My Lords, I feel very privileged to be following noble Lords in speaking to this amendment. I want to put it on the record that I am chair of UN Women UK.
I shall speak briefly to Amendments 132 and 133. I fully support sharing information, from the perspective of women from minority communities. With the support of the work that H.O.P.E training is doing through Meena Kumari and her team, I have learned an awful lot, even though I have been working in this area for a very long time. I have come to the conclusion that the silos that exist have been compounded even further if someone is from an ethnic minority background, English is not their first language and they do not understand how to access services and opportunities. They live within multigenerational households, and when they finally try to leave and enter a refuge, it may not be equipped for their needs, or they enter the home of a friend of a relative who can also be put at risk.
It is critical to offer as much protection as possible and to try, through training of all our services,—whether it is the judiciary as in this case, or all our other services—to get a much deeper understanding of the perspective of women coming from minority communities, who do not have the opportunities to understand the wider support mechanisms that may be available to them. That is not just through language, but it is also through cultural norms of acceptance.
The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, talked about forced marriages and modern slavery. I have come across numerous cases of forced marriages,
and seen the trauma and the effects of having lived within households where every single day was a day of abuse, not just by one perpetrator but by many family members. Trying to find the will to escape and then finding yourself sitting in court rooms with the whole family on one side and you alone as a survivor on the other—it is incredibly difficult to explain the long- lasting effects of that. I cannot imagine how that is ever going to leave you and your psyche.
6 pm
To come back to the points I have listened to today, I hope very much that my noble friend will note my plea that these amendments must also be seen from the lens of those people from BME communities who have no real opportunity to understand where to access support. Once they are in a system, the system must share their circumstances across the different agencies, so that they do not find themselves reliving trauma, again and again, in trying to navigate the systems themselves, and then give up.
My final point comes from what my noble friend Lady Newlove said: we must not disempower people. When they take the step to stand up and see people in court, that is the time for us to put all systems behind them to give them the power to get justice and to live a life as a normal, ordinary human being should live their life, with their own human rights.