Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference t to Chapter 12 of the Equal Treatment Bench Book, what assessment he has made of the effect on victims of violent and sexual assault of instances where those victims are instructed to use preferred pronouns instead of referring to their alleged attacker as a member of the sex that they experienced them to be.

No assessment of the effect of the Equal Treatment Bench Book is made by the Ministry of Justice. To preserve the independence of the judiciary, the Lord Chief Justice (LCJ), the Senior President of the Tribunals, and the Chief Coroner have statutory responsibility for judicial training. These responsibilities are exercised through the Judicial College, which also produces the Equal Treatment Bench Book.

Fair treatment is a fundamental principle embedded in the judicial oath and the Equal Treatment Bench Book is compiled by the judiciary to provide general guidelines for judicial office holders to apply as appropriate in any particular case. It is reviewed by a judicial editorial panel, with content from judicial experts and information from subject experts. The identities of the principal contributors appear in the Acknowledgments. The external documentary sources relied upon by the editors of the Bench Book are set out in full in the footnotes.