The Government say that this Bill will empower the police and courts to take more action against crime. However, much of it continues the failed approach of successive Governments. Legislating for longer and longer custodial sentences without any evidence that they deter people from committing crimes shows ignorance of the real drivers of crime. At its best, the Bill will be ineffective; at its worst, it is an assault on human rights and democracy.
There are some good elements of the Bill. Trauma-informed services, the strengthening of rehabilitation and the police covenant are all things that we Liberal Democrats support, but we argue that there is a need to go even further. It is a great shame that constructive debate about those important measures, which should really be at the centre of the Bill, is undermined by the elements of the Bill that are extremely concerning: serious violence reduction orders, which hand over stop-and-search powers; the increases in mandatory sentences that tie judges’ hands and do not even work to prevent crime; the proposals to criminalise trespass on unauthorised encampments, which discriminate against Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities; and the new restrictions on the right to protest, which are nothing short of an assault on our civil liberties.
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However, today I will talk specifically about violence against women and girls, which this Bill does not go far enough to prevent. What it should do—this should be enshrined in the Bill—is make misogyny a hate crime. The awful murder of Sarah Everard resonated so deeply with women across the UK because public sexual harassment remains a daily reality for far too many women. At the moment when women came together to grieve the loss of life and publicly express their solidarity, their protest was silenced.
More than 600,000 women are sexually assaulted each year; only one in six report it to the police. Last year, more than 50,000 women reported being raped; only 1,400 rapists were convicted. That is a far cry from a fair justice system. The Government need to do a lot more.
We need stronger measures to prevent violence against women, and we need a justice system that supports survivors. There needs to be better training and resources for police, prosecutors and judges, so that criminals are punished and survivors get the justice they need. We need to ratify the Istanbul convention so that survivors of rape and sexual abuse are never left to struggle alone, and we must recognise the root causes of violence against women.
In the same way that we recognise homophobic, racial and religious discrimination, making misogyny a hate crime would help us understand how the hatred of women causes harm, it would give our police the tools they need to make our streets safer for women, and it would send a strong message that everyday sexism must and can be stamped out. It is time that this Government showed their support and took violence against women and girls seriously. We should not let this Bill be a missed opportunity to do just that. We should all support new clause 43.