Violence Against Women and Girls

Virendra Sharma Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Mrs Brooke, to serve under your chairmanship and to follow such an informative speech from the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham). I congratulate the Select Committee on International Development on its report on violence against women and girls and the Government on their continued efforts to tackle the problem internationally, as well as nationally.

I served on the International Development Committee a few years ago when we went to Nigeria, Bangladesh and other places. We witnessed violence against women, child abuse, forced marriage, under-age marriage and poor education, especially for girls, with lack of water and sanitation in girls’ schools, which was provided in other schools. We witnessed that discrimination. I miss the work of the Committee, and I will certainly try to return to it so that I can contribute to its work.

After today’s news that a 20-year-old woman was tied to a tree and gang-raped in India, allegedly on the orders of village elders, the issue of violence against women and girls is particularly poignant; the utmost importance of addressing this critical issue has been highlighted again. As a member of the all-party group on population, development and reproductive health, I want to draw attention to the importance of family planning and sexual and reproductive health and rights when tackling violence against women and girls.

Violence against women has been called the most pervasive yet least recognised human rights abuse in the world. As many as one in three women in the world have suffered some form of abuse, most often by someone she knows, including her husband or another male family member. Any such abuse can leave deep psychological scars and damage the health of women and girls, especially their reproductive and sexual health, and sometime results in death or leaves them permanently disabled, ruining their lives.

The effects of violence on a woman’s reproductive health can be profound, from unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions to complications from frequent, high-risk pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. Gender-based violence is sustained by a culture of silence and a denial of the seriousness of the health consequences of abuse. In addition to individual harm, those consequences exact a social toll and place a heavy burden on health services. Gender-based violence is sustained by silence, so women’s voices must be heard and every effort must be made to enable women to speak out against it, and to get help when they are victims of it.

The Government should be congratulated on hosting the family planning summit in July 2012. Global leaders united and pledged $2.6 billion to provide 120 million women in the world’s poorest countries with access to contraception by 2020, and the UK announced £500 million in aid.

Currently, more than 200 million women and girls in developing countries do not have access to modern methods of contraception. The inability to choose and access family planning will cost many of those women their lives. I urge the Government to ensure that part of their pledge is dedicated to making emergency contraception available to victims of sexual violence to alleviate some of the suffering and SRHR problems it causes.

Access to modern contraceptives can help prevent an estimated 600,000 neonatal deaths. In 2012, an estimated 291,000 women and girls in low and middle-income countries died from pregnancy-related causes; 104,000 of those pregnancies were unintended. Investing in SRHR is cost-effective. Money spent on modern contraception helps save more in maternal and newborn health care and is a strong tool for moving towards gender equality and female empowerment. It helps tackle violence against women and girls and its devastating effects.

As well as ensuring access to family planning and SRHR, I urge the Government to strengthen advocacy on gender-based violence in all our country programmes in conjunction with other United Nations partners and non-governmental organisations. We must integrate messages on the prevention of gender-based violence into information, education and communication projects and conduct more research on gender-based violence.

Lastly and most importantly, I appeal to the Government to call for the new millennium development goals framework to include a target on universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights and a stand-alone goal on gender equality and women’s empowerment. The matters that we are discussing are of great urgency. We have a moral duty to defend the vulnerable and to ensure that human rights for all are protected.