I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
The UK signed the Council of Europe convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence back in June 2012 but has yet to ratify it. The Istanbul convention, as it is better known, is a unique, groundbreaking international legal instrument that enshrines in law the basic human right of women and girls to live lives free of violence and the fear of violence. Crucially, it provides a comprehensive set of mechanisms to achieve those aims. The provisions of the convention aim to prevent violence against women, protect the victims and survivors of abuse, prosecute perpetrators and hold them to account for their actions. It commits Governments to provide not only properly resourced support services through a strategic policy framework, but robust monitoring, data collection and public scrutiny.
The convention is a formidable package of measures, which Scottish Women’s Aid has described as
“quite simply the best piece of international policy and practice for eliminating violence against women that exists, setting minimum standards for Government responses to victims and survivors of gender based violence… It is a blueprint for how we move from small change at the margins…to a system that is designed to end domestic abuse and violence against women.”
We badly need a step change in efforts to eliminate violence against women. Two women are killed by their partner or their ex every week in England and Wales alone. According to the crime survey for England and Wales, in the past year 1.2 million women were victims of domestic violence. In Scotland last year, more than 58,000 incidents of domestic violence were reported to the police. Across the UK as a whole, the police recorded more than 87,500 rapes and more than 400,000 sexual assaults. Given that many—possibly most—incidents of sexual assault and rape go unreported, we must not underestimate the scale of the challenge we face.
We live in an environment where gender-based violence is so pervasive and normalised that we hardly even notice how much we put up with. Last week, here in Parliament, we heard harrowing accounts from the hon. Members for Edinburgh West (Michelle Thomson), for Eastleigh (Mims Davies) and for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin), who so courageously spoke out about their own dreadful experiences. One in three women experience domestic abuse or sexual violence in their lifetimes—and that figure is recognised as likely to be a conservative estimate.
Even those who avoid personal attack are living in a world saturated with images of glorified sexual violence, with a toxic public discourse in which boasting of sexual assault is reframed as locker room talk, women who are raped or assaulted are frequently shamed or blamed, and lives are blighted, and in some cases irreparably harmed. It affects us all. It restricts where we go, what we wear and what we dare to say out loud. In my view, we need to name violence against women for what it is: the most pervasive and systemic human rights abuse in
the world today, affecting women in every street in every village, town and city in every country around the world.
We need to understand that violence against women is grounded in and compounds gender inequality. Those of us who are committed to pushing the issue up the political agenda have our work cut out for us. Although domestic abuse and sexual violence primarily affect women, we should acknowledge that they also affect men, non-binary people and especially children—girls and boys.
We need to understand that violence against women is neither natural nor inevitable. We can prevent it and challenge it. We can hold the perpetrators to account. Those of us who have the privilege of shaping and influencing legislation need to acknowledge our responsibility to put our shoulder to the wheel and make the elimination of gender-based violence a political priority.