Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (Ratification of Convention) Bill

Debate between Tim Loughton and Eilidh Whiteford

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 16th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

The UK signed the Council of Europe convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence back in June 2012 but has yet to ratify it. The Istanbul convention, as it is better known, is a unique, groundbreaking international legal instrument that enshrines in law the basic human right of women and girls to live lives free of violence and the fear of violence. Crucially, it provides a comprehensive set of mechanisms to achieve those aims. The provisions of the convention aim to prevent violence against women, protect the victims and survivors of abuse, prosecute perpetrators and hold them to account for their actions. It commits Governments to provide not only properly resourced support services through a strategic policy framework, but robust monitoring, data collection and public scrutiny.

The convention is a formidable package of measures, which Scottish Women’s Aid has described as

“quite simply the best piece of international policy and practice for eliminating violence against women that exists, setting minimum standards for Government responses to victims and survivors of gender based violence… It is a blueprint for how we move from small change at the margins…to a system that is designed to end domestic abuse and violence against women.”

We badly need a step change in efforts to eliminate violence against women. Two women are killed by their partner or their ex every week in England and Wales alone. According to the crime survey for England and Wales, in the past year 1.2 million women were victims of domestic violence. In Scotland last year, more than 58,000 incidents of domestic violence were reported to the police. Across the UK as a whole, the police recorded more than 87,500 rapes and more than 400,000 sexual assaults. Given that many—possibly most—incidents of sexual assault and rape go unreported, we must not underestimate the scale of the challenge we face.

We live in an environment where gender-based violence is so pervasive and normalised that we hardly even notice how much we put up with. Last week, here in Parliament, we heard harrowing accounts from the hon. Members for Edinburgh West (Michelle Thomson), for Eastleigh (Mims Davies) and for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin), who so courageously spoke out about their own dreadful experiences. One in three women experience domestic abuse or sexual violence in their lifetimes—and that figure is recognised as likely to be a conservative estimate.

Even those who avoid personal attack are living in a world saturated with images of glorified sexual violence, with a toxic public discourse in which boasting of sexual assault is reframed as locker room talk, women who are raped or assaulted are frequently shamed or blamed, and lives are blighted, and in some cases irreparably harmed. It affects us all. It restricts where we go, what we wear and what we dare to say out loud. In my view, we need to name violence against women for what it is: the most pervasive and systemic human rights abuse in the world today, affecting women in every street in every village, town and city in every country around the world.

We need to understand that violence against women is grounded in and compounds gender inequality. Those of us who are committed to pushing the issue up the political agenda have our work cut out for us. Although domestic abuse and sexual violence primarily affect women, we should acknowledge that they also affect men, non-binary people and especially children—girls and boys.

We need to understand that violence against women is neither natural nor inevitable. We can prevent it and challenge it. We can hold the perpetrators to account. Those of us who have the privilege of shaping and influencing legislation need to acknowledge our responsibility to put our shoulder to the wheel and make the elimination of gender-based violence a political priority.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on the Bill, which I support. She mentions children. Is she aware that, extraordinarily, something like a third of domestic violence against women starts during pregnancy and that in more than three quarters of cases involving children being safeguarded or taken into care domestic violence is the single biggest element? It is a huge challenge for our society.

[Dr Whiteford]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that point. Many people are very shocked when they hear those statistics for the first time and hear that so much domestic abuse begins when women are probably at their most vulnerable—during pregnancy, when they are bringing new life into the world and yet do not have the protection they should expect from the fathers, often, of their children. He makes a very important point, and I am grateful to him for supporting the Bill.

I want to take a bit of time to set out why the Istanbul convention is so important, why it offers such a powerful vehicle for tackling gender-based violence and why the UK needs to prioritise its ratification. The treaty has global, national and local dimensions. In a globalising world, it recognises that gender-based violence often crosses state borders. States that ratify the convention commit to promoting and protecting the right of all their citizens to live free from violence in the public and private sphere, to working to end discrimination, to promoting equality between women and men, and to working within a co-ordinated, strategic, accountable and adequately resourced framework of policy and practice.

The convention is broad in scope. It covers aspects of criminal, civil and migration law. It sets out minimum standards for the protection of survivors and for access to services. It requires signatories to work to prevent violence and bring about attitudinal change. It explicitly addresses many of the most common manifestations of violence against women, including physical and psychological abuse, stalking, sexual violence, including rape, forced marriage, female genital mutilation and so-called honour crimes—that is not an exhaustive list. It recognises the differentiated risks women face depending on their circumstances. Although we know that women from all backgrounds—all income groups, ages, ethnicities, cultures, religions and political perspectives—are affected by these types of violence, we also know that poorer women are more exposed to risk. We know that disabled women are more likely to experience abuse than able-bodied women and that refugees and asylum seekers are especially vulnerable. In this respect, we see gender inequality cutting across and compounding other forms of disadvantage, and the convention addresses those and other forms of discrimination in its articles.

Several weeks ago, I had a conversation with Dr Lisa Gormley of the London School of Economics, who is one of the UK’s leading experts on the Istanbul convention. She emphasised that the key bit of the convention is found in articles 7 to 11. That surprised me. At first glance, when we turn to them—well, let me read out some of the headings: “Comprehensive and co-ordinated policies”; “Financial resources”; “Non-governmental organisations and civil society”; “Co-ordinating body”; “Data collection and research”. That is pretty dry stuff—we might say it is quite technocratic—but it is the engine that will drive the machine. Those provisions will turn a good critical analysis of violence against women and a collection of useful case studies of policy initiatives into a strategic and dynamic vehicle for real and ongoing change. They will allow us to learn from others’ experience of what works and force us to think more strategically about how we provide support to women across different levels of government—local, national and international. Crucially, those provisions will improve the protection of funding for women’s refuges and helpline services at a time when austerity cuts to local government budgets and voluntary sector funding are placing such lifeline services in jeopardy.