Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)

My Lords, I rise briefly to support Amendment 208 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan. The reason is very simple. I do not know how many of your Lordships have seen a documentary available on BBC iPlayer called “Lover, Liar, Predator”. For those who have not seen it, it is pretty searing. It has a happy ending in the sense that the women who were abused by this man—who started at the age of 17—in the end learned about one another, got together and very bravely faced their accuser in court. A Scottish jury found the predator guilty on all counts by a unanimous decision. The reason I mention this is that, in almost every case, the predator seized upon young women when they were 16, 17 or 18. That is the age at which, frequently, young women—and some young men, although they are usually a bit slower on the uptake—get involved in relationships. At that age, without the right education, without understanding, frankly, the nature of some men, it is easy to get into a relationship in which one quickly loses one’s sense of self—the ability to take one’s own decisions and to direct the course of one’s life. This was articulated at the briefing the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, kindly arranged last week, which some of us were at. Some of the students themselves spoke powerfully of their own cases, or those of people they have known who, at that vulnerable stage in their lives, growing into sexual beings, got it wrong. Given particularly that this accords completely with the Government’s new strategy, the more we can do to reinforce that and to enable this cadre of children—some several hundred thousand, which is a not insignificant number—to receive the education that all their peers in other forms of education are receiving seems a no-brainer.