Domestic Violence Refuges

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2016 Westminster Hall

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Julie Cooper) for bringing this issue to the House’s attention. My experience before becoming a Member of Parliament was partly in music, but I also spent 26 years doing work on violence against women and girls. Today, I will specifically focus on one particular group of women, those involved in prostitution.

Some 80,000 people in this country, mostly women and girls, are involved in prostitution. Fifty per cent of them have been raped or sexually assaulted, and 95% of women in street prostitution have severe drug problems. Fifty per cent of off-street prostituted women are migrants, usually trafficked. Women in prostitution are 18 times more likely to be murdered than other women. They are also at risk from their partners—who are often, although not always, pimps—their pimps, their traffickers and their clients. They are frequently in and out of a criminal justice system that penalises them, rather than the men who abuse them. They are suffering from mental health difficulties, for which they are unable to get help, and their drug problems often go untreated.

There is a parallel with domestic violence. Women were often accused of staying with their abusive partners, of choosing the abuse, and they still are, as hon. Members have mentioned. Women who are both living with an abusive partner and suffering violence at work as a prostituted woman are also often accused of making a choice to be in that situation, which is focusing attention on the wrong place. We need to be focusing on the perpetrators, but to do that properly we need adequate support for women involved in prostitution.

Eaves, one of the few services in London that specialised in services for women involved in prostitution, has sadly had to close due to cuts to funding. In my constituency of Bristol West, One25 does lots of fantastic work to support, help and advise women involved in prostitution. It works in partnership with St Mungo’s for women who are homeless, and it has a diverse source of funding to try to keep itself going, but like any other voluntary organisation, as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) said, without core funding it is frequently unstable, which means that the women who need its help and support are at risk.

Such women have complex needs. They are hard to help, and they may often be difficult to engage, or just difficult, but that does not mean that they do not deserve our help and protection. What does it say about us as a country, and about our approach to gender equality, if we continue to allow women to be bought and sold, and then abused? At work, bakers are required to bake and bus drivers are required to drive a bus. If a woman involved in prostitution is told by her client or pimp to have sex or to do certain sexual acts that she does not want to do and is then forced to do them, she has been raped. There is simply no other job like that. It is not a job like any other; it is a job in which rape and sexual and physical assault are a daily, constant and present threat. There is no other job like it.

I would like to see the report on ending demand by the all-party parliamentary group on prostitution and the global sex trade to be seriously considered by the Government but, for today, I urge the Minister to consider funding for this specific group of women. We cannot allow them just to be left by the wayside. We cannot allow them and their children to be left unprotected. It is too important for that, and I beg the Minister to think seriously about this specific group of women.