Violence against Women and Girls

Part of Contamination of Beef Products – in the House of Commons at 12:41 pm on 14 February 2013.

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Photo of Claire Perry Claire Perry Conservative, Devizes 12:41, 14 February 2013

My hon. Friend raises an interesting point, particularly with regard to violence by women that is directed towards men, but that is not the purpose of this debate. There are wrinkles in that matter that I do not want to go into. However, it is important that we hear male voices in this debate and I welcome the Minister to his position.

I want to talk about what we have done already. I am very proud of the Home Secretary. That statement might not receive wide cross-party support, but we have taken some important steps, as did the previous Government. We have provided stable funding for those who counsel and support victims of violence. I know from the domestic violence support centre in Devizes that the stability of that funding is very welcome. We have put new funding into a number of initiatives. We have trialled domestic violence protection orders. I am proud that those have been trialled in my constituency. It would be wonderful if the Minister could tell us when we might hear the results of those pilots and whether the orders will be adopted nationally.

We have also introduced Clare’s law, which has been campaigned for so effectively by many Members across the House. We have started to criminalise the serious offences of forced marriage and female genital mutilation —problems that have bedevilled us for many years. We have introduced a campaign that focuses on the problem of teenage rape, which tells young girls that it is wrong. Importantly, we have reformed stalking law to help those who are stalked.

A special subject for me is online violence, abuse and bullying, particularly against women and girls. Again, there has been extraordinary cross-party support in this area, for which we are all grateful. I do not mean to scaremonger, but it seems to me that we are conducting a long-term experiment with our children, particularly our girls and young women, by exposing them so freely to the violent, degrading and sexualised content of the online world.

There are two buckets of problems that we are trying to deal with. The first is children looking at third-party content on websites. I may be classified as the Mary Whitehouse 2.0 of my generation, but I do not mind what people call me. With the support of Members from across the House, we have made extraordinarily good progress in bringing the internet service providers to a point where they will all introduce filters that provide protection on all devices in the home by the end of the year. The fundamental problem is that only four in 10 families with children currently use filters. That means that six out of 10 children live in a filter-free environment. By the end of this year, public wi-fi will not allow adult content by default. Mobile phone operators are also making tremendous progress in refreshing their adult content bars. That is a tribute to the energies of Members from all parts of the House, in particular Fiona Mactaggart who has worked tirelessly on this matter.