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Violence Against Women

Thank you, Mr. Benton. It is nice to see the Front-Bench teams from the Equality Bill reassembled for one appearance only. We take violence against women seriously in all its forms. We all have a responsibility, along with the Government, to tackle violence against women and girls within our families and communities, at our places of work or study and in society at large. The Government have developed a number of linked national action plans on domestic violence, which includes tackling female genital mutilation, forced marriage and evil crimes committed in the name of honour; sexual assault and rape; prostitution; and human trafficking. We want to increase reporting and conviction rates, ensure that victims are supported, improve the criminal justice response and maximise prevention. The largest ever cross-governmental public consultation on tackling violence against women and girls was launched by the former Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Jacqui Smith). During 2009, it received more than 10,000 responses, which informed the cross-governmental violence against women and girls strategy that we published in November. The Department of Health has launched a taskforce led by Professor Alberti to consider the health aspects of violence against women. It aims to identify what is the current national health service response to violence against women and girls in terms of prevention and treatment, and to consider what more needs to be done. Part of that work is specifically to look at sexual violence against women and children. We expect the report next month. The work I am describing puts into a higher gear the work the Government have done over the past decade, which has transformed the debate on violence against women. A comprehensive search of Hansard shows that the issue was very rarely mentioned by the last Tory Government. If one looks beyond the debates in the Chamber to debates on Bills, as I have done, one sees that Labour Front Benchers tried to amend Tory criminal justice Bills to get rid of the ability to cross-examine women on their sexual history and proposed support for domestic violence victims, but found their proposals blocked. Meanwhile, an epidemic of violence against women was being suffered privately. The advent of 100 Labour women MPs in 1997 meant that the issue was taken on and run with. It has been taken on seriously, strongly and continuously by Ministers, male and female, ever since and there has been step-by-step improvement. Importantly, we have worked closely with the third sector, where there is great understanding of the subject—for example, Women's Aid has 35 years' wisdom. We have passed good legislation such as the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004. As a consequence of the steps we have taken, domestic homicide rates are lower now than they have been for the past decade. I used to make speeches on violence against women in which I said that between two and three women a week are killed through domestic violence. Happily, that statistic has changed, although it is still far too high. On average, just over one woman is now killed each week.