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It’s becoming gradually clearer not only how well the Labour government is doing, setting priorities and seeking to make a difference; but, less remarked on, what is less of a priority.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has spoken of ‘this new government’s mission to halve violence against women and girls in a decade’. That speaks of an understandable wish to have metrics – both to be sure that change has happened for the better, and for political and electoral reasons to have some evidence that good has happened.
The Labour ministers that have set themselves to work on VAWG – violence against women and girls – are, it’s only fair to say, taking up work begun by the Conservatives after the 2021 murder of Sarah Everard. The work is more intangible – to address the causes of violence; and whether in high profile cases, or the profile of soccer hooligans, usually the violence is by men. Hence Labour backs teaching to children in schools about healthy relationships, respect, and consent; and the ‘Have a word’ campaign by the Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, seeking to change male behaviour and language.
Partly, Labour is picking up policies set or even agreed upon during the Conservative government, but for whatever reason – Home Office inertia, the sheer tiredness of the Tories after years in power – did not get done, such as the Public Order Act 2023 that included 150 metre ‘zones’ around abortion clinics where it would be an offence to harass women walking to such places by anti-abortion campaigners.
As Yvette Cooper put it in her speech at the Labour Party Conference last month in Liverpool: “Ten years ago, I called for buffer zones around abortion clinics, but we weren’t in government. We couldn’t make it happen. Now we can and yes we have. Because no woman should be harassed on the way to a healthcare appointment that is her legal right.”
Partly, for these ministers, such as the Home Office Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls Jess Phillips, it’s personal; they have received intimidation, mainly from men, part of the online and real-world bile and hate increasingly directed at women in public life, in ways that a decade ago would have been more remarked upon and condemned. It’s personal also because of their family pasts; see the remarkable opening to Yvette Cooper’s speech to the 2023 Labour conference (how far ago that seems!), about how her ‘great, great grandmother was attacked by her husband’. What’s seldom commented on, whether because it’s too intimate or is regarded as normal and something to be shrugged off, is the name-calling and sexualised talk, by men, when women are on the pavement, going in and out of shops, having a drink in a bar; besides, more extreme, threats and stalking by a former boyfriend when the relationship went wrong; and most extreme of all, murder, and in case after case, seemingly without policies or attitudes ever changing, women reporting their concerns to police and nothing happening. Nothing! Until another man has killed another woman.
Older women might be experienced and angry enough to strike back, whether answering the cat-callers back or carrying scissors or some such item that can double as a weapon. But what of their daughters – shouldn’t they have a night out without having to watch out for routine predators, hanging around town centre pubs, taxi ranks and take-aways (routine enough for police to formalise Project Vigilant)? And in some ways, the online deluge of misogyny, life for women has got worse.
VAWG, then, is valid public policy, though not uncontested. Nothing ever is. Personalities plainly come into it, like anything – consider the ‘personality clash’ behind the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) investigation into former Metropolitan Police Service Deputy Commissioner Sir Stephen House’s conduct during a meeting at New Scotland Yard in 2022, as complained about by the criminologist Prof Betsy Stanko.
VAWG is contested because for one thing no end of other criminal justice topics are valid, and while only some can get money and ministerial attention, the fact is that if one (VAWG) is a priority, others are less so. Such as illegal drugs, which got no mention in Yvette Cooper’s party conference speeches in 2023 or 2024. What do drugs lack as an issue to be picked up by politicians that VAWG has? Perhaps nothing more than relatability. Someone harassed or murdered is someone’s daughter, sister; so is a drug addict who dies young, only they are more written off by society; less photogenic, even.
Photo by Mark Rowe; street art.
