Alice Macdonald

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I thank all Members who have spoken so powerfully today on this subject. As the Minister noted, two debates on male violence against women and girls have been happening at the same time, and many of us would have liked to speak in them both. Although the contexts are obviously different, many of the themes will be the same—the oppression of women, systematic discrimination, and the need for leadership and determination. I thank the Minister and the shadow Minister for their thorough responses to many of the questions we have raised. We see so much consensus on both sides of the House. We have covered a wide range of subjects and geographies—we have gone all around the world—and we have still not covered all the contexts in which women and girls are suffering. We have heard about many statistics and many stories, but importantly we have focused on the solutions; we can spend a lot of time in debates talking about the context without focusing on what we actually need to do. We have heard of the horrors of the direct and indirect impacts of conflict, the horrors of rape and murder, and the horrible realities of daily life for so many women and girls. At the beginning of the debate I said that I hoped we could find consensus, and I think we have found it on many areas—on the targeting of aid, on the need to involve women in peace processes and on the need for determination and focused leadership. As the head of UN Women said: “Women continue to pay the price of the wars of men”. We need to be clear that we are speaking about male violence. I want to finish by putting front and centre the women and girls who are in conflict zones and who are fighting so hard for their rights, and simply to survive, because it is them we must listen to. I will finish with the words of one of them, Leymah Gbowee, a Nobel laureate and a woman who fought so hard for peace in Liberia. She said: “You can never leave footprints that last if you are always walking on tiptoe.” We have heard today that we are not walking on tiptoe on this subject. We will be working at full throttle, with determination, focus and leadership, so that finally, maybe one day, women and girls are not suffering from violence anywhere. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered the impact of conflict on women and girls.