Protecting Children in Conflict

Debate between Fiona O'Donnell and Tim Loughton

Thursday 3rd July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Fiona O’Donnell]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech. In looking at our record on international prosecutions for acts of sexual violence so far, would the suggestion made by one of his colleagues about having a local form of justice, rather the western developed world being seen to impose its standards on other countries, be a better way forward?

[Tim Loughton]

I absolutely agree. If there can be a home-grown solution—so that people have ownership of it, and it can be adapted to their cultures and to the baggage of tribal conflicts, histories and cultural identities that have been asserted through violence—that has to be better. Otherwise, there is a risk that the former colonial power is seen as trying to reassert its ways.

There are some common basic moral standards that we should not resile from asserting in the international context, including that children are children, not young adults to be sent into war zones or to become victims of war in all its ghastly forms. They are children, and we treat children differently—they need our protection and respect—whether they are in Khartoum, Boston, Worthing, East Lothian or anywhere else in the world. We should not resile from the expression of such international values, in which we should take pride.

The Government have already committed to providing more than £140 million to the survivors of sexual violence and their supporters. In the context of the many victims of historical cases of horrendous sexual abuse that have recently hit the headlines in the United Kingdom, a key factor is making sure that victims who have had the bravery to come forward get the support they need in order to come to terms with the trauma that befell them, often as children. In this debate, we are talking about victims who have perhaps seen their parents gruesomely killed in front of them, their homes burned, their sisters raped, or their brothers, sisters and school friends kidnapped and taken off into slavery or the sex trade. These children need our support, and they need rehabilitation to get over traumas caused by what happened in front of their eyes, which is why that project is so important. The Government have also called for all soldiers and peacekeepers to be trained not only to understand the gravity of sexual violence in conflict, but to help to prevent it and to protect people. Those are all practical measures that we can sometimes overlook.

The Government, particularly the Foreign Secretary, should be given great credit for the great initiative of the global summit to end sexual violence in conflict—quite rightly, it hit the media, including our television screens—which he co-hosted with the special envoy Angelina Jolie last month in the east end of London. It brought together more than 140 countries and more than 900 experts, making it the biggest global meeting ever convened on the issue. Let us hope that it was not just a talking shop, but that delegates from nations where such violence happens daily could take comfort, ideas and support, could make contacts and could engage with projects that will help them in the future.

The preventing sexual violence initiative—again, the Government are spearheading it—aims to strengthen and support international efforts to respond to sexual violence in conflict, including by enhancing the capacity of countries, institutions and communities to support survivors and to end impunity for perpetrators. A team of UK experts has been deployed to conflict-affected countries at the heart of the problem, such as Libya, Syria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Mali, to name but a few. The initiative provides good practical experience, and we should be proud that DFID, our Foreign Office and this Government are pioneering, leading and setting such an example on the global stage.

Education is absolutely vital in all this, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) mentioned. That is why I welcome DFID’s pledge that by 2015 it will spend half of its direct educational aid on unstable or war-torn countries where more than two fifths of the world’s out-of-school children are found and where a lack of education can contribute directly to conflict. In such a revolving doors scenario, kids are indoctrinated to hate other kids and families from other tribes and religions in other parts of the country. If they are brought up to accept that as normal, it is little surprise that they are susceptible to taking up arms when a conflict happens. We have to start at the beginning, by educating against conflict and the mentality of vehement retaliation right at the outset. Education is so important. The United Kingdom’s commitment of up to £300 million for the Global Partnership for Education over the next four years is therefore particularly welcome.

Many children out of school are marginalised and hard to reach, and nearly half of them live in fragile and conflict-affected areas. Marginalisation affects children right through the education system, from early education to university level. In post-conflict environments and fragile states, getting children back into school and addressing out-of-school youth, some of whom may have been child soldiers or refugees themselves, helps to bring back a sense of equity, justice and cohesion to what can be a fractured society. That has to be the start.

Girls’ education is a big issue. The girls’ education challenge will give up to 1 million of the world’s poorest girls the opportunity to improve their lives through education. The point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford was important: if more women were doing the educating—and, indeed, the negotiating before or after a conflict, as well—there might be a better chance of avoiding the worst excesses of conflict in the first place.

We will perhaps think of places such as Afghanistan, where under the Taliban regime girls were excluded from education. Despite all the horrors that have taken place in that country, one great success that we should never cease to emphasise is that so many young women and girls in Afghanistan now have the opportunity to get an education in school and to go on to university. We should never underestimate the importance of that. However, there are other countries, which are not in such familiar conflict zones, where young women do not get access to education. There is so much more to do, particularly in parts of Africa. That is why DFID’s priority of concentrating aid on getting more girls into education across the world is a good one that many of us can support.

I have seen projects in places such as Ghana. In my constituency, I run the EYE project—it stands for Eco, Young and Engaged—and every year we have an eco-summit; recently we had our seventh. A very enthusiastic local man called Jib Hagan runs a charity called CARE—Collecting and Recycling Ecologically. He collects old computers that are being thrown out by local schools and businesses, takes them to Ghana and puts them in schools, pre-loaded with lots of information about how to be more environmentally friendly, how girls can get better education, engagement in the democratic process and so on. In return, he brings back lots of wonderful shopping bags made from old plastic carrier bags by some of the kids and the families out there.

A few years ago, we did a satellite link-up with the British Council between one school in a very impoverished area whose pupils were using those computers and the 250 local kids at my eco-summit. Incredibly, the technology worked. British kids and Ghanaian kids in completely contrasting environments spoke to each other, and understood and empathised with one another. It was a wonderful moment. To see the advantage that a bit of old technology that we were throwing out had brought to those kids—it was going to transform their educational opportunities and, I hope, keep that country out of conflict—was deeply humbling, and a very proud moment for those of us who had helped to make it happen.

Girls’ education is a particularly important part of preventing conflict in the future. I will draw on a couple of examples. I do not need to go over all the statistics about what is happening in Syria at the moment, but there are now 2.3 million children in Syria who are out of school or at risk of dropping out of school. Many hundreds of thousands are refugees outside Syria, as well. I am due to visit some Syrian refugee camps in Jordan later this month—they are vast camps—just as some years ago in Syria I visited what was then the largest refugee camp run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the world. It was for Iraqis fleeing conflict who had gone to Damascus. I saw the great efforts of the UNHCR and other charities, which were trying to make sure that there was some normality in the lives of those kids. Getting some ongoing education for them was absolutely key. We must make sure that children who are displaced because of the horrible war dragging on in Syria can at least have some semblance of a normal childhood by continuing some form of education. The crisis in Syria has placed many women and girls at risk of violence, exploitation and insecurity. We often forget that.

Drawing on some of my previous trips, the very first parliamentary delegation that I went on, some 15 or so years ago, was to Ethiopia. That country had been riven by civil war under a particularly nasty Marxist regime. People had been driven out of their properties and sexual violence was part of the conflict. I remember visiting the Fistula hospital in Addis Ababa. It is a charity set up by some wonderful medics, where visiting clinicians go to help out. Daily I saw 12-year-old, 13-year-old and 14-year-old women—in some cases they had walked hundreds of miles—who had had bad experiences of giving birth because they had been too young. They were victims either of conflict, of misguided forced marriage or of being raped, effectively under the noses of their families in their villages, and had then been cast out. The only sanctuary and help they could get was by walking literally hundreds of miles to that wonderful hospital in Addis Ababa. The war in Ethiopia did huge damage but the country is, I hope, on a better path now.

I visited schools in the drought-affected areas, and, as I said earlier, kids were walking 10 miles or more each day to and from their homes to attend school, because it was such a big deal. They loved it. Nobody was playing hooky there; no truancy officer was needed. They went to school because their parents wanted them to go, as they could see it was a good thing. The kids themselves wanted to go to school and get an education, because that was their ladder out of poverty. It would stop them getting sucked into the conflict that so often happens in these impoverished zones, where people will fight over a little dustbowl of land.

I remember going to Mozambique—again, a country riven by vicious civil war over many, many years. There were many displaced kids who had fled parts of Mozambique and had gone to what they thought was the relative safety of South Africa, but had ended up in the sex trade. I worked with some hugely dedicated charities in Mozambique that were trying to rescue those kids.

A few years ago I went to Tajikistan, where I was taken to a school in Duschanbe, because I wanted to see some of the refugees from Afghanistan—there were a lot of them there. They asked me to give a class to kids of all different ages. They spoke wonderful English and were really enthusiastic about being there. They were there because they had been driven out of Afghanistan. There had been a big spate of kidnappings: brothers and sisters had been kidnapped; indeed, the teacher’s own children had been kidnapped and she had never seen them again. Tajikistan was giving them sanctuary, and had given them a school and some teaching resources, because the way forward is education.

There are many other subjects that we could mention in this debate. Forced marriages are another form of conflict, frankly. Female genital mutilation, of which we have been hearing so much recently, is another form of violence inflicted on children. It is not acceptable in the modern world, and we should not be afraid of saying so, whatever cultural differences might separate us from those people who say it is all right. It is not all right. It is not acceptable in this day and age. It is violence against girls and women.

There is no excuse for children being caught up in war and conflict. Children are different and special, and as adults we have a duty to do whatever we can to protect them, in this country or in any far-flung corner of the globe in which they are involved in conflict. In many of the countries that we are talking about, almost half the population is under the age of 18, so we are talking about huge numbers of people who are the future of those countries. If we do not get it right for those war-torn countries now, we will not get it right in the future. If they get back on the road to peace and prosperity, their kids might at last get an education and a chance to prosper.

Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Fiona O'Donnell and Tim Loughton

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

I do not think that the Opposition are being honest with us. Last week, they tabled a reasoned amendment declining to give the Bill a Second Reading, one reason being that

“it offers a marriage tax allowance which will help only a third of married couples, rather than a 10 pence starting rate of tax which would help millions more families”.

Coming from a party that dispensed with a 10p tax rate when it was in government, those reasons show inconsistency and brass neck, while the opening speech of the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) made a good case for extending the transferable married couple’s tax allowance to make it fairer and more inclusive.

Amendment 3 does not offer outright opposition. It is a fudged amendment, which calls for a review, including

“a calculation of the proportion of married couples and civil partners who are eligible…;…an assessment of the impact…;…the cost to the Exchequer…; and…an assessment of alternative tax reliefs”.

For starters, we know all that. There is a contrast between that and the Labour Opposition’s new clause 1 on child care provision, which was considered yesterday. It asked for a different sort of tax relief or public subsidy, but it did not have any conditions attached to it about a review after six months, a calculation of the proportion of people who benefit, or an assessment of its impact.

The Opposition are entirely disingenuous and inconsistent. Why do they not just come out and say, “We fundamentally—completely and utterly—disagree with and oppose the concept of transferable married couple’s tax allowances”? Why have they not done so in the amendment that we are debating? That would have been more honest, and we could then have had a proper debate. I think that the Opposition are being disingenuous.

[Fiona O'Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)]

On the subject of inconsistency, the hon. Gentleman voted against giving same-sex couples the right to marry, so having opposed that union, does he now support their having a tax break?

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton]

Interestingly, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has done a lot of work in that area—this also relates to what the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) said about child poverty—and its report states:

“The risk of poverty is much higher for children in couple families where only one parent works; sole earner families account for a significant minority of poor families with children. Many fathers”—

this applies to mothers, too—

“have to work long hours, making it harder for them to get involved in family life and more difficult for mothers to work. To enable more low-income families to have both partners in work”.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation makes a case for why such recognition helps lower paid families, too. My long-term aspiration is that we should fully extend the allowance, but at this stage, as I stated in my proposed amendment to last year’s Finance Bill, I would like us to concentrate on families with children under the age of five. If it meant that we could extend a more generous allowance to families with children under that age, I would be happy for the allowance not to extend to married couples generally. Such an amendment has been costed at between £700 million and £750 million, which is affordable in the context of what else is happening.

[Fiona O'Donnell]

What is the hon. Gentleman’s definition of a family? He keeps talking about families, rather than married couples with children. Does he consider a family—I hope this is not what he intends—only to be one in which a couple is married?

[Tim Loughton]

I am talking about married couples, which now take different forms. As we have already discussed, the definition includes same-sex marriages, civil partnerships and conventionally married couples. That is to whom the allowance should apply, which has never been in doubt. The allowance is about making it easier for parents to choose the best way to bring up their children. Frankly, it is insulting to describe the measure as discriminating against single parents.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Fiona O'Donnell and Tim Loughton

Monday 11th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Fiona O'Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)]

1. When he plans to issue his transition plan for the careers service.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning—who is here with us in spirit, if not in body today—committed during an Education Bill debate to hold a summit for interested parties to focus on issues of transition to the new arrangements for young people’s careers guidance. That summit is to take place this Friday. Following the event, we will set out key milestones for the transition period up to September 2012 to support local authorities’ transition planning. We will also look to share examples of the models being developed at the local level, and the material will be made available on the Local Government Association’s communities of practice website.

[Fiona O'Donnell]

We know that this Government are fond of pauses, but it is eight months since the Minister announced the end of Connexions and the start of the new all-age career service. In the meantime, parents and practitioners have been left with no help to support young people in assessing their options or planning for their futures, so will Casper the Ghost Minister take this opportunity to provide detailed guidance, eight months after it was promised, on how the transitional arrangements and the new service will work?

[Tim Loughton]

I am impressed by the hon. Lady’s affection for Connexions, which does not exist in Scotland anyway. She will have just four more days to wait until after the summit that was promised and discussed in Committee, when my hon. Friend the Minister will lay out our plans in detail, with plenty of time for the transitions to come into effect.