Offences Against the Person Act 1861

Debate between Paula Sherriff and Jess Phillips

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

Recently, I had to hire a car. It turned out that the cheapest and best option was to hire it from Birmingham airport. When I got in the car, I turned on the on-board sat-nav, and the last journey taken was to the Calthorpe clinic in Edgbaston—the place I myself had been for an abortion a decade previously. I shuddered at the thought of the woman who had hired the car before me, not to go about her working life but to do something that I had taken completely for granted. I and the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) are not criminals.

Last week, I asked the women of Northern Ireland to get in touch and tell me their stories of travelling to England, Scotland and Wales. Today I am them, and here are some extracts:

“It was Christmas Eve. I was with friends at a party and stepped outside for a breath of air and I was raped… My Mum had to book flights and booked me into a clinic. This all took money & I was from a working class family. We borrowed what we could and I left for London. Alone after I’d been Raped. I’d never travelled anywhere on my own.”

“I was in a relationship of sorts with”

an abusive man.

“I knew that had I carried on with this pregnancy I would not only lose my job but my home and the ability to look after the children I already had. My consultant told me that following legal advice medical staff were not allowed to provide any information that would help anyone to get an abortion.”

“I cried on the phone when I rang Marie Stopes in Belfast and they told me how much it would cost to book a medical abortion. I…considered taking too many of the antidepressants…not enough to kill myself but enough to induce a miscarriage”.

“I was 15, standing in McDonalds car park in the freezing December weather staring at a boy much older than me minutes after finding out I was pregnant. I was terrified…that someone would see me standing in my school uniform. I went to Liverpool two months before I turned 16, and 8 weeks after having sex with a boy who no longer wanted to know my name. The shame I felt lingered long after I had made the eight-hour boat journey back to Northern Ireland.”

[Paula Sherriff]

I think my hon. Friend has ably demonstrated this in her speech, but does she agree that, for the vast majority of women, the decision to have an abortion, at whatever stage, is a heart-rending one and rarely taken without huge consideration?

[Jess Phillips]

I absolutely agree. I would also like to stick up for the women who are not the difficult cases, as well as those who are.

Let me return to the stories:

“The taxi driver who picked us up in Birmingham from the flight was kind, he drove right past protestors outside the clinic and called them ‘horrible people’. He wouldn’t accept mum’s money for the fare. I realised he saw many girls like me, I wasn’t alone…I did not want to travel on my own so had to wait till my friend got time off work…Leicester isn’t exactly easy to get to so we set off at 4 am for our flight, an hour’s bus journey into Leicester, and another 45 mins on another bus just to get to the clinic. After the procedure”,

she and her friend had to go and catch another flight.

“Again another two bus journeys that took near 3 hours this time to get back to the airport, another flight”.

They went back to the house,

“drained, exhausted, emotional and sore.”

She continues:

“The night before I was due to fly to London I had some minor bleeding and by the time I boarded the plane I was in some discomfort. Immediately the plane took off I made my way to the toilet as I had started to bleed heavily. When a female steward eventually knocked at the door I told her I was unwell and suffered from heavy periods. Of course she must have known but she said nothing. I was first off the plane with the young steward who accompanied me to the public toilets in Heathrow airport. She tried to persuade me to see a doctor or nurse but I was terrified. I went into the cubicle, I passed everything into the toilet and flushed it. When I returned to Belfast I did see my GP who was horrified and told me I could have died.”

The final story in my speech sums up what each and every woman who got in touch was saying—and there were hundreds:

“Despite my mental health issues, despite an abusive partner, despite having no money and no real sense of where I was going, I was expected to have this baby. But I didn’t want to be pregnant. And that’s really why I went to England. Afterwards I felt sore, but mostly angry that I’d been made to board a plane because the government that laid claim to my country, demanded it, legislates better for its English citizens than its Northern Irish people. Because Westminster allows our women to be deprived of the basic human rights they give to their English citizens.”

Immigration Detention

Debate between Paula Sherriff and Jess Phillips

Thursday 10th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) on securing this vital debate.

Every year, approximately 2,000 women seeking asylum in the UK are detained, many at Yarl’s Wood detention centre near Bedford. The majority of those women have survived traumatic life events such as rape, domestic violence and threats of abuse, and many have been psychologically affected. Being locked up or detained can be particularly distressing and counter-productive, forcing some to relive their traumas.

Some 40% of those women who were interviewed recently admitted that they had self-harmed and 20% admitted to having attempting suicide. In a recent report, the chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick, said:

“Yarl’s Wood is rightly a place of national concern.”

The inspectorate found that about half the women who were in detention centres pending an asylum decision felt unsafe. Worryingly, the report detailed that since the previous inspection, the treatment and condition of those held had deteriorated significantly.

One woman said:

“I felt so upset and frightened because I was arrested and locked up and tortured back home. I have scars on my feet and arms where I was beaten by police and guards and so the situation and male guards in Yarl’s Wood made me feel extremely frightened…it feels like being locked up in prison back home.”

Women have alluded to significant breaches of privacy while being held, including allegations of sexual harassment and violations of dignity. Female staffing levels are also considered to be inadequate.

The parliamentary inquiry recommended a mandatory 28-day limit on all immigration detention. Referring to cases involving women, it called for gender-specific rules for detention. It stated that there should be no detention of pregnant women or survivors of rape and sexual abuse. The current Home Office policy stipulates that pregnant women should be detained only in the most exceptional of circumstances, but in 2014, 99 pregnant women were held at Yarl’s Wood alone.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is suspicious that when I visited two women at Yarl’s Wood this summer, both of whom had suffered exactly what she is outlining, they were released that day? Does she agree that the reason might be that the Government do not want too much scrutiny of what is going on at that centre?

[Paula Sherriff]

I absolutely agree with those comments.

Detention is a costly exercise at about £40,000 a year. The comparative cost of maintaining those seeking asylum in the community is significantly cheaper. There is significant evidence that the detention of asylum seekers is expensive, unnecessary and unjust. There is a clear appetite across the House for a change in culture and I look forward to seeing real progress on this issue.