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Violence Against Women

Independent domestic violence advisers are, of course, not counsellors; they are primary workers who will provide support from the start, and they are usually from local rape crisis centre or Women's Aid centre. If there is a domestic violence court in my hon. Friend's area, which there must be, there are IDVAs attached to it and they need to be utilised properly. I do not know what her local authority is like in terms of match funding or funding—she has given a thumbs down—but the difficulty is that we send out money to local authorities for these services with indicators required for their performance and they spend the money as they should, but they do not always provide the service that she is seeking. That is a real difficulty, and it cuts across the whole question of central versus local funding. I cannot decide from Westminster how many IDVAs there should be in Sandwell. That must be done by the local authority. Of course, there is a lot of Home Office funding for IDVAs and independent sexual violence advisers, but there needs to be some funding from the local authorities, too. My hon. Friend will know about the map of gaps, which shows where the gaps are with the intention—driven by the Equality and Human Rights Commission—of making those local authorities that are not match funding do so in the future. We are doing what we can, but my hon. Friend's point is well made. Inside Government, we have a cross-criminal justice system rape performance group and all police forces in all Crown Prosecution Service areas are checked against a series of indicators. Of course, for some years, there has been sexual offences training for senior police officers and advocates prosecuting rape cases. Some primary training for all front-line officers is also in process, so that hopefully no one will get anything but a totally sympathetic reception when they make a complaint. The Baroness Stern review on rape was commissioned because we thought that the consultation on violence against women that I mentioned, which was behind the strategy, was not deeply enough representative of what was going on in rape cases. It is probably extremely difficult for people to talk about such things, so we have asked Baroness Stern to take an in-depth look. We have asked her to examine the responses of all the public authorities to rape complaints; to consider how more victims can be encouraged to report; to explore ways in which the attrition rate—the fall out between reporting and getting to court—can be reduced; to consider how to increase the conviction rate fairly; to identify how to increase victim and witness confidence and satisfaction; and to explore public and professional attitudes to rape to see how they impact on criminal justice outcomes. Although I will primarily talk about justice issues, there is a whole tranche of the violence against women strategy, which I imagine will be buttressed by Baroness Stern, that says we need to do a good deal of public opinion work. It is just as important to protect and punish when such crimes happen as it is to prevent them in the first place. For that, we need to mobilise those members of the public who are not already on board. Baroness Stern will make some recommendations very shortly. Turning briefly to the Crown Prosecution Service, over which the Law Officers have superintendence, those involved are pioneers. We believe that we have the first public prosecution service to integrate all forms of violence against women, according to the UN definition, into a strategy and action plan that relates work in this area to wider gender equality. That is consistent with the CPS's vision to become a world-class prosecution service. The CPS intends to improve prosecution performance by introducing a new indicator on violence against women, which includes targets for successful outcomes in relation to domestic violence, rape and sexual offences. There have been good increases in rape prosecutions. The figure of 6.5 per cent. for convictions for rapes that are reported is much better than it was a couple of years ago, when it was 5.2 per cent. The figure is indeed small, but it is from report right through to court. When the stage of a charge is reached, the conviction rate is 59 per cent. and, and it is rising. I am not aware of any other offence that we count from complaint to court, so it is hard to compare that 6 per cent. with anything. The figure does sound small and I feel that it is, but once we get to the charging stage, there is a conviction rate of 59 per cent. In relation to domestic violence, we have exceeded the target of 72 per cent. Baroness Stern will consider the area between complaint and charge to see what goes wrong. From the launch of the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007 up to last December, 107 forced marriage protection orders have been issued. From January to August last year, the forced marriage unit received 1,063 calls of one sort or another to enlist its services, which is an increase of 25 per cent. over the past year. We believe that the message is beginning to get out that forced marriage is unlawful and that it can be stopped. Of course, a range of people can help somebody who is a victim or who is about to become a victim to take action in court. We made civil action available because it was clear from the research done—not by us but by an independent trust—that if forced marriage were made criminal immediately, it would stop a lot of victims taking action, because they would not be prepared to criminalise members of their family. In 2006 we established the UK Human Trafficking Centre, a multi-agency organisation centrally co-ordinating intelligence and operations on trafficking. Tackling human trafficking is now core police business, and every force should have the capacity to deal with trafficking within their area. Prostitution is another element of violence against women. For some time we have had exit strategies in place to assist women to leave prostitution. They often come into prostitution very young or for reasons connected to their vulnerability. We have prosecuted pimps for many years, and there have been police campaigns on street prostitution for many years. Last year we conducted a review of demand in prostitution, which is linked closely to trafficking, but it is not only about trafficked women, and we concluded that it should be a criminal offence to pay for sex with someone who has been subject to exploitative conduct. That is now a crime, and there will be training for police and the CPS to ensure that it is used. We have tackled newspapers that advertise prostitution by asking the Newspaper Society to tighten its guidelines, which it has done. The number of advertisements referring to, for example, "fresh foreign girls available every week" has diminished enormously. Tackling the trafficking element has been an effective part of the action we have taken. Personally, I am interested in looking at whether we should make it unlawful to put such an advertisement in a newspaper, as it is in Ireland, and we will look at that legislation to see whether it would help here. The points I have raised are headlines. I hope that we have a good debate and that we hear fresh ideas, because the Government are keen, as I have said, to shift up a gear in all we are doing on violence against women. We think that we now have an effective multi-agency response and have implemented an effective approach to victims and survivors, and we will do more. We have an ambitious programme to make our community a safer place for all and, in particular, to end violence against women.