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

Wendy Morton Excerpts

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

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate and to follow someone whom I am tempted to call my hon. Friend, but I know that I am not supposed to, Mr Speaker. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) speaks with such passion and expertise in the area of domestic violence. I congratulate the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) on bringing forward this important Bill. I had put today’s date in my diary as a “PMB” day because my private Member’s Bill is third on the list. I hope to see the same number of people here to support mine, but we will see how the day goes.

The Bill represents an historic opportunity to tackle domestic abuse and violence against women and girls. It is a shame that Parliament was not sitting last Friday, which was the penultimate day of 16 days of activism following the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. That might have been more appropriate, but events are determined by the days on which the House sits. It is shocking in this day and age that on average two women are killed by their partner or ex-partner every week in England and Wales and that 27.1% of women have experienced abuse since the age of 16. Last year, an estimated 4.5 million females aged between 16 and 59 were victims of domestic abuse.

Preparing my speech for today made me reflect, and I recalled the time when, as a child, my sister and I were at home with mum and a lady from the village knocked on our door. She was trying to escape domestic violence, and she and her two boys spent the afternoon in our house with me, my mum and my sister. The House of Commons is a strange place, and it does bring back memories from time to time and makes one reflect on experiences and how one felt at the time, but I digress.

The statistics are shocking, but they do not show the whole picture. Domestic violence is a largely hidden crime that is difficult to quantify accurately. Women do not always report or disclose occurrences of domestic abuse to the police for many and varied reasons. If the Bill is successful today—I hope it is—it will require the Government to ratify the Council of Europe’s Istanbul convention as soon as possible. In addition to the measures that the Government have already put in place, including committing £80 million to violence against women and girl services, the Bill will help to end violence again women and girls.

Turning briefly to the Istanbul convention itself, between 2006 and 2008 the Council of Europe campaign task force looking at violence against women concluded that existing legislation to prevent and combat all kinds of violence against women was not being enforced. Services for victims were scarce and underfunded, and there was a huge disparity in protection between member states. The taskforce recommended that the Council of Europe produce a convention on preventing and combating violence, and the recommendation led to the drafting and publication of the Istanbul convention. The UK played a significant role in its production, and the UK coalition Government signed the convention on 8 June 2012.

Since that signing, the UK has made significant progress towards ratification. There has been legislation on forced marriage, female genital mutilation, coercive control and, most recently, stalking. In fact, in most respects measures already in place in the UK to protect women and girls from violence comply with or go further than the convention requires. It is just those final amendments to domestic law to take extra-territorial jurisdiction over a range of offences that has caused the delay in ratification. I hope the Minister will expand on that in his closing remarks, but I was pleased to read that there has been contact with counterparts in the devolved Administrations on whether the legislative changes for extra-territorial jurisdiction should extend to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

I am glad that the Bill has made it to the Floor of the House today and that Parliament has time to debate it. Let us hope that it does lead to ratification, which will give all women and girls the legal guarantee to the right to live lives free from both violence and the fear of violence. It is an important issue that sadly affects so many women, and one could ask why we need a private Member’s Bill to do something about it. We know that the Government have already committed to ratifying the convention and have provided many examples of the work that they are doing to meet and go beyond its requirements, but this is an historic day and an important private Member’s Bill, which provides a chance for everyone in the House to come together and show our support for an important issue.

The best way to end violence against women is to prevent it from happening in the first place. That means changing prejudices, attitudes and gender stereotypes through the further training of professionals and the use of NGOs to help people recognise and challenge different forms of violence and to prevent victimisation. I emphasise the need for co-operation between agencies. We must ensure that children are taught about equality at an early age and that intervention and treatment programmes are working as well as they possibly can. I recall visiting a women’s refuge in the north-east several years ago. I was humbled to meet the women and children there, and I gained a deeper understanding of the fact that domestic violence has no social boundaries or age limits. Sadly, it cuts across all classes and all areas of society.

The women and girls who have been failed by preventive measures and have become victims of violence must be offered the best possible protection and support. They need support and understanding from Government agencies, the police, and health services, many of which already do terrific work. Specific measures include ensuring that victims have access to adequate information in a language that they can understand, that shelters are established with an adequate geographical distribution, and that easily accessible rape crisis and sexual violence referral centres are available to those who need them.

Turning to the prosecution of perpetrators, one of the convention’s biggest achievements is the range of measures, procedures and best practices for investigating and prosecuting violence against women. The convention ensures that victims must be protected at all stages of an investigation whether through emergency barring orders, whereby the police can remove a perpetrator of domestic violence from their home, or restraining and protection orders. Such orders must be available for immediate protection, allowed during subsequent legal proceedings and, possibly most importantly, issued without prejudicing the defendant’s right to a fair trial.

The issue is not confined to the UK or Europe, so I want to discuss violence against women and girls abroad. Through my work on the International Development Committee and as co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group for sustainable development goals, I have seen and heard about examples of violence against women and girls throughout the world. Sexual violence is one characteristic of the ongoing insurgency in north-east Nigeria. Earlier in the year, along with my International Development Committee colleague, the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) —I hope I have pronounced that correctly [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”]—I met representatives from “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign at the Unity Fountain in Abuja. They campaign on and highlight the issues relating to the missing Chibok girls. It is now 978 days since they were abducted and 196 of them remain missing. This campaign cannot be pushed to the sidelines, and this event was really moving. It was one of the memorable parts of that visit earlier in the year, albeit for sad reasons.

In 2014, the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Hague of Richmond, as he is now, hosted the first global summit to end sexual violence in conflict, along with the UN special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It took place here in the UK and was the largest gathering ever brought together on the subject, with 1,700 delegates and 123 country delegations, including 79 Ministers. The summit agreed practical steps to tackle impunity for the use of rape as a weapon of war and to begin to change global attitudes to these crimes. As I said earlier, changing attitudes to these crimes and towards equality in general must surely be the best way of ending violence against women.

Similarly, in 2005 the UK successfully advocated for a stand-alone goal on gender equality as part of the sustainable development goals and the establishment of dedicated targets within the goals for all countries on ending all forms of violence against women and girls. It is only with measures such as these that we can hope to bring an end to the suffering of women worldwide.

It is also only fair to draw attention to some of the good work that the Government and the Department for International Development are doing throughout the world to help end violence against women and girls. DFID is running a number of successful programmes to tackle FGM, helping 15 countries to have a policy framework or action plan to end it. The Secretary of State for International Development has demonstrated her commitment to this important work recently, committing £2.75 million to the UN trust fund to end violence against women, supporting organisations across the world to tackle gender-based violence. That takes the UK’s total contribution to the fund to £11 million. The SDGs are global—they are universal—and it is right and proper that we recognise them today in this important debate. We must recognise that there is still a long way to go, but a lot of work has already been done on goal 5, which is to:

“Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”.

Let me come back to what is happening in the UK and the reason we are all here today. I am conscious that I am indulging your time, Mr Deputy Speaker—I am looking at the clock as I speak. Last year, there were more than 100,000 prosecutions for domestic abuse. The fact that more victims are having the confidence to come forward and report violence shows that we are moving in the right direction, but there is always more we can do, and ratifying the Istanbul convention is one way of achieving that. I end by recognising the work the Government have done already in line with the Istanbul convention, and they should be applauded. I will be supporting the Bill today, to help ensure that violence against a woman simply because she is a woman becomes a thing of the past.