Stalking Protection Bill

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 19th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure and an honour to join my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) in sponsoring this Bill and to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), who was inspired to do so much to improve the law in this important area following the particularly horrific case that he has just told us about. As we have heard, stalking is a terrifying, intrusive and profoundly unsettling crime, and I defy anyone in the Chamber not to have been moved by the words that my hon. Friend has just read out, which truly sent shivers down my spine. It is important to recognise that the victims bear the scars for the rest of their lives.

I want to focus on the impact that stalking can have throughout a family. We heard about the Emily Maitlis case and how brave it was of her to have spoken so publicly about the effect on her marriage and children of what happened to her, and I have a constituency case that brought things home for me. My constituent, whom I will call Julie—not her real name—came to see me with her mother about 18 months ago having suffered a sustained campaign of harassment. With your leave, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will read her words to the House, rather than try to use my own, because the way that she puts things is very powerful. She wrote:

“Despite the stalker having been verbally warned by the police to leave me alone, he continued to contact me, receiving over 60 text messages/missed calls a day to either my mobile or home phone. I reported it to the police again as advised to. Different officers attended to take my statement, and I again had to repeat the situation. In the end I had to change my numbers for both mobile and landline. This did not stop the contact. He tried to contact me through various other means, Facebook, WhatsApp, email, Google Hangouts, and Instagram. Some of the messages received on WhatsApp were from numbers unknown to me, and some of the messages contained intimate images of me, or threats of exposing them. All of the accounts I deactivated and eventually, after laying low for a while, I set up new accounts. However, this did not deter him.

After a very short while, the stalker managed to obtain my new mobile and home number, and again he started with the calls. I know it was him as my partner and I both spoke to him on at least one occasion where he threatened to cause harm to my partner. He used to call my home number and would call in the middle of the night several times and hang up, which woke my children on many occasions and in the end I left the phone unplugged. I left BT and EE and set up a new contracts… and did not give my details to hardly anybody to reduce the risk of him”

finding them out. She continued:

“This obviously isolated me from my circle of friends... However, he was unwittingly involving them by adding all my circle of friends on Facebook, some of which are very close and dear to me, and he started to make a nuisance of himself with them, constantly bombarding them with messages asking questions about me”.

That email goes on much longer, and it is all profoundly disturbing. It provides a picture of how young women now live their lives. So much of a person’s life is now on social media, which is an important way to keep in touch with family and friends, but even though my constituent did all the right things, took all the right advice and went to the police repeatedly, she was unable to live her life in the way that she should have been able to.

Julie’s other family members were contacted, and the part of her story that affected me most deeply is that her daughter, a young teenager, was contacted by the stalker at school. Despite numerous statements to the police, my constituent had to organise her own non-molestation order, although she was pleased that the police served it on her behalf. When she approached me, she was anxious and very afraid of what would happen in the future:

“This man will continue with this behaviour…and from what I have experienced, he won’t stop—he will do it again but to what level next time. I would love nothing more than to try and change the way cases like this are approached.”

She was pleased to hear about the Bill, and she was pleased that I was able to come and speak about her case on her behalf, although she is not at a point where she would like her details to become public.

There is obviously little I can do to assist Julie as her MP, but I got involved in her case when the prosecution against her stalker sadly came to nothing. She had pursued the matter with the police, having to tell her story again and again, as she told us in her email. When she went to court, a vital piece of evidence, a screenshot of a WhatsApp message, had been lost by the Crown Prosecution Service so could not be presented. The prosecution therefore failed, and her stalker contacted her again the next day with a crowing message about what had happened.

I have been able to assist Julie in pursuing her complaint against the CPS, and we will see what happens as a result. The damage to her life, to her mum’s life and, very sadly, to her daughter’s life has already happened. It is now too late to take away their fear when going to work or school that something nasty will happen. As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham, those fears are not unfounded. We have to take this very seriously.

I have no doubt that an early stalking protection order would have made a real difference in Julie’s case, and I hope it would have limited some of the trauma she continues to deal with today. That is exactly why this Bill is so important. The police must be given the power to take swift action on stalking offences at an early stage, and as my hon. Friend said, it is important that such action is accompanied by rigorous and relevant training not only for the police but for the CPS and the judiciary. This is a very serious crime. Generations of Julie’s family have suffered, and I want to make certain it does not continue.