Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Cash Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th December 2025 Lords Chamber

Ending honour-based abuse requires courage from all of us. It requires professionals who act, neighbours who refuse to look away and communities that reject violence in the name of honour. It requires survivors to be supported and to rebuild their lives with dignity. When we act together, either through prevention, protection, prosecution or partnership, we make it harder for abusers to hide and easier for victims to find safety.

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this important group. I am conscious of time, and it is late, but I really wanted to come back to a few things that the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, said. I hope that I have not misunderstood, but I confess to feeling a little confused.

It is very clear in the history of our criminal legislation in this country that introducing previous offences regarding violence against women and girls has had a significant impact and made a difference—for example, coercive and controlling behaviour; stalking, which, of course, does not apply just to women or girls; and female genital mutilation. In all cases, reporting, prosecutions and convictions increased, so the protections have been manifest.

The same applies here. I support wholeheartedly this group of amendments and am very grateful for the indication from the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, that there have been conversations. I trust that we are pushing at an open door on this. I declare an interest: as well as being a barrister, I spent many years running a behavioural science business. The naming of offences is extremely important in order for people to feel able to come forward. There is a wealth of behavioural science. I hope that a few of my points will reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, on some of the points she mentioned around the definition, because the reasons why we introduce these offences matter so very much. Honour abuse is so often defined as a family dispute, a cultural issue or something that is too sensitive for others to name. It does not matter which culture we are talking about or which motivation. The noble Baroness is absolutely right about that.

Something in behavioural science tells us, as we know from a wealth of research, that the cognitive availability, the salience of being able to name something, changes the outcome. Kahneman, Cialdini and others talk about how we need injunctive norms in society. It is why the criminal justice system operates so effectively. It tells communities and individuals, “This behaviour is not tolerated”. In the United Kingdom, domestic abuse reforms have consistently shown that explicitly naming conduct, whether it is coercive control, stalking or honour-based abuse—or, as it should really be called, honour-based excuse—shifts police practice, community practice and public understanding. It does not legitimise it. On the contrary, it shows that naming it in a prohibitive framework delegitimises it, collapses ambiguity and increases protection from all parts of the community around those victims. Public health research also shows that people seek help much more readily and quickly when they know that their experience matches a recognised category in law. The stigma is reduced and having recognition and validation of harm increases disclosure.

Naming something operates as a community-level intervention as well. We break pluralistic ignorance when we name a phenomenon such as honour-based abuse. Some noble Lords may know about a study carried out at Harvard University by the famous psychologists Prentice and Miller, who looked at students’ attitudes towards a culture of drinking. They all thought it was accepted by everyone else. The majority did not like it. They continued to go along with it because they did not realise that others felt the same as they did and that the majority view was not to support it. By doing that study and revealing that, Prentice and Miller empowered the students to take a stance and change their own behaviours. That is now well-established psychological research. That is why communities and individuals such as the very tragic victims that we have heard about today and their families, who continue to work, need this legislation and these offences to be named in the way that we are seeking.

It also increases bystander activation. People will get more involved and will understand that there is safety and support around them when they intervene as third parties. People are much more likely to act when they can say, “This is illegal, this feels wrong, this is wrong”. Teachers, GPs, neighbours and extended family members then all have the infrastructure within which to act.

The law functions in a very important way—sometimes, it feels, almost in a magical way. Maybe as a lawyer I would say that, but it does signal to everyone a focal point. It creates a place around which we can all convene and focus. It co-ordinates action where previously things might have gone unsaid and there may have been fear about raising an issue and talking about it. Families and professionals often know that something is wrong but fear acting alone. A statutory definition removes that hesitation and makes it clear where the authority and the power lie.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I rise, mercifully briefly, to come at this from a slightly different direction. Four years ago, when I was a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, we had a debate in the assembly specifically about honour-based abuse in the part-session in September 2021. The point I want to raise is that this is not a UK-only phenomenon but an international phenomenon, and I am putting forward the idea that there is something to be gained from looking at the experience and examples of attempts to deal with honour-based abuse in different jurisdictions. The report that the debate was about looked at the incidence of honour-based abuse and how it is being dealt with in countries such as Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Austria and the Netherlands. That was four years ago, so I suspect things have moved on since then. All I ask is that the Government are conscious of that when they are looking at the current state of international knowledge and the degree to which we can benefit from that.

Honour-based abuse comes underneath the Istanbul convention, which we have finally signed up to. Within that, there is an organisation called the Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, which has the acronym GREVIO. It has been in existence for about 15 years. I have just checked, and I am ashamed to say that, at the moment, while there is a lot of international representation on this body, there is not a single UK representative, nor has there ever been. I suggest that looking at what this committee does—because it focuses very much on this area—and seeing whether we could not potentially nominate somebody who could go and participate in that and learn from it would be a very good idea.

The only other thing I would say is in the context of the research that the rapporteur for this, who was a representative from Monaco, did. She spoke quite extensively to Nazir Afzal—somebody who I suspect the Minister knows—a prosecutor from the north of England who has been particularly heavily involved in this. One of the things he said really struck me. The report says:

“The crimes were strongly linked to cultural factors”,


particularly factors

“which strengthened … male power and aimed to prevent women from making choices”.

What really struck me was this:

“A 21-year-old man born and raised in England had told him that a man was like a piece of gold which you could clean if you dropped it in the mud, whereas a woman was like a piece of silk, which would be stained forever”.