Rape and Sexual Violence — House of Commons, 2022-03-08
Topic: Health
Jessica Rose Phillips (Labour, Centre-left): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker; I was not expecting to be called so quickly, so this is a delight, and Happy International Women’s Day to you. I want to talk over a few things. Obviously, along with the shadow Justice Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves), I spend a huge amount of time with victims and setting out what we think the Labour party policy needs to be, and I endorse absolutely everything that she said There are a number of things that I feel the Government are not currently addressing and on which there does not seem to be any direction of travel. The first thing—it would be remiss of me not to mention that this has come from almost every victim of sexual violence that I have ever met, and certainly in the past few weeks—is the commissioning strategy around health provision for victims of violence and abuse. In my view, and I tried to get everybody to vote for this during the passage of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, there should be a statutory duty on every public commissioning body that runs people-based services to have to commission specialist support for victims of violence and abuse. It is inexcusable that in the vast majority of mental health services across our country, there is absolutely nothing in the way of specialist support. I have never met somebody, male or female, suffering from substance misuses, who was heroin-dependent or who had their lives blighted by substance misuse, who had not suffered some form of sexual violence as a child or adult. The reality is that we should put in those specialist services and insist that every public health commissioner and every mental health commissioner in the country provides this as part of their sexual health and substance misuse strategies The Minister has talked about chief constables and the fact that they get to decide, and that local areas will pick. There is not a local area in the country where people are not being raped. There is not one; it is not one of those crimes. There are crimes that happen in my constituency every single day that likely are not happening so much in the Minister’s constituency. We have very different seats, but this is not a crime that discriminates in any area. All our constituencies are full of people who are being raped and abused The situation at the moment is that, unlike what we have done in making refuge a statutory duty, we do not say that local decision makers and local commissioners have to provide specialist EMDR—eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing—trauma-based support. We sit back in this building and delegate responsibility to local decision makers. Personally, I think that if there is a chief constable in the country who thinks that they should not have specialist support and specialist officers for sexual violence, they should not be a chief constable in our country—the end. I am absolutely certain that the Minister agrees with me I wish to raise another very important point regarding healthcare. The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup), answered a parliamentary question this week about ending telemedical abortions. She said that the Government had taken advice with regard to vulnerable women and how they use the service and that has resulted in the decision to end telemedical abortions. I would like Ministers to tell me which experts they spoke to, because there is not a women’s organisation in the land that fights for women who have been victims of sexual violence or domestic abuse that would agree with the Government’s current stance on telemedical abortions It does not begin and end with the criminal justice system—thank goodness, because there would be literally no hope for rape victims if that were the case. There is not a rape victim in the country who would say that they have had a good time in the criminal justice system. I have heard rape victims describe themselves as the lucky ones because they were raped by a stranger—and their phone was still taken off them. What on earth for? My phone is not taken off me when my car gets broken into. Why are we taking phones off them The Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), told me last week that there is never a time when she would not want to brief this House on Operation Soteria. I ask Ministers: when the people running Operation Soteria arranged with me to brief Members in this House about the findings of the Metropolitan police that in some cases three quarters of police officers think women routinely lie about their sexual violence experiences, why were we not allowed to hold that briefing? Why were the people who work on Operation Soteria not allowed to come to Parliament to brief Members The Government say that Operation Soteria is something that they are doing, but it is not just a check box—"Oh, we’ve done Operation Soteria." We have to know what people are saying, so we can scrutinise it. What they have said so far is that the system needs an entire overhaul. That is what I will be looking for.