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Sir Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) (LD)
I am pleased to have the opportunity to debate my Committee’s report on violence against women and girls. I am delighted, with the change of Chair, to be under your chairmanship, Mrs Brooke.
I welcome my colleague, the Minister, to her place. I appreciate her role as a champion for women and her campaigning enthusiasm for that. I know she shares with me and the Committee the recognition that the status and role of women is absolutely central to development policy.
Violence is of widespread concern. When we published our report in June, I said:
“Violence against women expresses a deep-seated contempt that, regrettably, persists in some countries towards women and girls. It has been the ‘forgotten Millennium Development Goal’. The way in which any nation treats its women holds the key to its social and economic advancement. When you treat women as chattels - when you mutilate them, abuse them, force them to marry early, lock them out of school or stop them entering the workforce – you fail to function as a society.”
It is that fundamental. I will not rehearse the statistics, but in many quarters they are shocking.
When we published the report, we made a number of recommendations, and I ask for an update on the Government’s progress on them. We know where the Government have agreed with us.
Sir Malcolm Bruce
The interruption came at a natural break in my speech, because I was about to summarise some of the things the Committee welcomes that have happened since our report. I will then ask a few questions to clarify the progress being made, with a final couple of remarks about the situation in Afghanistan.
Commendably, the Foreign Secretary has maintained the cross-departmental prevention of sexual violence in conflict initiative, which has been widely welcomed and supported. The declaration of commitment to end sexual violence in conflict has been signed by 113 countries. The UK hosted a high-level event on violence against women and girls in humanitarian crises in November and plans a summit on ending sexual violence in conflict in June this year.
The Department for International Development specifically has made progress with its £35 million fund to end female genital mutilation within a generation, to which the Minister is extremely committed, and she will want to speak about when she replies to the debate. DFID has also launched a new £3 million programme on access to justice for women and girls suffering violence in Afghanistan. We welcome these initiatives by the Government.
May I address some of the issues arising from our recommendations? First, we acknowledge the “Theory of Change” initiative underlying the Government and Department approach. May we have more specifics on how theory becomes practice? What in particular is being done in those countries where violence is especially prevalent, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan and Somalia—which is not to say that there are not other countries where it is a serious problem? Will violence against women and girls be prioritised specifically in the programmes in those countries?
We had a specific concern with water and sanitation, which I accept that the Government acknowledged immediately, because there was no particular focus on violence against women and girls. Everyone knows that this is a prime example of where women and girls are especially vulnerable, either when they are going to collect water or are using sanitary facilities—they become vulnerable to attack. We welcome the Government agreeing that they should update the guidance. Will the Minister report on the progress made? They gave us 12 months’ notice, so we are halfway through that period.
Last week at the Liaison Committee, I also raised the subject of female genital mutilation with the Prime Minister. The International Development Committee was concerned that it was also an issue within the United Kingdom. It is not as prevalent here as it is in some countries, thank God, but many women living in this country have nevertheless suffered from it, and an estimated 20,000 girls are at risk.
We are aware, first, that female genital mutilation happens in this country, and yet there have been no prosecutions. Sometimes, too, girls are shipped out to have it done abroad and then brought back. Thirdly, the Select Committee was told, women who are British citizens and brought up here may go back to the country of their family’s origin where they are at risk, and yet the extent of our ability to protect them as British citizens is limited.
We are interested in finding out from the Minister how the DFID fund will deal with such issues and, in particular, whether there is any update on the possibility of prosecutions. There have been investigations, but no case has been brought to trial. As the Prime Minister said, getting people to testify and give evidence is the problem, but our view is that prosecutions would underline and demonstrate the strength of feeling.
DFID is a big player in the development sector and in engaging with multilateral agencies. The Committee hopes that when the Government engage with such agencies they will ensure that the issue of violence against women and girls is prioritised in their programmes. We are interested to know what steps the Government have taken to ensure that that is so. We are aware that the Secretary of State champions the issue in the World Bank, but the Government engage with other multilateral agencies where how the issue is being taken forward is not so apparent.
The high-level panel co-chaired by the Prime Minister made a welcome specific reference to target goals on gender equality, with one section on targeting violence against women and girls and another on child marriage, about which the Select Committee was particularly concerned. The recommendation is now going through a working party. Will the Minister tell us what the Government are doing to ensure that the recommendation comes out at the other end and is not lost or diluted in any way?
Some people have said, for example, that we cannot have a target of zero violence, but once we start to quantify things the feeling is that we are in effect diluting the commitment to achieve measurable transformational change in the sector. I guess that the challenge to our Government is whether they will continue to insist on a target of eliminating violence against women internationally as a key priority, to ensure that the post-2015 development agenda specifically and explicitly highlights that as essential to delivering progress.
When we visited Ethiopia to support the programme we visited a project on child marriage supported by the Department, which the Minister has also visited. I do not often do commercials, but I think there is still something about it on our website. An interesting thing was that although the funding came from DFID and the leader of the project was UK-based everyone else on the programme was Ethiopian. They worked with the community, but they did not arrive with a pre-determined objective. They sat down with members of the community to discuss how child marriage affects communities, and led them to realise how damaging it is. The participants went from thinking that it was in the girls’ best interest to understanding that it is not. We heard some powerful testimony from a young girl who had been divorced at 13; another who said she had been married—and she meant married—at seven; a mother who had married off her elder daughter and then realised she was wrong, and became determined not to do that to her younger daughter; and a young priest who championed the case against child marriage. He pointed out that it increased the poverty of the village. That was powerful evidence of what can be done.
A slight concern arose with respect to the campaign on female genital mutilation. I know that the Minister has visited the project in Senegal, and has praised it. It was believed to be effective, but we were concerned that it might become the blueprint for what would happen in every country. I hope the Minister will agree—I am fairly certain that she will—that the work must be done according to each country’s social norms, so that people can come to their own conclusion that female genital mutilation is not the thing to do. It is after all not in just low-income countries that it happens. The biggest country where it is practised is Egypt, where about 90% of the women have been subjected to it. Indeed, they accept it. There is a huge amount of work to do. Another sad statistic was from Ethiopia, where 70% of women thought that it was perfectly all right to be beaten by their husbands—that they had a right to do it. There are huge cultural challenges involved in turning things around. I had a strong engagement with President Karzai on the issue during a previous visit, and he came out second best.
As to Afghanistan, we recommended in a separate report that DFID should sharpen up its commitment to its programmes specifically on women. We said that women’s status after the military departure—we will stay there for development purposes—will be the test of whether our intervention made a transformation. The statistics are extremely worrying. A UN report shows that although there has been a 28% increase in violence against women in Afghanistan there has been only a 2% increase in prosecutions. Laws have been changed to disadvantage women. For example, family members are not allowed to give evidence, which makes prosecution extremely difficult. President Karzai proposed to support the reintroduction of the stoning of women for adultery. That is a shocking indictment of a country that we tried to support, and for which our men and women died. The values we are concerned about are not cultural; they are absolute. We are entitled to speak out without compromise and say, “I don’t care what your religion or social norms are; if violence by one sex against another goes unchallenged, that will demean and diminish your society. It is just wrong and should not be tolerated.”
We are glad that the Minister champions the issue, and that the Secretary of State is leading a global campaign. There is a huge amount to be done, but I hope that the Minister can give us some up-to-date sense of how the Government are taking things forward.
Annette Brooke (in the Chair)
Order. I shall call the winding-up speeches at 4.20 pm. Six hon. Members want to speak, so I shall leave them to do the arithmetic, for now.
Sandra Osborne (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the Chairman of the Select Committee on International Development, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce). There were many interesting facts from his experience and visits that I had not heard before, and I thank him. I congratulate the Select Committee on the report, and the Government on their efforts to tackle the problem.
Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has described violence against women and girls as one of the most pervasive human rights violations in the world. It is both endemic and epidemic. It limits self-esteem, life chances, economic opportunity and development. Gender-based violence reinforces women’s inequality. As to the rate and frequency of violence against women, there is no one particular country or cultural tradition that it is confined to. This country suffers from it too. In Colombia for example, a woman is killed by a current or former partner every six days. In Somalia, 98% of women have undergone female genital mutilation. In Amhara, Ethiopia, 50% of girls are married by the time they are 15 years old.
Today I want to highlight two tragedies connected to the plight of women. The first is forced and child marriage, which is practiced in too many parts of the world, including the UK. Those affected may become vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation, early pregnancy, with a high risk of maternal mortality and morbidity, and the transmission of sexually transmitted infections and HIV. Teen pregnancy is the No. 1 cause of mortality for girls between the ages of 15 and 19 and nearly 10% of all adolescent girls in low and middle-income countries are mothers before they are 16.
Taking action against early and forced marriage will ensure that more young women and girls can continue their education, act with agency and make independent decisions about their futures. I commend the work that DFID is doing and the references to the subject in the Select Committee report, but the all-party group on population, development and reproductive health, of which I am a member, has also produced a report. “A Childhood Lost”, about child marriages in the UK and abroad, was published a year ago. The report says that it is estimated that every year 5,000 to 8,000 people, including many young girls, are at risk of forced marriage in England. The chair of the all-party group has tabled amendments to the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, which is currently being debated in the other House, to safeguard 16 and 17-year-olds in the UK, who are currently able to marry with parental consent. I want to repeat the comments made in the Select Committee report, about FGM in the UK, with reference to this topic: while it is beyond my remit to comment on domestic policy in this debate, I believe
“that—as it stands—the UK’s credibility in calling to end the practice overseas is undermined by the failure to tackle the problem at home.”
I shall follow the debate in the other House with interest and I hope the Government will agree to safeguard young girls. That will send a strong message to practising communities at home and abroad.
The second issue to do with violence against women that I want to talk about is often ignored. It is one on which the UK has the potential to assert global leadership. That is the denial of abortion to girls and women who are raped in situations of armed conflict, in violation of their rights under international humanitarian law. The Select Committee report has a chapter entitled “Abortions for women raped in conflict”. Currently, the major providers of medical humanitarian services, including those funded by DFID, routinely exclude the option of abortion to girls and women raped in armed conflict. That forces the majority of rape victims—including young girls whose bodies are unprepared for motherhood —to endure unwanted, dangerous, and life-threatening pregnancies and childbirths. Denying rape victims access to safe abortion in humanitarian medical settings leads to further inhumane treatment of people already brutalised by war, because it compounds the physical injuries and psychological devastation of the rape itself.
Studies have shown that for girls and women who become pregnant from rape in armed conflict, maternal mortality is heightened owing to both the physical injuries from rape and the difficult conditions imposed by war. Girls impregnated by war rape are especially vulnerable, as
“when their bodies are not yet mature,”
pregnancy and childbearing
“can result in the rupture of the uterus and death of both the mother and the child.”
If both survive, there are also the emotional and practical difficulties of raising a child that frequently is unwanted, in a war zone—especially when the society is one that ostracizes victims of rape, and children conceived in rape.
Sky News has just reported the story of a 16-year-old girl who was impregnated by rape in the ongoing conflict in the Central African Republic, and forced to bear a child in dangerous circumstances. After being raped she was kicked out of her home and left alone to struggle with her pregnancy in the midst of war. This month she gave birth in a local hospital, which was facing a shortage of drugs to treat any complications she might develop. As the Sky News correspondent who witnessed the delivery reported:
“It was a brutal birth to a baby boy she never wanted, into a dangerously chaotic and unstable country.”
Her story is one of the countless and uncounted stories of girls and women forced by rape, as well as humanitarian aid policies, to endure dangerous and unwanted pregnancies in war zones.
As was referred to in the International Development Committee report, girls and women raped in situations of armed conflict are considered “the wounded and sick” under the Geneva conventions, with inalienable rights to comprehensive, non-discriminatory medical care. To further protect those rights, the Geneva conventions require that doctors treating war victims make medical decisions based solely on the best interests of the patient, and mandate that they are immune from prosecution under domestic laws, including laws prohibiting abortion. Accordingly, women and girls who are impregnated by rape in armed conflict have an absolute right to any and all medical treatments, including abortion, that could restore them to the highest level of physical and mental health.
Let me give some examples. Approximately 500,000 women suffered violence during the genocide in Rwanda. Many more were victimised during the aftermath of the 2010 flooding in Pakistan. Lack of access to reproductive health care in disaster and conflict zones is harming women and girls around the world. As is often the case, the world’s poorest are suffering the most. Every year 47,000 women die from unsafe abortions, and millions more suffer serious life-threatening injuries.
Let us be clear on unsafe abortions. Denying a woman access to abortion in situations of rape, of incest and of endangerment of the mother’s life is an act that coerces a woman to continue a pregnancy against her will, infringing her dignity and autonomy by severely restricting decision making in respect of her sexual and reproductive health. That pattern of coercive control over women’s rights to health and autonomy can result in physical and psychological harm, and can amount to a state-sanctioned pattern of gender-based violence.
As such, I wish to highlight the concern that overall investment and commitments to eradicate unsafe abortion are being diluted and diverted in light of misinterpretation of guidelines from the United States Agency for International Development, with disastrous and often fatal consequences for women and children. DFID has recently said:
“On access to abortion services, UK policy is clear: the UK development budget can be used, without exception, to provide safe abortion care where necessary, and to the extent allowed by national laws.”
That clarity is to be commended. Will the Government now give guarantees that they will tackle the matter head on and ask the US to lift the practice of banning funding for abortion services?
I wish to draw attention to the commendable work of many non-governmental organisations—including the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International—that are working with displaced populations in conflict areas to provide training and support on the provision of abortion services. That includes work to improve access to information and to sexual and reproductive health services for communities in humanitarian settings, initially throughout the Asia-Pacific region, where 3,900 professionals have been trained in 18 countries and 76 in-house trainings have been rolled out. In addition to training professionals working in crisis and post-crisis situations, that work also co-ordinates key health and relief agencies, providing regional and national level advocacy to politicians and policy makers, and provides technical assistance and dissemination of information to professionals in humanitarian settings. In light of its success, regional training is also being rolled out in Africa and the middle east and north African region, in partnership with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the UK Family Planning Association.
The United Nations Security Council and Secretary-General agree that victims of rape in armed conflict must be provided with the option of abortion. On October 18 2013, the Security Council unanimously passed resolution 2122, a groundbreaking resolution supporting abortion services for girls and women impregnated by war rape. Although the Security Council does not use the term abortion in resolution 2122, its language makes clear that member states and the UN must ensure that all options are given to women impregnated by war rape, stating that it notes
“the need for access to the full range of sexual and reproductive health services, including regarding pregnancies resulting from rape, without discrimination”.
That provision directly responds to the Secretary-General’s recommendation to the Security Council in September 2013 that girls and women raped in armed conflict must be ensured access to
“services for safe termination of pregnancies resulting from rape, without discrimination and in accordance with international human rights and humanitarian law.”
That language reaffirms that medical care for girls and women raped in war is governed by the Geneva conventions rather than national or local abortion laws.
I will finish there, so that other Members have the chance to join in the debate.
Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Brooke. I am also pleased to follow the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne).
This important debate about violence against women and girls follows the publication of the International Development Committee’s report, the contents of which the Chair of the Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce), has outlined. Violence against women and girls is a wide-reaching issue. Globally, one in three women will experience one type of gender-based violence or another in their lifetime. Although such violence is first and foremost an abuse of basic human rights, and, in some cases, even child abuse, it has other more wide-ranging societal implications, which the Department for International Development should address when apportioning aid.
One of the most shocking forms of violence committed against women worldwide, already mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Chair of the Committee, is undoubtedly female genital mutilation. Globally, up to 140 million girls have been subjected to the practice. The issue is all the more concerning when we consider that FGM is a culturally institutionalised practice and in some countries is endemic; the percentage of girls having undergone the procedure in Somalia and Kurdistan stands at 98% and 70% respectively. It is practised in about 28 countries worldwide.
I am pleased that DFID has recognised the need to step into the breach, as international donor support has been low, and that it has dedicated £35 million, along with programming, to
“end female genital mutilation in one generation.”
I am also encouraged by how DFID aims to do that. The Chair of the Select Committee mentioned the project we saw in Ethiopia—a powerful project about village empowerment to educate people against such practices. We saw that in action. Only by teaching communities about female genital mutilation and the complications it causes can they be made aware of the true brutality of the practice. I believe that in patriarchal societies such as those we have mentioned, such education should be focused on men and boys, especially village elders and religious leaders, as well as women and girls.
Alarmingly, however, FGM is not confined to far-away countries. Figures in a recent report showed that, as those who have been working for up to 30 years to stop the practice in Britain know, the incidence of FGM here has increased considerably over recent years. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children reports that last year 70 women sought treatment for injuries sustained during the procedure and illnesses associated with the practice. Some cases even led to death.
Of course, those figures are not entirely representative of the true extent of the problem, as many women fear the consequences of telling the authorities. That makes it difficult for the police and prosecutors to identify cases of FGM, and to date there has never been a prosecution under the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 here in Britain. That situation presents law enforcement authorities with something of a problem, and I would welcome mandatory reporting by doctors, nurses and other health professionals, and teachers who feel that their pupils are in danger of either having the cutting done here or of being taken back to their home community to have it done.
It is important that public bodies are taught that FGM is not a culturally sensitive issue but a crime that needs to be reported to protect the girls whom it affects. It is child abuse, and until there has been a prosecution the practice will continue unabated. It is against British law and punishable in the courts. Why are the safeguarding boards not shouting from the roof tops about the issue? All those entrusted with protecting children, young people and women need to start taking a much more robust approach.
I am sorry to say that France’s record is much better than ours. It has had around 100 prosecutions to date and is setting a good example. We should look at what it has done and how, and then do the same. It is shocking that some French girls are sent here to be mutilated in this country. Why do we not change the law to prosecute the parents of girls who have been cut? The children are supposed to be under their protection, but the parents allow that to happen. They have been complicit, even when they have not done the cutting themselves. When a few parents have been prosecuted, more will think twice about the practice.
I pay tribute to the work of the previous chairman of the all-party group on genital mutilation, my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison), who is now a Health Minister and is following up every avenue she can. I have taken her place, and will be working with communities here in the UK to make progress on this issue.
Forced marriage, which was not mentioned in this report, is another area where fear of offending cultural sensibilities is seriously affecting the rights of young women. For some time now, I have been involved with a charity, Karma Nirvana in Derby, which runs a helpline service for men and women affected by the practice. It is run by Jasvinder Sanghera, who was herself a victim of forced marriage. Every year, Karma Nirvana writes to schools throughout the country to circulate information and literature promoting awareness of the issue, but to date only nine schools have responded to the initiative.
When Karma Nirvana launched its new poster campaign earlier this year, only two schools signed up. Some head teachers have torn them down from notice boards for fear of upsetting cultural sensibilities. Again, this is child abuse, and despite the disappointing figures, it is essential that schools take some responsibility in combating forced marriages because they know their pupils and should highlight possible victims. Some 35% of victims are school-age children.
I am aware that the offence of forcing someone into marriage against their will is set to enter the statute book later this year, but schools, other public agencies and the media are turning a blind eye to the problem. When a teacher and a white female pupil ran away to France last year, the media reported it every day for more than a week until they were found. There may be hundreds of Asian girls going missing every year, but that is not reported in the news. Those girls are British but not white. Is that the difference? If so, could we not blame the media for racial discrimination?
Shafilea Ahmed was murdered by her parents in 2003 after refusing to enter into an arranged marriage. She told five separate organisations that she was at risk, but all failed to act on her warnings. The police even attempted to provide mediation between her and her parents, who later took her life. It is clear that cultural sensitivity overrode the need to protect that young girl. Could that be called honour-based violence? Where is the honour in murdering your own child?
Jasvinder Sanghera’s sister poured petrol over herself and set herself alight, burning herself to death after being forced to marry a man she did not want to be with. There are countless similar stories, but time prevents me from going through them.
It is essential that the Committee should lend its support nationally and internationally to stamping out this social evil. A recent report by Demos praised the Department for International Development for its work in providing assistance and aid for victims of forced marriage, but there is so much more to be done. Greater co-ordination between in-country DFID representatives and Foreign and Commonwealth Office consular staff is paramount in promoting the regional presence of the forced marriage unit, allowing girls who are forcibly taken abroad to marry to be brought back safely to the UK. Perhaps there should be similar units in countries that practise FGM so that they can act when they suspect that a child has been taken to a country for the specific reason of cutting.
It is important to raise the issue of future funding for Karma Nirvana. It has taken 30,000 calls since 2008, but it is unsure whether its funding stream from the Ministry of Justice will be in place after September. It is the only charity providing hotline support for those experiencing honour-based abuse and forced marriage. It is obvious that forced marriage is not a small problem, and when the law against it comes into force it follows logically that the demand for support services will increase. I urge the Minister to make representations to the Minister with the relevant responsibility to ensure continued funding.
The Committee’s report makes important recommendations for ending barbaric practices such as FGM. I am pleased that it suggests doing that through education. I understand that DFID is undertaking initiatives to eradicate forced marriage, but it is important for the Committee to have further discussions on the issue to evaluate how we can further encourage efforts at home and abroad.
Annette Brooke (in the Chair)
Order. We are down to about nine minutes per speech.
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.
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Brooke. I pay tribute to those who spoke before me, and I will comment particularly on the powerful message from my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) about the need to stand up against things happening in this country that must be exposed and not hidden away—female genital mutilation, and early and forced marriage.
I very much—perhaps “enjoyed” is the wrong word—appreciated being part of the inquiry by the International Development Committee. I confess that I had not given enough thought to this issue over the years, and the process opened my eyes to the extent of violence against women and girls, not only in the developing world but, as we have heard, in the developed world. I am pleased that the Government have made the issue a focus of their work, led by the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for International Development, and by Ministers in the Department for International Development, including the former Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Mr O’Brien), and the current Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone), who has rightly championed the issue and made it a focus of her work.
The issue was particularly brought home to me by three students who approached me from King Edward VI school in Stafford, in my constituency. Those three girls—Maya Lucey, Amy Mace and Chloe Taylor—wrote to me saying that they would like to speak with me about it. I had not spoken to them about it before, but what they had heard in the press and elsewhere had made them concerned about female genital mutilation in the UK. I had the pleasure of meeting and speaking to them last Friday, or rather of listening to what they had to say. I was profoundly impressed not only by the extent of their knowledge, but by their commitment to stopping FGM in this country. I pledged that I would do what I could to raise the matter in this debate and to supporting all the work that my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire and others continue to do in Parliament. I pay tribute to the girls’ teacher, Mrs Jo Bentham, who ensured that they were supported in talking about an issue that is particularly difficult for some people of their age to raise.
Members have already discussed the statistics on FGM prevalence rates. They are as high as 98% in Somalia and 94% in Sierra Leone; I will mention Sierra Leone a bit later. An estimated 3.3 million girls a year globally are still at risk from the practice. A study conducted in 2007 by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the City university midwifery department, using modelled estimates, concluded that 66,000 women resident in England and Wales had undergone FGM, and that 23,000 girls under the age of 15 were at risk of it. This matter is of great importance not just in countries in the remit of the Department for International Development, but right here on our doorstep. I welcome the work being done by DFID. We understand that, in March 2013, it dedicated £35 million to ending FGM in one generation. Part of that money will fund social change, communications and research. The goal is ambitious and worthy, and I congratulate DFID on its commitment.
In the time remaining to me, I will concentrate on the vital matter of changing social norms. I well remember living in Tanzania and having a good friend from an area where FGM was the norm—everybody allowed their young daughters to be subjected to it. He was determined that that should not be the case for his daughters, and instead of taking a negative or critical approach, he stood up and said, “We’re not going to allow our daughters to go through this. We are setting an example.” That comes back to a point made by previous speakers: it is vital that we engage communities, not just lecture them. We must work with women’s groups, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire said, and with men and boys, to say that FGM is completely unacceptable.
I want briefly to address the question of early marriage, and one problem that it brings and to which FGM contributes: fistulas. When I was in Sierra Leone at the end of last year, I visited the Aberdeen Women’s Centre in Freetown, which has been equipped through generous donations from Scotland, in particular, and from Ann Gloag. We saw women there, some of them very young, whose lives were being transformed by the repair of their fistulas, which had developed largely as a result of their being married and giving birth at an early age. It made an enormous difference to them. Without it, they would have been almost outcast and ashamed to be in society.
We have heard about the critical matter of water and sanitation. While I was living in Tanzania and my wife was running a public health programme there, one key thing that she wanted was for shallow wells to be drilled in every village to enable women and girls to get water locally, rather than having to travel 5 km, 6 km or 7 km for it. Such travelling not only meant that they could not receive education, but put them and their mothers at risk of violence. The project made a big difference, especially as the community was involved in not only raising the money for the wells and pumps in the first place, but maintaining them. One could see that when a community was committed to the well-being of the girls and women in their midst, it was quick to raise the necessary money.
I conclude by again commending the Government’s work in this area. We must ensure that it continues and is not a theme for only a year. It has to be a theme for this Government and many Governments—and for many generations. That is so obvious, yet it sometimes seems to escape our notice.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
Like most hon. Members, I want to focus on one aspect of violence against women and girls: female genital mutilation. I believe that our concern reflects that of the public, and that was brought home to me when I was asked to do several media interviews following the publication of our Committee’s report, because every one of them focused on concern about FGM in this country. I believe that once people become aware of the issue, they want resources allocated to address it. I welcome the prioritisation that DFID is giving FGM by providing £35 million towards the ambitious aspiration of ending it in a generation. I want to touch on the practice here and abroad, and to update Members on one or two statistics that have been published since the Committee published its report. I will finish by asking the Minister some questions.
As we have heard, a terrifying number of girls are affected—140 million. According to UNICEF, 98% of women and girls in Somalia are affected. In Guinea, 96% are affected; in Egypt, 91%; in Eritrea, 89%; in Sierra Leone, 88%; in Ethiopia, 74%; in Sudan, 88%; in Gambia, 76%; and in Burkina Faso, 76%. The practice also occurs in many countries outside Africa, so it is a truly global problem. In recent decades, the practice has grown significantly among the migrant communities of north America, Scandinavia, Europe and the UK.
Our Committee was shocked to receive statistics for this country from the Department of Health. A 2007 report indicated that about 66,000 women and girls in the UK had undergone FGM and that more than 20,000 girls aged under 15 were at risk. However, those figures may well have been a gross underestimate. I had the privilege of sponsoring the launch in the House this week of a report from the New Culture Forum. That report extrapolated figures from the 2011 census data, whereas the figures that I cited were from the 2001 census. The number of women and girls living with FGM from migrant communities is highly likely to have increased over those years. It is now estimated that the figures could be about three times those that the Committee received, meaning that about 170,000 could have undergone FGM, and about 65,000 girls aged 13 and under could be at risk of mutilation.
The New Culture Forum report also includes thought-provoking comments, one of which is the frequently made statement that it is now almost 30 years since legislation was enacted to outlaw the practice—the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985—yet
“not a single successful prosecution has been brought against FGM practitioners.”
It is interesting to note that we are behind Kenya in that respect, as it has brought at least three successful prosecutions. As has been mentioned, France has brought many more. However, it is not only 30 years since legislation prohibiting the practice was enacted, because legislation relevant to it actually goes back as far as 1861, as what is happening is grievous bodily harm. It is child sexual abuse of the worst possible nature, so we really must do all that we can to break down what the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has called a “wall of silence” that is inhibiting prosecutions in this country.
We need to ensure that professionals in the field, including criminal prosecutors and health care practitioners, receive adequate training, and that there is engagement and education within FGM-practising communities. As many Members have said, FGM is a cultural practice that has to be changed.
There is a difficultly with compiling evidence. Only this week, we heard that hospitals are failing to report FGM as they should, because
“161 hospitals that responded to a Freedom of Information request, 83 said that they did not formally record FGM cases.”
That has to change. This week we heard that the chief inspector of constabulary, Tom Winsor, was reported as saying:
“Police are never called by certain minority communities because they administer their own justice even in cases as serious as…sexual assaults on children.”
That also has to change.
The most important factor in inhibiting action is excessive cultural sensitivity, which is simply a reluctance to combat the practice of FGM for fear of appearing reactionary or prejudiced. The profound irony is that that perspective generates a discrimination of its own as the victims remain unprotected precisely because of their race. It is interesting that the Council of Europe has clearly dismissed arguments of political correctness, stating:
“It is a matter of urgency to make a distinction between the need to tolerate and protect minority cultures and turning a blind eye to customs that amount to torture and inhuman or barbaric treatment”
of this type.
As a French lawyer said at the event that I was privileged to sponsor this week, “You cannot use the excuse, ‘It’s their culture.’ Torture is not culture.”
In most cases, parents and/or grandparents—the very people a child would expect to provide them with protection—are present at the act, and it is often conducted at their instigation. It is heart-rending to hear some of the recordings of a child crying out, “Mummy, Mummy” during the act. This is not only about all the physical damage that we have heard of today, as the psychological and mental damage that the children—they are often aged between six and 12—suffer cannot be calculated.
I turn to several questions to which I would like the Minister to respond. First, although our Committee welcomes DFID’s announcement of £35 million for a programme to end FGM in a generation, if that aspiration is to be met, the funding needs to be invested sensitively and carefully. I remind the Minister of the Committee’s recommendation of adopting a “phased and flexible” approach to ensure that evidence-based programming is conducted. Will she update us on progress with regard to the use of that £35 million to tackle FGM worldwide?
Secondly, will the Minister confirm reports of how the Metropolitan police are approaching the issue? I understand that they have reopened some FGM cases. How confident is the Minister that that will lead to a prosecution in this country? It is clear that we need to put aside political correctness and adopt a far more robust, cross-agency approach in which the police proactively track girls at risk. Our Committee has recommended the publication of an up-to-date, binding document requiring all health service providers, the Department of Health, the Department for Education, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office, the Government Equalities Office, the police, the Ministry of Justice and the Crown Prosecution Service to play their part. Will she look again at that? Is it not the case that unless we have joined-up working, we will not be able to tackle FGM in this country? Even more so, unless we have international joined-up working, and learn from good practice and success in other countries, we will not achieve our global aspiration. This massive challenge requires joint working by as many agencies as possible.
The Committee noted that the Government disagreed with our report’s recommendation that a cross-Whitehall strategy for tackling FGM should be published, as they said that they already had an action plan in place. Why, as the Prime Minister himself admitted earlier this month, do we therefore still lack results on stamping out this practice in the UK? During our inquiry, we discovered that there was no consistent data collection on FGM in the NHS. Will the Minister assure us that the Government will start collecting information routinely about at-risk babies and girls, and that that information will be used to take action?
We welcome the action already taken by DFID and its financial commitment. However, we highlight in particular that although robust action must be taken, it needs to be culturally applicable and there has to be joint working, both within and outside the UK.
Dame Angela Watkinson (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Brooke. I shall keep a close eye on the clock.
I speak as a delegate of the Council of Europe, which has 47 member countries across geographical Europe—it is much larger than the European Union. Its purpose is to uphold three things: democracy, the rule of law and human rights. All those categories come within the subject of this debate, but none more so than human rights. We are going on our first quarterly visit next week, but on our last visit we happened to go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, where we were reminded that it was set up to prevent gross abuses of human rights, rather than to address some of the trivial things that it is asked to decide on these days. We were interested to find that 97% of the applications to it from the United Kingdom are rejected on the grounds that they are inadmissible or inappropriate. The sort of gross abuses that took place during the second world war, for example, gave rise to the body’s creation.
I wish to speak briefly about the horror of the use of rape as a weapon of war. The results of that are not just the psychological, emotional and physical damage that sufferers live with for the rest of their lives, but the cultural rejection that comes with it. Victims often have no means of earning a living and are condemned to a life of extreme poverty and isolation.
However, I want to focus mainly on the subject that almost every other speaker has spoken about: female genital mutilation. That most grotesque, barbaric practice amounts to torture. It is illegal in this country and is a gross breach of human rights. It was probably during my first Parliament that I served on the Committee that considered the Bill that made it illegal to remove girls from this country and take them abroad to undergo this practice. Another member of that Committee was the then Liberal Democrat Member, Dr Jenny Tonge. We all agreed before our proceedings started—hon. Members on both sides of the Committee were of the same mind—that there was no need to enter into any graphic descriptions, but Jenny Tonge, as a doctor, did embark on the most graphic descriptions of what happens to victims. I will not name the male colleague who was with me, but he was so affected by that that he went very pale and almost passed out in his chair.
The Bill’s purpose was to stop the practice happening, but of course it has not, given the extreme difficulty of enforcement and of finding anyone who is willing to provide evidence. There is often collusion among older women in the cultural groups that still uphold this practice, which is often carried out in unsterile conditions. The victims suffer infection, chronic health problems for the rest of their lives, and real trauma during marriage and childbirth.
We must try to deal with this practice in many ways, including through diplomacy between countries and Governments, and do whatever we can to bring it to an end. It involves the most appalling subjugation of women. An estimated 140 million women in Africa and the middle east, and 66,000 women living in this country, have suffered FGM. A further 20,000 girls in this country are estimated to be at risk. However, it is extremely difficult to obtain evidence about what happens, and then it is only after the event, although even that has a purpose. If we could just secure some convictions, it would help to deter further instances of this practice, break the cultural habit and make people realise that FGM is illegal in this country.
One hundred years ago, women in this country rose up to demand their human rights. Women in other countries need to do that, and we need to do whatever we can to find strong women in the countries in which the practice prevails and to help them to speak out and rise up there, because that will be the most effective way of getting this dreadful practice stopped.
Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)
I am grateful to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Brooke. There have been many well informed speeches today. I welcome the broad approach of the Government in making this a strategic issue in the work of the Department for International Development, but it is also right to raise some of the concerns flagged up in the Select Committee report.
Violence against women is a violation that cannot be justified by any political, religious or cultural claim. Around the world, violence against women and girls takes many grotesque forms, a lot of which have been raised in this debate. One in three women will face violence in their lifetimes: that is 1 billion women and girls—1 billion stories of violence against women. However, that is not a stagnant statistic; there are a number of situations happening now, globally, that should spur our focus on this issue.
There is the vulnerable situation faced by women and girls in the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan. Early reports indicated that the collapse in law and order, the widespread displacement of people and the distress, disruption and sheer desperation following a disaster of that magnitude had put more than 65,000 women and girls at risk of sexual abuse and trafficking. There were the 4,000 incidents of violence against women documented in just six months by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. Those incidents included maiming and amputation of body parts, acid attacks, kickings, beating with a wire, pulling out of hair and burning, rape, prostitution and forced abortion. That highlights the precarious situation of women on the eve of our withdrawal from Afghanistan. There is the worsening situation undoubtedly faced by women and girls in the Central African Republic, in Syria and in South Sudan as violence in those fragile states escalates.
Women and girls who experience violence suffer from a range of physical and psychological health problems. It diminishes their ability and confidence to participate in normal human activities and public life and cripples their contribution to development and peace. In doing so, violence against women impoverishes not only women, but their families, their communities and, ultimately, entire nation states.
However, at our worst, we have allowed fears of cultural insensitivity to overpower and suppress our moral obligation to stand up for women worldwide. We have allowed abusers to go unpunished for their crimes. We have allowed violence against women not to get the reckoning and retribution that it deserves and let it be removed, at times, from the international agenda. Perhaps most shockingly, we allowed it to be negotiated out of the millennium development goals. At this crucial time, we cannot and must not allow that to happen again.
The Government’s determination to tackle the collusive silence that surrounds debate on this issue is laudable, although I am concerned that on some levels that approach is flawed. The International Development Committee’s second report of this Session highlighted important ways in which we can strengthen our approach to tackling violence against women and girls.
Specifically, the report spoke of the danger of DFID’s narrow focus on reactive support services above proactive, transformative projects that deal with the underlying causes of violence. The report found that of 117 interventions listed by DFID, just 16 were aimed at changing social norms. Instead, the majority focus on building institutional capacity to respond to acts of violence—supporting survivors to access justice or the protective care and support services that they need.
The report recommended a fundamental shift in emphasis. Gender activists have supported that call, saying that they have often found it difficult, particularly at country level, to see how DFID is challenging social norms and that evidence of DFID’s much lauded and commendable “Theory of Change” being mainstreamed into key DFID programmes can sometimes be scant. In their response to the report, the Government agreed. In answer to the concerns raised, they highlighted
“ongoing efforts to deliver our commitment to help ten million women and girls access security and justice services by 2015.”
At the end of last year, DFID published another strategy entitled “Addressing Violence against Women and Girls through security and justice programming”. I acknowledge freely that it is not an either/or, but I am concerned that that invades the principal recommendation that stems from the report. Will the Minister respond to that?
Although investment in security and justice systems is a crucial building block for violence prevention, establishing accountability and redress, evidence shows that better-functioning institutions will have limited impact on the reduction of violence against women and girls unless efforts are also made to tackle the root causes of violence: women’s lack of power and discriminatory social norms.
The strategy states that one of its key objectives is to protect women and girls from all forms of violence and the threat of violence, but only seven of the 44 case studies listed across the two guidance notes make any attempt to prevent violence against women and girls; the other 37 case studies refer solely to the provision of services after violence has been committed. Moreover, it appears that we often fail to follow our own advice. The guidance asserts in bold:
“Any training or awareness raising work”—
of security and justice actors, including soldiers, occupying forces, peacekeeping forces or demobilised troops—
“must focus on improving knowledge and changing attitudes and changing behaviours.”
That is at odds with the tone used by the Prime Minister when he gave evidence to the Liaison Committee last week:
“We cannot ask our soldiers, sailors and airmen to do too many different things. They need clear instructions and a clear goal, but, yes, that can be part of it.”
The “that” is the role of UK armed forces in training overseas forces about violence against women. The guidance stresses the importance of informal provision and the role of women’s rights organisations and states that
“supporting women’s organisations and other CSOs to lobby for policy reforms and support implementation is a key priority”.
However, Womenkind Worldwide highlighted the concern that despite their enormous added value, many women’s rights organisations have not received the resources that they need to scale up their delivery and influence. They suffer from a shortage of funding that commits beyond an annual cycle. Womenkind Worldwide undertook analysis that showed that UK aid funding amounted to $16.41 million in 2011, compared with, for example, $118.6 million in the Netherlands and more in other countries. Very few southern-based women’s rights organisations are direct recipients of DFID centralised funds, and only one women’s rights organisation, Gender Links, was found to be funded under the programme partnership arrangement fund. No direct grants were found to be offering support under the civil society challenge fund.
I appreciate that we are dealing with a difficult area in which there are many competing needs, but surely there must be a shift towards tackling views among men and boys as well as protecting women and girls from violence. That is an issue not only further afield but in this country, so we should look at our views and those of others. Analysis by Amnesty International highlighted the fact that only three of 27 DFID country programmes have identified violence against women and girls as a strategic priority.
In the Government’s response to the International Development Committee’s report, much is made of the newly announced research and innovation fund, which is mentioned 12 times in the 24 pages. Although more research is welcome, I remain concerned that the research component is unlikely to be activated until later this year, and that only £25 million has been allocated, with no commitment on length, amount or protection of future funding. I am concerned that that fund may delay our response to this crucial issue. It is important that research goes hand in hand with active country programmes that challenge the perceptions of men and boys about violence against women and girls. The fund must not be treated as an omnipotent panacea. I welcome the Government’s response on those issues.
The International Development Committee’s report raises crucial questions and highlights some important ways in which we can strengthen our response. Although I stand four-square behind the Government’s approach of making the matter a strategic priority, I hope that the Minister will reflect on some of the areas of the report in which the Committee wanted DFID to do more or do things differently.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Lynne Featherstone)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Brooke. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce) on securing this important debate, and I thank the International Development Committee for providing a wide-ranging and thought-provoking report on the critical issues that we have discussed, to which my Department has formally replied. I thank all those who provided evidence to that Committee, and I thank the hon. Members for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy), for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham), for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), for Hornchurch and Upminster (Dame Angela Watkinson), for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne), for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) and for Luton South (Gavin Shuker)—my opposite number—for their contributions. We are discussing an issue about which everyone is concerned, and on which everyone is committed to moving forward.
Tackling violence is a human rights and development necessity, and it is a priority for the UK Government. Many points have been raised in the debate, and I will address as many as possible in the time that I have. Since the International Development Committee presented its report on the Government’s work in this area, there have been several developments. Following the recommendation in the report, in November I updated the House in my role as ministerial champion for tackling violence against women and girls overseas on progress on tackling violence against women and girls.
I will address the issues on female genital mutilation more fully in a moment, but during the past two weeks, for example, I have organised and attended meetings with other cross-Whitehall Ministries. I met religious leaders—an important part of our armoury in tackling FGM—and representatives of the teachers’ unions. They, and indeed everyone, must be partners in this mission.
On 13 November, the Secretary of State for International Development, my right hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Justine Greening), convened with Sweden the “Keep her safe” event, which brought together UN and NGO leaders and senior Government officials from across the international humanitarian system. They agreed a fundamental new approach to protecting girls and women in emergency situations, which the hon. Member for Luton South raised, to ensure that their needs are addressed as part of the initial response. At the event, £21.6 million in new UK funding was announced to help implement those commitments and protect girls and women in all emergencies.
In line with the Committee’s recommendations, DFID continues to scale up the implementation of programming about violence against women and girls. In Afghanistan, we recently announced a new £18.5 million funding package to help support women, which will strengthen access to justice for women who are victims of violence and raise public awareness of women’s rights.
The hon. Member for Luton South raised access to justice and the balance that had to be struck. That ties in with the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative, which deals with the matter at the sharp end, where rape is used as a weapon of war. If there is impunity, we cannot move forward. Just as with preventing sexual violence in conflict, access to justice must go hand in hand with a change in social norms.
In Somalia, to bring gender issues to the forefront of our work, DFID recently created an internal gender policy group, which is led and chaired by senior management and has representatives from each sector. The scale-up is being supported by robust evidence from sources such as the violence against women and girls help desk, which has provided support to DFID country offices, and further DFID guidance on addressing violence against women and girls through security and justice programming. That note is part of a series of DFID guidance notes on violence against women and girls, and it will further support our scale-up efforts by providing practical advice to staff and other UK Departments.
The £25 million research and innovation fund to address violence against women and girls will support programme implementation and scale-up by generating evidence on what works for the prevention of such violence. Although I share the frustration at the time that some such measures will take, some of them will go into play very soon. When we scale up, we must be sure that we are making an impact on behalf of British taxpayers and doing something that works, not something that we rush into only to discover that it was not what we needed to do.
I have many points to address. My right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon asked about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria and South Sudan, and whether VAWG would be prioritised. We are currently in the process of a round of resource allocation across all DFID offices, and we are looking in detail at how we can most effectively scale up our VAWG programmes. I have mentioned Somalia, but in Nigeria we have a major programme, “Voices for Change,” to tackle the underlying causes of VAWG and gender inequality. DFID and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are working closely on VAWG programmes in DRC, ensuring preventative action and effective responses to survivors.
I was asked what we are doing about water, sanitation and hygiene, or WASH. DFID has produced a new briefing note on violence against women and girls in emergencies, and over the next year will also produce guidance on how water and sanitation sector programmes can address such violence. Importantly, through the sanitation and hygiene applied research for equity programme—SHARE—DFID has funded development of a violence, gender and WASH practitioner toolkit, which will be available this year.
I was asked how we are ensuring that VAWG is prioritised in multilateral agencies. We are keen to ensure that VAWG is a high priority in multilaterals. UN Women is a key partner in such matters, and DFID helps to fund it. The call to action in November last year that I described secured commitments from a wide range of UN agencies to put women and girls at the heart of their humanitarian response. That includes protecting them from violence. It was a pledge not so much on finance, but on what UN agencies would do under the circumstances.
A lot of right hon. and hon. Members raised the issue of female genital mutilation, an issue about which I am passionate. I think that that comes from frustration, having spent two and a half years at the Home Office. Our diaspora is intrinsically linked with the developing world but there has been a lack of prosecutions. We were challenged on the latter continually, but I must also say that there were no prosecutions under the 13 years of the previous Government.
FGM is a major issue. I am sure that we all recognise how challenging it is for a child to give evidence against their parent. As many Members said, FGM is child abuse and it is illegal, so the inevitable consequences are that the child will be removed from the parents virtually as soon as it is known that something has happened. That has been the great inhibitor. It is important that we have prosecutions, as much as anything because of the message that they send out. The answer is clearly not to send 20,000 sets of parents to jail, but the message that FGM is illegal and unacceptable is very important.
The Minister for Crime Prevention, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), is champing at the bit on this issue. He is working closely with the Director of Public Prosecutions, who believes that we are very near to the first few prosecutions. Part of the issue has been getting preparatory evidence on computers. That way, the process might not necessarily involve a child victim giving evidence in court—there will be evidence of plans to take a child to a mother country to have them cut. We are optimistic about prosecutions. I could not agree more with those Members who said that we must not tiptoe on cultural eggshells. For a long time, that has been the problem and a challenge. I am clear that that can have no standing. FGM is against our laws.
The hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire asked about what happens in France. They examine every girl every year until the age of six, as part of other examinations. When I met with my opposite number in France, she said, “You know, we just have a little look.” Given that there is no question about 99% of our population—they do not practise FGM—that would not necessarily be the best use of resources for us. There must be continual pressure from the Metropolitan police and the other forces around the country that were mentioned. They are now proactively looking for those who are perpetrating FGM and seeking to prosecute them.
Many Members also raised the point that our work should be much more to do with awareness and getting into and working with communities. The women of our Somali communities are very hidden. When I visited a school in Bristol, the first primary school in the country that has an FGM safeguarding policy and brings in the Somali mothers, that was the first time that they had all met to be able to discuss such things. The issues are not discussed in the way that we might in this country—the women are very isolated. That is why I have been trying to involve religious and community leaders, alongside those agencies that are working in this field and are best able to get into the communities and to deal with awareness.
I have also involved the TUC and the teaching unions, because they have an opportunity to look at teacher training and other such issues. Indeed, I am working with other Ministers on safeguarding, because the issues are hugely important. The Home Office produced guidelines—I am going to run out of time—for front-line workers, but we were shocked to find that eight out of 10 teachers do not even know about the guidelines, so we are working with the Department for Education on raising awareness about such issues.
I could not agree more with the view that we must be flexible with funding. However, the £35 million that was raised is, in a sense, to get things started. We need to find out what is right—part of the money goes on gathering evidence; part of it goes on social change. The funding helps to support the African movement, as well as the UN resolution banning FGM.
Early and forced marriage is very much in the same vein as FGM, inasmuch as both are social norms. That is a terrible indictment, because such norms are the most deep-seated and hardest things to change. That is why I am particularly interested in behavioural change. We continue to work with Girls Not Brides to develop a global theory of change on early and forced marriage, to underpin the new programmes.
Lynne Featherstone
I have only half a second, so I hope that the hon. Lady will forgive me if I do not.
We are pushing for an ambitious and stand-alone goal on gender for 2015, including strong target language on preventing and eliminating VAWG, as set out in the high-level panel report. It is feasible to have an ultimate target of eliminating VAWG and to measure progress towards that as we do for other ambitious goals, such as that for ending hunger.
I want quickly to address stoning in Afghanistan. Women and girls there continue to face huge issues. The proposal to reinstate stoning is symptomatic of the situation in which women and girls find themselves. In fact, I met the Afghan Minister for Education only yesterday. I raised the issue of violence against women and girls in schools in Afghanistan. He gave me many assurances, but one challenge in Afghanistan is that things are decentralising. Individual communities are going to be far from central control.
I must finish there. I am very sorry, but I will try to write to Members to answer the points that I could not address in such a short time.
Sir Malcolm Bruce
I thank the Minister and all Members who took part. We can see how strongly people feel about the issues we have been discussing, and how determined they are that we should maintain pressure to improve the situation and make progress.
Last week, I asked the Prime Minister whether the conflict, stability and security fund would have specific targets for violence against women and girls. He did not then know the answer and has not yet replied. I urge the Minister to get not only an answer but the right answer.
We have had a very good debate. I thank everyone who has taken part—both the members of my Committee and others. It was very much appreciated.
Question put and agreed to.