Violence against Women and Girls: London

Emily Darlington Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum) for securing this important debate and making such a great contribution, drawing on her personal experiences before widening it out to London, the country and the world. This issue does not have borders and is not limited to a single socioeconomic class, religion or area of the country.

I congratulate the Minister on the success of her domestic abuse protection orders, which hit 1,000 this week, in keeping survivors protected while they are at their most vulnerable. I thank Treasury Ministers for their financial inclusion strategy, which is starting to address economic abuse, and Ministry of Justice Ministers for tackling the ongoing abuse in family courts. We are all looking forward to the VAWG strategy: its publication and its ambition to halve violence against women and girls. That is a goal we can all get behind.

Although it is the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, we in Milton Keynes call it White Ribbon Day. I will focus on why that is and on prevention. Milton Keynes is the first White Ribbon city. White Ribbon is very close to my heart because it was started by men in Canada after the shooting at an École Polytechnique. A man went in and shot women engineering students because he had not got a place at engineering school. Like many of us here today, those men in Canada were sick and tired of the rhetoric that women were somehow at fault—maybe they should have locked the door of the classroom; maybe they should have behaved differently. They recognised that the problem was started by men and needed to be solved by men.

What does it mean for Milton Keynes to be a White Ribbon city? It means that more than 160 companies, organisations and charities have become White Ribbon accredited: from the YMCA to the MK Dons; from big corporations to small, niche ones; from voluntary groups to the city council; and from the police to the fire service. Thousands of individuals have also signed up, together making the pledge to never commit, excuse or remain silent about male violence against women.

We all know that this is not all men; the difficulty is that too often the majority of men, who would never consider committing or excusing such abuse, remain silent. The issue is about empowering them to be active bystanders and to know how to comfortably walk into a situation that does not feel right and call out their friends’ behaviours in pubs, changing rooms and other places. Alternatively, it is about empowering them to talk to a co-worker who used to be a fantastic, performing female colleague, but who has all of a sudden gone quiet: to know that there is a reason why and what to do with the answers.

We need to do this not only in Milton Keynes, but right across the country. MPs from across the House have signed up to White Ribbon. I thank Mr Speaker and the Madam Deputy Speakers for their commitment to making us the first White Ribbon Parliament in the world, setting an example for the country. I know they are progressing on that as quickly as they can. Parliament is a workplace, not a lifestyle. We have seen incidents right across this Estate that, unfortunately, do not bring it pride. The catering staff, the MPs and everyone else who works on the Estate need to feel safe, as do the visitors who have meetings and tours here. Members of Parliament must be held to the highest standards because we are setting the example against the misogyny promoted online.

I conclude by talking about the Online Safety Act 2023. There is a huge campaign against the Act, but it is making real progress. It does need to make further progress in some areas—not just releasing guidance on how platforms can help protect women, but also making it mandatory, doing work on deepfakes, addressing the 850,000 consumers of child sexual abuse imagery and tackling the grooming of children on gaming platforms and on end-to-end encrypted sites.

We can and must do more, and this is the moment. We have the Government commitment, we have personal ministerial commitments in different Departments and we have the cross-party commitment. We have the commitment and demand from voluntary groups, mums and dads, and our sisters and daughters. Today is the day we make that change.