Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House condemns the Government for failing to take sufficient action to tackle the epidemic of violence against women and girls and for presiding over a fall in the rape charge rate to a record low; and therefore calls on the Government to increase the number of specialist rape and serious sexual offences units, improve police training to secure better outcomes for victims, introduce effective national management and monitoring of domestic abuse and sexual offenders and urgently publish the perpetrator strategy in full.

Next week is International Women’s Day, a time when we celebrate women across the world. However, it is also a time when we highlight the discrimination, violence and abuse that too many women and girls face. It is a time when we look back on the progress that we have or have not made, and it is a time to look forward and set out our demands for freedom, justice and equality, including the basic right to have freedom from fear. And we should face the hard truth, because when it comes to violence against women and girls, and that basic entitlement to freedom from fear, that progress has been far too slow. We have even seen in some areas the clock being turned back.

I welcome the work that the Government have done on tackling violence against women and girls, and I welcome some of the policies they have set out, but the reason for calling this debate today is that it is not enough. We are not being determined enough. We are not going far enough. We are not going fast enough to ensure that women and girls in this country feel safe in the way that they are entitled to be. The Government are right to agree to have a violence against women and girls strategy. The “Enough.” communication campaign they launched this week is welcome. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which we worked with the Government on and contributed to, raising a whole series of further measures to be added, is welcome. There are policy proposals that Labour Members have put forward over many years which the Government have now accepted, most recently treating domestic and sexual abuse as a serious violent crime as part of the duty—if we are honest, it is shocking that it was ever disputed that it should be treated as a serious violent crime—and adding violence against women to the strategic policing priority. There are, therefore, many things we should have cross-party agreement on, but we should also just be really blunt and honest: worthwhile as those changes are, they really do not meet the scale of the challenge we face, and in too many areas things have been getting worse.

Mr Speaker, as you know, I have stood at this Dispatch Box before doing the job of shadow Home Secretary. That means it can sometimes feel a little bit like groundhog day. As shadow Home Secretary, a job with responsibility for holding the Government to account on policing, one cannot avoid noticing that police officers are certainly getting younger. It also means, however, that I have been talking about violence against women many times over the years. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) has been campaigning on violence against women and girls for very much longer than I have. Seven years ago, I warned that the police were becoming too overstretched to properly tackle serious crimes such as rape and domestic abuse. I warned then about the risk of falling prosecutions, more criminals being let off and more victims being let down. I wish I had been wrong, but it has got much worse than I could possibly have imagined since then.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that one way it has got worse is the huge escalation in waiting times to get to court? Many victims are waiting for such a long time to get into court that they end up walking away from the whole process, letting perpetrators get away with it. No strategy will tackle this issue unless the Government start to get on top of court delays.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That has an incredibly damaging impact on the prosecutions of rape and other sexual assaults in the criminal justice system. This has not just happened during the covid crisis—we should be really clear about that—because the delays have been getting worse and worse over many years. It is devastating for victims who may be desperate to get on with their lives. They can end up feeling hugely traumatised by the entire process of the rape being investigated and then being pursued through the criminal justice system. That is badly letting down the victims that the criminal justice system should be standing up for and ensuring justice for. My hon. Friend is right that those delays have got worse—getting worse by hundreds of days—but what it means is that a growing number of victims are dropping out now before it finally reaches prosecution. Some 40% of rape victims withdraw from prosecution because they just cannot bear it any more. That means the entire criminal justice system and this House, which ultimately must have oversight of the criminal justice system, is letting those victims down.

--- Later in debate ---

[Wera Hobhouse]

Once again, it is simply a matter of resources. Schools must be given extra resource to have specialists who guide young people into proper relationships. It will probably save us a lot of money if we get this right, but we need to spend the money in the first place.

To back this up, a 2021 Ofsted report highlighted just how early sexual harassment begins, to the point where it becomes “commonplace”. According to the report, 92% of girls said that sexist name calling happens a lot or sometimes; and 80% of girls—80%—reported being put under pressure to provide sexual images of themselves. These figures speak for themselves and say that we need urgent action.

It is hugely disappointing that the Government continue to rule out making misogyny a hate crime. Yes, we discussed this at the beginning of the week, but I need to repeat what I said just two days ago: we have to get to the root causes of violence against women and girls. We must send a powerful message that negative attitudes towards women that lead to hate and lead to offences—from harassment all the way to very serious sexual assault—are not acceptable, and that is what making misogyny a hate crime would do. Hate crime legislation, as we have established, does not add to an offence, but it has made a clear difference to crimes based on racial or religious hate. Why do women not deserve the same treatment? I still cannot understand why the Government are not supporting this. Making misogyny a hate crime is not a silver bullet, but existing hate crime legislation has made a clear difference. So let us get on with it and make misogyny a hate crime.

None of the steps that I have pointed to will make violence against women and girls stop overnight, but the time of inaction and making excuses is up—we owe it to all women and girls who suffer violence and harassment on a daily basis.2.48 pm

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I am really pleased that the Labour party has chosen to use one of our precious Opposition day debates for this subject today. It is a matter of tremendous importance. There is obviously a huge amount on the parliamentary agenda at the moment, so it really sends a positive sign that the party has chosen to debate this today.

I want to speak a bit about why this matters so much to me. As Members of Parliament, we on occasion have things that influence small numbers of our constituents—maybe just one of them. Sometimes it might be something that matters to a reasonable number of our constituents. If we had a factory closure that affected 5% of our constituents, we would be racing to Parliament to speak about it, but here we have an issue that not only affects the 51% of our population who are women, but demeans all of us who live in a society where our sisters, our partners, our wives and our daughters experience this and are not safe to go about their lives.

When I speak with those who I know intimately enough to have this kind of conversation, it is remarkable to me how absolutely everyday it is for women to face some kind of sexual harassment. Almost every woman I know who I am in a position to know this about has had an experience of something reasonably serious in this epidemic of violence. My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) was right to say that we need to accept that we are talking about male violence against women and the extent to which it is culturally everyday and normalised.

This issue matters to me not just as a Member of Parliament representing all the women and girls in my constituency, but as a partner, a father, a brother and a friend of women who suffer from it. It also matters to me as a constituency Member of Parliament. My right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) spoke about how we all have constituency casework trying to support women who have been victims of rape and victims of sexual and domestic violence. We recently had the appalling murder of Gracie Spinks in my constituency. Because of the ongoing police investigation, I am not able to go into detail about that at the moment, but Gracie was murdered by a man who had been stalking her. She had no relationship with him previously, but he had become obsessed with her, and that case has touched the hearts of every person in Chesterfield and led to a very passionate debate in Westminster Hall a few weeks ago.

The Government’s approach is failing at every level. The number of offences committed is shocking enough. The number that do not get reported is shocking enough. The number of reported offences that get inadequately investigated is shocking. The number of cases that have been investigated that get submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service is shocking. The number of cases that get referred to the CPS, but that wait so long to get into court that the victim removes their support for the trial is appalling, as is the number convicted. At every level, this is an absolute crisis and an epidemic that the Government and we all collectively are failing to address.

It is regrettable that the Home Secretary is not responding to this debate, because it would have sent a powerful message if she had come and said, “I am fronting up here. I am taking this seriously. I am not going to delegate this to my junior Minister. I will be the one to respond to this debate.” I put that on the record.

One of the important things that came across very strongly in the debate that we had about stalking was that, when it comes to sexual and domestic violence and stalking, there is such a responsibility on the victim of crime to prove that an offence has taken place, in a way that does not happen if we report to the police that we have been attacked and beaten up or that something has been stolen. In those cases, it is accepted there is a likelihood that the offence has taken place. When it comes to these kinds of offences against women, there is a huge burden of proof on the woman to prove that something has taken place.

I want to talk particularly about the important issue of stalking. The motion does not talk about stalking, but the matter is incredibly important to us in Chesterfield in the light of the Gracie Spinks murder. We need police forces across the country consistently to provide stalking advocacy services for victims and to ensure that every police officer recognises what stalking is all about and the impacts of that offence. Importantly, we have been talking about online violence against women, but often if the police investigate the online case, they will get the evidence they need to back up the stalking case.

Alongside all the pressures that this motion places on the Government, there is a need for us collectively to have a candid conversation about the culture of male violence and the culture, particularly among younger men and older boys, of watching porn and in particular the kind of porn, readily available on the internet, that normalises vicious sexual violence against women. The Government have been too quiet on that, and it needs to be said.

The motion

“condemns the Government for failing to take sufficient action”.

I do not think that anyone who has listened to the statistics that have been put out today can have any doubt that insufficient action has been taken. I welcome the positive tone we heard from the Minister, but we all need to be relentlessly saying to the Minister and the Government that the time for talk is over. We need to see a collective approach that addresses the manifold failures we have here so that more of our sisters, wives and daughters can live more peacefully in the future.