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Women, Justice and Gender Equality

I must compliment the Poppy project, which has led the way in giving support and breathing space to trafficked women. I also congratulate my hon. Friend on pointing out how complex, knotty and interwoven the fates of the abuser and the abused are in such situations. We must move forward carefully but speedily towards a solution to that problem. There is a Home Office scheme called the women’s offending reduction programme, which has functioned since March 2004. It is intended to improve community interventions and services for women, to support greater use of community sentences and to avoid the use of custody for women, where possible. The previous Home Secretary announced a programme called, ““Together women”” at the annual meeting of the Fawcett commission on women and criminal justice, which I chaired a year ago. We have invested £9 million in that project since 2005, and there are demonstration projects in four centres. Those one-stop centres allow key workers to support women who are offenders and women who are at risk of offending.