My Lords, for health reasons my noble friend Lady Drake cannot be here today. She has asked me to deliver on her behalf what she wishes to be said in opening this debate, and I share her views.
The UK Government have labelled violence against women and girls as a national threat. The prevalence of violence against women and girls in the UK is not only unacceptable but frightening. Such violence covers a depressingly long roll-call of crime types, including domestic abuse, stalking and harassment, modern slavery and human trafficking, rape and sexual offences—which show a particularly large increase—spiking, child sex abuse and exploitation, female genital mutilation, adult sexual exploitation and so-called honour-based abuse. The exponential advancement of technology has fuelled the opportunities for sexual harassment and abuse. Such violence accounts for at least 15.8% of all recorded crime. Domestic abuse makes up a third of violence recorded by the police. In the six months from October 2021 to March 2022, at least 507,827 offences against women and girls were recorded. That equates to two crimes per minute.
Even these figures are an understatement. The National Police Chiefs’ Council’s first strategic threat and risk assessment of such violence confirms that many crimes remain hidden. Victims do not report them. ONS data reveal that only one in four women who are victims of rape or penetration before the age of 16 told someone about the abuse at the time. More than half give “embarrassment” as a reason. Just under half thought that no one would believe them. Some 1.7 million women aged 16 and over experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2022, and while 81% of female victims of partner abuse told someone, mostly a friend or relative, only 18% contacted the police. Between April 2020 and March 2021, 5,395 women and girls attending a hospital or a GP had FGM identified.
The impact of violence extends to experience of the criminal justice system. Women from minoritised groups and immigrant women are particularly fearful of engaging with the police. Victims’ experience in the court process too often serves to enhance the impact of the violence. Public trust in policing has eroded over recent years. A series of high-profile public cases has clearly affected women’s confidence in how policing responds to crimes affecting women and girls. The impact of the violence is complex and long lasting. Girls who experience abuse before they are 16 are much more likely to experience abuse later in life.
Sadly, the burden of harassment and abuse on girls from a young age has for a long time been invisible. The Children’s Commissioner recently surveyed more than half a million children in the “Big Ask”. Young girls wrote about feeling unsafe and intimidated in public spaces. It is a compelling read and reveals a deeply disturbing reality for our children. It describes a society that downplays and accepts harassment as a norm and leaves perpetrators unpunished.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the speech of the noble Baroness, but how depressing to hear that this is the world in which girls and boys are being brought up. I really hope that we can do more and better to address these issues. I would like to focus on two areas: the situation of migrant victims of domestic abuse and the experience of survivors of domestic abuse in family courts.
We know that migration status is weaponised by abusers. Eleven years after signing and ratifying the Istanbul convention on preventing violence against women, we are still waiting for the Government to sign up to Article 59 of that convention—they have refused—which grants protection to survivors of domestic abuse or forced marriage whose residency status is dependent on their abuser.
Last year, in response to a Written Question, my noble friend Lady Williams, then a Home Office Minister, wrote that the reservation on Article 59 was
“pending the results and evaluation of the Support for Migrant Victims”
pilot scheme, and that the Government would decide what to do about supporting these very vulnerable survivors of abuse, and about the reservation, “as soon as possible” once it was concluded. The scheme, which was offered by the Government as the answer to all our concerns about support for migrant women while we debated the Domestic Abuse Bill, was originally due to be concluded last summer but has now been extended. Can my noble friend the Minister update us on when the Government intend to publish the evaluation of the first year of the scheme, and tell us what the timetable is for moving beyond that pilot to comprehensive support for migrant victims of domestic abuse and ratifying Article 59?
Turning to family courts, I thank my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy, who wrote to me last month with an update on the implementation of the Ministry of Justice’s 2020 expert panel report, Assessing Risk of Harm to Children and Parents in Private Law Children Cases. He highlighted the success of the integrated domestic abuse court pilot scheme, which shows that a more humane and efficient court system is possible. I urge the Government to roll this model out across the country. When that happens, it will be important to ensure that it receives the funding and institutional backing necessary, so that it can continue to be a success.
Given the organisations which are stepping up to address this issue, would it not be better if we could resolve it at the source and protect survivors, while preventing inappropriate child removals?
I thank my noble friend Lady Warwick for taking this debate on behalf of my noble friend Lady Drake, who I trust will be back in good health very soon. How many times has this House debated this topic? It has been many, many times. Have things improved? It does not seem like they have. The statistics on violence against women and girls show that this is still a very big problem.
There are now many laws by which perpetrators can be brought to justice. Research conducted by the UK’s Office for National Statistics—the ONS—found that violence against women and girls can have significant and long-lasting impacts, such as mental health issues and homelessness. We have already talked about rape convictions, but the highest ever number of rapes within a 12-month period was recorded by police in the year ending September 2022: the figure was 70,633. In that same period, charges were brought in just 2,616 rape cases, so the truth is that women in Britain today who are raped have little chance of seeing justice.
I want to highlight in this debate violence and abuse against older women. In doing so, I declare an interest, as I am a patron of the charity Hourglass, which campaigns for, and on behalf of, older people who are victims of domestic violence and abuse. Is the Minister aware of the excellent work that the Older People’s Commissioner for Wales is undertaking on the matter of domestic abuse against older people? This is a serious and concerning matter, and the commissioner offers advice and support in a very practical manner. Older people in Wales are fortunate in having a commissioner. It is a shame that older people in England are denied such a commissioner by this UK Government.
Domestic abuse and violence against older women is rarely spoken about—it is just hidden away—and Hourglass is working hard in the four nations of the UK to highlight this problem. Until recently, data on domestic abuse was collected only on women aged up to 74, but the ONS has now removed that limit. I submitted a Written Question on 29 March on the number of domestic abuse victims who were over 74. I received a reply from Professor Sir Ian Diamond, the head of the ONS, in which he said that he plans to release domestic abuse data for those aged 75 and over for the year ending March 2023 in late November.
My Lords, I wonder whether we are not looking at this subject from the wrong end of telescope, because by the time the violence has occurred, in a sense, it is already too late: the damage has been done. So I want to share my theory of how this abuse starts.
Sometimes, it begins at school. I was shocked to read Ofsted’s review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges. Did noble Lords know that 88% of girls have been sent pictures or videos they did not want to see, and 80% have been pressured to provide sexual images of themselves? The first I knew about this practice was some years ago. As a local MP, I met the worried parents of a girl who had been bullied into posting a photo of her own genitals online. She was so traumatised and humiliated that she refused to return to school.
That leads me to why I am so passionate about Amendment 170 to the Online Safety Bill, on cyberflashing. I was really delighted at the amendments the Government recently made, broadening the scope of the current offences of revenge porn and the sharing deepfake pornographic images. However, we still do not have a consent-based cyberflashing offence, although we do have alterations extending the scope of Amendment 170 to include content that has been altered and appears to be a photograph or a film. A group of us will be trying to convince the Government that they need to go that bit further, because the constraints put on the Bill will not prevent much of the damage that unsolicited cyberflashing will do to the mental health and well-being of women and, importantly, girls.
Thinking further about schoolgirls and boys, images being frequently sent without permission will increase the sexualising of children, and images sent “for a laugh” may pressure girls to laugh off these images on the outside when they are cringing with humiliation inside. They are not mature enough to cope. This is the first stage in being groomed into a culture which is a million miles away from how they have been brought up. This is where it often starts, with boys socialised into believing that porn is realistic behaviour as to what girls think and want.
My Lords, one of the most shocking aspects of violence against women and girls is that almost one in four girls in this country reports having suffered abuse before the age of 16. Millions of women and girls face many forms of violence throughout their lives, including pornography, sexual exploitation and rape. The impact of pornography and violence against women and girls, whether physical, emotional or sexual, is devastating and often lives long with the victim.
Women and girls form the bulk of those who provide much-needed care and support in our society, both within and outside the family. They used to be called the weaker sex, but in practice more often than not they provide the strength, boundaries and moral foundation that we all need.
The Home Secretary’s Statement about violence against women and girls three months ago was welcome in giving strategic direction and indeed some funding. It is welcome too that there has been a move towards making it easier to raise the alarm and taking complaints more seriously from the start. However, I am concerned that these welcome moves might not be sufficient to get a grip on the issue, given the gap between reports and prosecutions, and given that the reporting rates are, as we know, a significant understatement of the extent of the problem.
The justice system is creaking from chronic underinvestment over more than a decade, and what is needed is an honest and frank appraisal of what that means in a policy area where intervention and remedy—for example, in cases of honour abuse, sexual abuse and domestic violence—are extremely urgent and missteps place victims at greater risk.
Police powers and sentencing guidelines are important elements in a strategy, but they are not in themselves solutions. I add my voice to those of other noble Lords in urging the Government to do all that is necessary to prevent violence against women and girls. I also underline the importance of collecting data in this area, and urge the Minister to consider appointing an independent rapporteur to support policy development and to report on the progress we are making in tackling the scale of the problem.
My Lords, in the UK, for as long as I can remember, we have had a very successful practical measure that has worked to help keep women and girls safe: the provision of single-sex spaces and services—toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards and dormitories, to name just a few. When we saw a sign saying “Ladies” or “Women” on the door of a facility, we believed that we would come across only females in that space. We are often told that signs on a door do not keep men out, but the social contract did in the vast majority of cases, and women and girls felt able to raise the alarm when a male breached those boundaries.
I suspect that a lot of women have a story to tell about escaping a predatory man—a man who would not take no for an answer or was being verbally or physically abusive—by escaping to the ladies’ toilets and waiting until he had given up or gone away. Ask your female friends, mothers, sisters, daughters, aunts and cousins; you may be surprised and saddened by their stories.
The social contract is now broken. In many public buildings and areas, single-sex facilities have been replaced by mixed-sex ones, or men have been given the impression that they can go where they like and nobody will challenge them. I have heard from women who tell me exactly this: they are afraid to challenge men who should not be in a female-only space, due to the fear of how they may react—so they fake a smile, which many men take as acceptance, and get out of there as quickly as they can. In many cases, they never go back to that venue.
Of course, violence does not have to be physical. In 2021, Ofsted published a review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges. In England, it found that sexual harassment occurred
“so frequently that it has become ‘commonplace’”.
We heard today of an alleged attack on an Essex schoolgirl, which is outrageous. Some 59% of girls reported being photographed or videoed without their consent. Males having access to previously female-only spaces enables this. Do large retailers, who proudly boast of their inclusive and gender-neutral changing rooms, conduct regular sweeps for hidden cameras? Voyeurism is still a crime, so why are some organisations enabling it by replacing single-sex spaces with mixed-sex spaces? Often, it is because lobby groups have told them that it is more inclusive, when, in fact, being inclusive excludes many women and girls from taking an active part in public life.
I congratulate my noble sisters on facilitating this debate on the vital issue of violence against women—an epidemic exacerbated by decades of austerity.
While I totally agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, on the need for more judicial training, today also feels like a moment to celebrate our judiciary. I pay tribute to my dear friend, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, who retired from your Lordships’ House last week due to fading health. It is sometimes hard to believe that it was as late as 1991 that rape within marriage was outlawed in this country, and that it was judges, not parliamentarians, who established such an obvious and civilised reform. This is what the ever self-deprecating noble and learned Lord said about his landmark decision in the Crown v C years later in 2017:
“I have few boasts to my name by way of legal achievement, few jewels in my judicial crown, but I can and do boast of being the first judge in this jurisdiction … to rule that a husband is not permitted in law to have intercourse with his wife quite simply whensoever he chooses—in short, that there is such an offence as marital rape. That decision was said at the time to fly in the face of centuries of established legal principle but in fact, happily, it was upheld by both the Court of Appeal and indeed the Appeal Committee in your Lordships’ House”.—[Official Report, 10/3/17; col. 1584.]
But now, six years later, it is political priorities and economic resources, rather than the law, that are letting so many women in the United Kingdom so badly down. As we have heard, attrition rates between the reporting and charging of rape, let alone trials and convictions, are so dire as to amount to de facto decriminalisation of one of the gravest offences, the prevalence of which casts a very long shadow on any society’s levels of basic common decency.
Further, we are now in a vicious spiral of such low trust in policing and the criminal justice system, on the part of women in particular, that they are reluctant, as we have heard, even to come forward as victims of terrible, inhuman and degrading abuse. Rape and other types of violence against women are complex crimes, and all the more difficult, evidentially, on account of their intimate nature. It takes expensive expert personnel and generous support services to even begin to tackle the problem, and years of neglect now render the challenge even greater. Will the Minister commit to making this a personal priority for his tenure in the Home Department?
20 of 45 shown
I will take noble Lords to that reality through the girls’ own voices. A girl of 16 said:
“There’s no safety for young people: harassment and crime, no-one feels safe, girls in uniform get catcalled by creeps … We deserve better. We deserve for things to change”.
Girls as young as 11 feel responsible for their own protection strategies, avoiding certain areas or routes home, or planning escape or self-defence. One girl of 11 wrote:
“I think that lots of girls are afraid of things that will happen to them. For example, harassment or assault … most girls my age (including me) do not know what to do when this happens. I think we should be taught what to do, like a form of self-defence. This is very important to me”.
Another little girl of 11 said:
“The fact that girls all over the country have to always have an airpod out to listen for danger, to carry self defence skills, to always go home with friends, to wear trainers more often to run away from trouble. Girls are constantly thinking of this at school and it frightens us”.
Boys and girls are increasingly exposed to pornography from a young age, which is normalising violence against women and girls and warping young people’s perceptions of what healthy sexual relationships are. Reports by the Children’s Commissioner, including Evidence on Pornography’s Influence on Harmful Sexual Behaviour Among Children, vividly capture these voices. A girl of 18 who first saw pornography aged 11 said that it had
“affected me in my adult relationships and my body image and how my sex life is currently”.
A 19 year-old girl who first saw pornography at the age of 10 said:
“You see a lot of stuff like barely legal teens on porn sites and it’s not nice. They want us to act like porn models but we can’t change who we are, what we like, what we are afraid of”.
Pornography depicts sex as a transactional, one-way interaction in which women perform as objects for male gratification.
The survey also captured boys’ views. A boy of 18 who first saw pornography at the age of 13 said:
“Males can be led to believe women are purely for sex”.
A boy of 18 who first saw pornography at the age of 12 wrote:
“Many heterosexual men grow up to have certain expectations of how to treat women when having sex, and in general. A lot of that is actually just abuse”.
The reports find a link between specific acts of sexual violence commonly seen in pornography and those reported in official documents on the investigation of children who have abused other children.
Building on this research, the commissioner has been speaking with girl victims of peer-on-peer abuse about the impact of pornography. Key things emerged. One was toxic relationships: “He would just lose it quite a lot, and he could be quite violent”. Another was negative role models for boys: “I got catcalled by this guy, and I remember telling the boy I was with and he was like, ‘Yeah, like, that’s funny, me and my dad do that’”. There was the sharing of intimate child abuse images—“My friend said, ‘Basically, he’s filmed like you’re having sex with him and he’s been showing everyone at school’”—and rape and sexual assault: “He came round and it was all fine, and then it just got a bit not fine very quickly”.
Girls often do not tell. They often believe that they will get a poor response from professionals and adults. Reporting a crime to the police can be as traumatic as the event itself. To share one abused girl’s advice to her abused friend: “I don’t even want to turn round and go, ‘Go to the police, get justice’, because it’s not going to make her feel any better. I think if I could do it again I wouldn’t, because I’d get over the abuse much faster. I only reported it because I wanted the perpetrator to not do it again”. The court process is not always child-centred and trauma-informed. One victim of peer-on-peer abuse observed that it feels like punishment for the victim.
These experiences are confirmed by recent Girlguiding attitudes surveys, which show that 53% of 11 to 21 year-old females do not feel safe when they are outside on their own, 79% have experienced online harms and 67% of 13 to 18 year-old girls experience sexual harassment at school. The 2021 Ofsted Review of Sexual Abuse in Schools and Colleges found that nearly 90% of girls and 50% of boys said that being sent explicit pictures or videos of things that they did not want to see happens a lot or sometimes to them or their peers. Sexual harassment of children is commonplace. The frequency of harmful sexual behaviours means that some children consider them as normal.
By failing to protect our girls from the increasing prevalence of violence, we continue to fuel the level of violence and harassment experienced by women in our country. I have focused on children’s experiences because they highlight for us all the appalling and fundamental challenges they face and what that bodes for the future, However, I want to end by briefly reminding the House of some statistics. Two women are killed by partners or ex-partners every week. Rape prosecutions and convictions are at a record low. One rape per school day is reported as taking place on school premises. The Crime Survey estimates that approximately 1.7 million women over 16 experienced domestic violence last year. The position of women from minority groups is even more precarious; they have no recourse to public funds, which is a significant barrier to accessing support, including safe accommodation such as a refuge. Too few women experiencing domestic abuse can find a safe home with the support that they need to rebuild their lives.
There is so much more that we need to do, and some things will of course take time, but I want to make some proposals to the Minister for immediate action. Will he strengthen the Online Safety Bill to ensure that all platforms and service providers, including user sites and pornography providers, are subject to stringent requirements to protect children and women from online pornography? Will he strengthen the Victims and Prisoners Bill to ensure that every child victim is entitled to support, including specialist advocacy, if they are a victim of sexual abuse? Will he ensure that the code of practice sets guidance on how children’s rights will be met? Will he ensure that training in relationship, sex and health education teaching in schools takes a “safeguarding first” approach? Teachers should receive training on delivering sensitive topics, including pornography. Will he fund vital community-based domestic abuse services? Will he take immediate steps to rebuild women’s and girls’ confidence in our police and criminal justice system? These proposals are only a start but urgent action is needed now if women and girls are to be free to live and thrive in Britain today. I beg to move.
In the meantime, anecdotal evidence suggests that women continue to have their children taken away from them on the basis of so-called expert opinion, given by unregulated witnesses who would not be allowed to make formal diagnoses in any other setting. It would be helpful if the Government could publish data on how many children are removed from parental care by the family courts in private law proceedings and in how many of these cases domestic abuse has been experienced by a parent and parental alienation has been alleged by the abusive parent.
Greater transparency over judicial training on domestic abuse is crucial. Without clear information on what training is provided and who is providing it, we are not able to scrutinise the basis on which judges are making decisions. During the passage of the Domestic Abuse Act the then Minister, my noble friend Lord Wolfson, assured me that he would continue to raise this in his meetings with the senior judiciary. Can the Minister tell the House today if judiciary training on domestic abuse remains on the agenda for ministerial meetings with the senior judiciary? I respect the impartiality principle of the judiciary’s independence, but perhaps Ministers could encourage the Judicial College to be more open about what training is being provided.
Finally, I am concerned about a Ministry of Justice consultation on making mediation mandatory in domestic abuse cases. This gives the abuser a platform from which to continue their abuse. I strongly urge the Government to preserve the existing exemption from mandatory mediation for survivors of domestic abuse.
There are many who are stepping up to deal with—
Once we have these figures, they will be of great value. Without such statistics there is no way of knowing how big the problem is, how to tackle it and what help and support can be given. When this report is published, will the Minister agree to a debate so he can say what further measures, including funding, the Government will take in order to work with charities such as Hourglass, which know so much about this matter? Doing so will bring violence and abuse against older people into the open and, I hope, lead to women and girls living in a fear-free world.
In a sense, these are first-world problems. At the other end of the spectrum are abused migrant women who are nevertheless too fearful to report abuse because they fear that doing so might get them deported. Fear of having information shared between police and immigration authorities is enabling perpetrators to use immigration status to retain, control and inflict further abuse. This is known as immigration abuse, and the ambiguity of where people stand, even between the services themselves, leaves perpetrators with the freedom to act with impunity, evade justice and potentially target others, undermining public safety.
The answer would be a proper firewall—a blanket ban on services such as police sharing data with the Home Office. We tried to introduce such a ban during consideration of the Domestic Abuse Bill, but more needs to be done. I have no time to go into it now, but I would like to put the Government on notice that, a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger, “I’ll be back”, raising the issue of the firewall in amendments to the Victims and Prisoners Bill.
In law, single-sex spaces and services are intended for one sex only: that is the very thing permitted by Part 7 of Schedule 3 to the Equality Act 2010. It is not possible to admit a male to a single-sex space or service for females without destroying the very basic nature of that service. Once there are males using it, however they personally regard themselves, it becomes mixed-sex. Some 88% of sexual offences occur in unisex changing rooms and unisex bathrooms, and this cannot be allowed to continue. The Government have done really good work on the social contract, but it is broken and needs fixing. We have to keep spaces single-sex.
Will the Government guarantee the provision of specialist rape provision in every police force in the country, of more publicly funded refuge places and of other priority support for victims? Will the Prime Minister, himself a father of daughters, lead a public campaign for women’s and girls’ dignity and rights, in contrast with, I am afraid, the rather laddish and often misogynistic political culture of recent years?