Baroness Lawlor (Con)

My Lords, I support the general aims of these amendments. I am broadly sympathetic to the group and I agree with the need to address the problem of honour-based abuse specifically. I understand that it will be a difficult matter, and not simple, to define it tightly. Some honour-based offences are criminal offences, as we know: they involve murder. We have heard already about the murder of Banaz Mahmod in 2006 in Handsworth, in Birmingham, where she was strangled and her body put in a suitcase. For that crime, the perpetrators were found and convicted. There is also voter impersonation, which I think we could be stronger on because it involves controlling and coercive behaviour. I have been told by members of one community in particular in an area of London with which I am very familiar that they are not allowed to go to the polls and they are not allowed to vote. The women there will laugh at you and tell you that their husbands vote for them. They are just not allowed to go to the polls. In fact, grown women who are married are not allowed to go out except when accompanied by their husband, an uncle or their husband’s brother. That, to my mind, is pretty specific coercive or controlling behaviour for grown women. We have the law to deal with clear breaches of the law, but I agree that it is difficult to define abusive and coercive behaviour that is not immediately an offence within the law. I therefore support the desire to define it and the need to recognise that this controlling behaviour does exist. It does not fall within an easily definable way of dealing with it, but we must address it. There are reasons to address it, for instance, with grown-up people past the age of 18 who are obliged to wear a certain sort of dress to conform to community norms that will set them apart from their community, or with women I have spoken to who are not allowed to continue their education. This is not for reasons of finance or because money is needed from a job. They have to stay at home, quite often because there is a coercive husband at home who does not want his wife to go out for any reason, unless or until there are children whom she may take to school or bring to the hospital. Any thought of continuing studies after a certain age is absolutely ruled out. These are not easy things to deal with. They fall within that difficult area of family arrangements and the rightful place we award the family in arranging its affairs internally. But unless we are going to become a society where different groups of people remain segregated socially, educationally and in terms of the very law, and we allow borderline abuse to continue in the family setting because we do not have a definition of it, which denies basic freedoms to certain groups of girls and, indeed, young women, and can often lead to far worse things, we should try to tackle it. I support these amendments for that reason. We need some definition and some guidance, and we need to cover them within the abuse framework.