I beg to move, that the Bill be now read the Third time.
I am grateful for the debates that we have had in Committee and in the House this morning. The amendments that have been accepted reflect our substantial
debate in Committee. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his amendments, which have afforded us the opportunity to clarify some important aspects of the Bill, and have some commitments made from the Dispatch Box that will be useful to us if, as I hope, the Bill continues to make progress.
We have taken some time this morning, and I am conscious that other colleagues have Bills that they are anxious to progress. If those Bills are to be properly scrutinised, that requires me to be brief. If the House decides to give the Bill its Third Reading, it will be an historic day. For the first time in our history, deliberately harassing, following, shouting degrading words or making obscene gestures at women and girls—and yes, on occasion, at men and boys—in public places, because of their sex, and with the deliberate intention to cause them alarm or distress, will be a specific offence, and a serious one at that.
The astonishing thing is that that has not been an offence until now, many years after it was made an aggravated offence to harass someone in public on grounds of their race, religion or sexuality, for example. Indeed, women—it is mostly women, although the Bill also applies to men—have had to alter the way they live their lives: to walk home using different routes; to arrange to be accompanied rather than walk alone; to have, or pretend to have, conversations on a mobile phone while walking alone; to hold keys clenched in their hands as a safeguard.
So prevalent is this that when visiting a sixth form at one of my local schools a few weeks ago, with young men and women of 17 and 18, I asked how many students in the class typically walked home with keys in their hands. Instantly, without conferring, every young woman in the class put up their hand. Not a single young man did, and they expressed some mystification that this happens at all. Such are the changes and accommodations that have, sometimes subconsciously, been made because of the potential and reality of harassment in public.
Our streets belong to women just as much as they belong to men. Women should be able to use our streets as confidently and safely as men do, free from abuse, humiliation, and physical or verbal violence. The Bill makes the specific but important step that harassing women—or men or boys, if it applies to them—in the street with the intention to degrade or terrify is not normal, natural or “just the way of the world”; it is a crime, and a serious one at that. The Bill will address that anomaly and move our legislation forward. I commend it to the House.
10.45 am