Contribution
I want to thank all my colleagues for their valuable and powerful accounts, in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington), who has worked so hard on this issue, and my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Paul Waugh), who has done a great deal to assist in community cohesion.
Violence against women and girls is undeniably difficult to speak about, especially as so many of us have suffered and will know friends and family who have been affected. Before I begin, I would like to express my solidarity with the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), who has received further vile and misogynistic attacks this week. I hope members of the official Opposition are brave enough to do the same and call out these vitriolic attacks for what they are. My hon. Friend has always shone brightly as a beacon for all victims of violent and sexual abuse.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) said, it feels like nothing has changed since the 1980s, when I went to university in Leeds in the wake of the Yorkshire ripper. Women’s behaviour is still dictated by fear of rape and violent attack. Violence against women and girls is a national emergency, not the inevitability that previous Governments have treated it as. We are sick and tired of seeing women and girls facing the same threats of violence and abuse, generation after generation.
Recent generations have faced the new threat of image-based abuse. My colleagues and I on the Women and Equalities Committee investigated image-based abuse and produced a report, which recommended that the Government take action to protect victims. I am pleased that the Government will introduce three new offences to combat image-based abuse. These are steps in the right direction—steps that will protect more women from revenge porn and will hopefully lead more victims to feel confident in reporting perpetrators.
We can go through statistic after statistic, but I want to speak about the experience of one of my constituents, who was brave enough to share her story with me and asked me to share it with the House. Olivia, in her words, was love-bombed before her abuse started. Her abuser emotionally manipulated her and then strangled her and left acid in her car. She did everything that we ask of victims. She called the police. She reported everything at the time and had witnesses who spoke to the police, but she was too scared to tell them about all the abuse that was happening. Then her perpetrator made her believe that he was the victim and convinced her to drop the charges and continue their relationship. They went away on holiday. There, the abuse continued, and she had to get the police involved abroad. She decided to end the relationship shortly after, but it did not end there.
Her abuser harassed, stalked and threatened her at her own home and in public. Again, she did everything right. She called the police on every occasion to report it. When he was finally arrested, no further action was taken because there was not enough evidence to convict him. When she first reported him, she was told that he would be convicted and charged for non-fatal strangulation, but he still walks the streets, and it is her who must live in fear of what could happen next.
We must confront the uncomfortable reality that even when victims of violence report domestic abuse to the police, they do not get the help they need. I asked Olivia whether there was anything she would like me to share, and she asked me to tell the House that
“when a girl or woman approaches the police, faster action needs to be taken as the perpetrators can very quickly get back into our heads and feel that we are the problem and women are more likely to drop the case, there should be more support from the police when victims ask for cases to be dropped”.
We know that domestic abuse is much more than physical abuse. Coercive control leaves victims helpless and unable to escape their abusers, like Olivia says. It is time we made sure that our first responders, police and ambulance crews know what coercive control looks like. We must make sure that teachers teach their students about coercive control, and that cases of coercive control are spotted and taken seriously by the police before it is too late, as was the case with another of my constituents, who sadly lost her daughter.
The Government’s new ministerial board on tackling violence against women and girls will bring together Ministers from the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Health and Social Care, the Department for Education, the Department for Transport, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and many more Departments, to ensure that for the first time we have a truly cross-Government approach to violence against women and girls. I urge them to ensure that tackling coercive control is at the centre of that approach.
This cross-Government approach and the introduction of domestic abuse specialists into 999 control rooms as part of Raneem’s law give me hope in the fight against gendered violence. We have a long way to go, but I am proud to be part of a Government who are committed to tackling misogyny, halving violence against women and girls and taking action now to make that a reality in every corner of our society.