We all know through our constituency casework of people who have been victims. One common theme is that victims often did not realise that they were being controlled until long afterwards. It can take years for the penny to drop. I do not need to spell it out, then—do I?—that for those coerced into choosing assisted dying, that penny will never drop. They will no longer be with us.

Thirdly, people will choose assisted dying because of their pain when they would not do if that pain was properly managed. Here is where the evidence from other countries becomes truly disturbing—in fact, terrifying. In the last decade, the countries in Europe without assisted dying increased palliative care investment by over three times more than those that had legalised it. In the United States, those states without assisted dying saw an increase in the size of their palliative care teams that was also three times greater than that in states that had legalised it. That is clearly no accident and no coincidence. Indeed, the group that have contacted me who are most vociferously against the Bill are palliative care doctors.

[Sorcha Eastwood (Lagan Valley) (Alliance)]

The discussion we are having—and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater) for the way that she has conducted it—almost implies that palliative care is of the same excellent standard across the UK. I have to inform the House that it is not, which is a matter of deep regret. I cannot stand by the Bill because many vulnerable, marginalised people will be impacted by it. I want to support and affirm life, and I want that to be with dignity.