Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls

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.

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.

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.

Does my right hon. Friend share my concern about a case in my surgery at the weekend? A young woman went to the police to report violence by her partner against her. She was concerned that the officer did not treat the matter seriously enough and made a complaint against the officer. Subsequently, she was then charged with stalking the person who had committed violence against her. I am afraid that this is the way our police in London seem to have got things entirely the wrong way around.

That is an incredibly disturbing case. Many of us as constituency MPs will have had deeply troubling cases where, at every stage from the policing response, the investigation and the court response, it feels like not only is there a deep injustice being done, but that the system does not understand what is happening and the nature of violence against women and girls. I would be keen to talk to my hon. Friend further about that individual case and how we can ensure—it is one of the issues we refer to in the motion—there is proper training for police officers across the board on violence against women and girls, and on some of the incredibly serious issues we face.

Following on from the hon. Gentleman’s point, which I think is absolutely fundamental to this issue, we are in a position where 90% of rape allegations are not referred by the police to the Crown Prosecution Service. We have a severe problem prior to charge in terms of how we deal with these matters. We have a conviction rate in the courts of 4%, so 4% of police referrals are put in that position. We have to concentrate on what is going wrong in police investigations. Does the right hon. Lady agree?

I agree. I think that things are going wrong at every stage in the process. Things are going wrong in the police investigation—I will come on to talk about Operation Soteria, and how we should go much more widely—in the referral process between the police and the Crown Prosecution Service, which is also breaking down, and in the prosecution. The hon. Member is absolutely right: at every stage in the process things are going wrong. That raises the challenge for us in Parliament, because there is always a risk that different bits of the criminal justice system end up blaming each other. We need the oversight to pull everybody together and demand that action is taken. My fear is that we are not seeing that oversight, because it is simply not delivering results.

I have respect for the Ministers in both the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office who work on violence against women and girls, but I say to them that the work is not delivering results, and it is overwhelmingly not on the scale that we need. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue has said:

“Provision is at breaking point.”

It has said:

“Rape victims are continually and systematically failed by the criminal justice system.”

How have the Government allowed that to happen? How have the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice allowed that to happen? How have we allowed it to reach breaking point? Back in 2014, Labour called for action to increase prosecutions, but the opposite has happened. The rape prosecution rate is down to a horrendous record low of just 1.3%—lower than ever.

We should consider for a moment the reality of what that means. Around 63,000 rapes are reported a year. It is estimated that at least as many again are not reported. Of those reported, just 1.3% result in someone being charged. That means that across the country more than 300 women will be raped today—more than 300 lives devastated by a vile crime, according to those estimates. Those figures mean that, on average, 170 rapes will be reported today, but the figures also suggest that just less than three of those rapists will see the inside of a court room this year, never mind the inside of a prison cell.

Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that there is a lack of cohesion between presenting at accident and emergency and reporting the crime to the police? In a case that I was involved in recently, a young lady who had to stay in hospital overnight was then told by the hospital that she had to go to the police the next day when she was out of hospital. Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is a real issue that we have to resolve between A&E departments and the police?

I completely agree with my hon. Friend’s point. I have also had cases raised with me where the victim of spiking was told to make an appointment with the police to have the tests done and could not get an appointment until considerably after the drugs would have left her system. Therefore, there was no possibility of getting the evidence needed that might then help with an investigation.

That is why we need a co-ordinated approach, but that requires leadership. Very often it is the nature of our criminal justice system and the support services, be they in health, mental health or other areas, that we need organisations to work together, but ensuring that that happens needs leadership from us and, ultimately, from the Government. That is the purpose of today’s debate: to call for much stronger leadership from the Government to tackle these awful crimes and the gaps where things are simply not happening.

There has now been recognition of the seriousness of spiking, but we still have to go much further to ensure that action is taken. I spoke to a college class of 17-year-olds in my constituency a few weeks ago. We started talking about this, and I asked them how many of them knew someone who had been spiked. They were 17-year-olds, and all the girls and half the boys said that they knew someone who had been spiked. That shows the scale of the challenge that is affecting young people. We have failed as a society and across the criminal justice system to take the action needed.

My right hon. Friend knows that in Leeds dozens of spiking cases have been reported just to me as an MP. I took action alongside the Mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin. We had a spiking summit. We had a multi-agency approach. We worked with the nightclubs and bars. The spiking cases included not just drinks but injections. It had an effect of putting people off undertaking the spiking, but although people were assaulted and there were cases of theft, we still have not seen any prosecutions. We need the powers to go further. For instance, the rape and serious sexual offences unit is not properly funded at West Yorkshire police. We need that funding in place to ensure that we have action.

I agree with my hon. Friend. In fact, a couple of weeks ago I sat in on the morning report sessions of senior officers in West Yorkshire police. They raised a couple of spiking cases that had come in that day in Leeds, and the action that they were taking. I strongly welcome the work that the West Yorkshire Mayor has done to highlight this and to call for stronger action, but we need to go much further.

There is still a blind spot across the country, and across the criminal justice system, around stalking. We have all heard awful cases where someone who had been stalked reported it to the police and then things got worse, and ultimately the awful result was that the woman was killed, despite reporting it to the police. I think that that sets out why we need so much more urgency. Although we welcome the work that the Government have done and the things that Ministers have said, there is still no sense of urgency or action at the scale that is needed.

I am very glad that the Government have made violence against women and girls a strategic policing requirement alongside terrorism. Good. I wish they had done it immediately when the inspectorate recommended it back in the autumn. I would also say that we called for violence against women and girls to be treated as a top priority alongside terrorism in 2014. We need clear objectives and detailed outcomes against which the police and the criminal justice system will be judged. It should not just be made a priority and then passed over—we need clear follow-up.

The Government have set a target to get rape prosecutions back up to the level they were at in 2016. That was still too low, but at least it is a target. However, they are way off achieving that right now and it could take years at the current rate. That is a total disgrace, because women cannot wait for that.

Why does every police force not have a specialist rape and sexual assault unit? Why is that not a requirement for police forces when we have known for such a long time that specialist policing is crucial to investigating and prosecuting sexual assaults, and domestic abuse as well? Having that specialist expertise is crucial, which is why we are calling for a specialist rape and sexual assault unit in every force. It should just be a basic requirement.

My right hon. Friend is making an incredibly powerful speech. Does she agree that we also must not forget the online sphere? As we heard last week in the debate on child sexual exploitation, these things often start online. We have been so slow in catching up. Does she agree that we hope that all the recommendations from the Joint Committee on the draft Online Safety Bill will be incorporated into the Bill?

My hon. Friend is completely right. We all know that, just as we campaigned for many years to reclaim the streets from abuse and violence, we may need to reclaim the internet from abuse and violence against women and girls, because it is totally unacceptable that women can end up feeling harassed and targeted by misogyny and abuse. When he presented his ten-minute rule Bill just half an hour ago, we heard the powerful words of my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) about the risks of incels and misogyny online and of young people, particularly young men, being groomed online into extremism and misogyny. We need the strongest possible action against that as part of the online harms Bill. I hope that the Government will bring that forward, because our approach needs to be about prevention and safety in all aspects of our lives, online and offline.

It does not matter how many women walk home with their keys between their fingers, how many women share their location with friends waiting at home or how many safety apps are developed. Unless we target the perpetrators, target prevention and have a complete overhaul of a system that just is not working and is not delivering, in 12 months’ time, in the run-up to next year’s International Women’s Day, we will say all the same things again. That is not good enough.

Let us all stand together and urge the Government to go much further and much faster and to be much stronger. Let us tackle violence against women and girls and let all of us say that we have had enough. We will take action. We will see change.

It is a genuine pleasure to be in the Chamber today to discuss this important issue ahead of International Women’s Day.

We can start with some areas of agreement, because that is how we are going to change things. We can all agree that we have had enough. We are half the population and we should not have to put up with some of the behaviours and crimes that are captured by the phrase violence against women and girls. The range of behaviours and crimes caught by that phase is truly shocking—the many ways in which our sex is used against us and we are made victims of the sorts of crimes that everyone in this Chamber finds absolutely abhorrent. That is why last year we published our tackling violence against women and girls strategy, because we wanted an holistic and societal response to these crimes.

The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) rightly urges us to do more and go faster, and there is will and determination in this Government to do exactly that. That is why we worked together last year to pass the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, for example—truly groundbreaking legislation that will help more than 2 million adult victims and the children who live in abusive households with this most invidious and hidden of crimes. We have to acknowledge, however, that this will take time. I wish solving the problem were as easy as pulling a lever in one part of the criminal justice system, but it is not. Fundamentally, we know that some of the behaviours and crimes that we will hear about this afternoon have arisen as a result of behaviours, societal attitudes and so on that we must tackle. Not only do we know that intellectually and academically, because we have asked researchers and worked with charities and campaigners, but we know it from the responses of women and girls, and men, to our call for evidence last year when we were drafting the tackling violence against women and girls strategy. More than 180,000 responses were received. That is an unprecedented response rate. It caught that moment, which I am sure we all remember, when there was a very urgent national conversation about how women and girls are suffering these behaviours and crimes.

I know that the Minister takes the matter very seriously. I urge her not to just accept that it will take time. I do not think we should accept that; I think we should be much more ambitious about the changes that should happen immediately and the changes that should happen within the next few months, rather than starting from the position that it will take time.

I press the Minister for her diagnosis of why things have got so disastrously worse since 2016, with the massive drop in the prosecution rate and the pushing of the system to breaking point. I have a diagnosis around the scale of the cuts to policing and to the criminal justice system, not just the digital changes that have taken place. If the Government do not understand and recognise how things have got so much worse on their watch, people will not have confidence—women and girls will not have confidence—that things will be turned around.

If I may, I will develop that point in my speech. As the right hon. Lady knows, an enormous amount of work is going on, particularly in the rape review, and I want to take the House through it in detail. She is absolutely right that there is action now, this day, to tackle these crimes and behaviours, but we must acknowledge—as, in fairness, colleagues across the House have acknowledged throughout our domestic abuse debates and so on—that there are real, fundamental problems that we have to tackle at a societal level so that women and girls know we agree that this behaviour is not their fault, is not their responsibility and must be tackled.

We talk about wider societal change and bringing young people up with proper relationship training. I was a secondary school teacher; that sort of relationship training is done at the end of the day by maths teachers or foreign language teachers. Does the Minister believe that we need professionals to lead it? We cannot leave it to schools to pick up the pieces any more.