Women will find no reassurance in the Metropolitan police’s statement that the abduction and murder of women on the street is rare, multiple MPs have said, with dozens calling for further action from the government to tackle male violence and misogyny.
In a Commons debate for International Women’s Day, which took place hours after the news that human remains had been found in the search for missing Sarah Everard, the Labour MP Jess Phillips read out the names of 118 women killed by men since last year’s debate.
Female MPs from across different parties told moving and angry stories of street harassment they had been subjected to, and called for tougher action from the government when the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill returns to the House of Commons next week.
The Guardian understands Labour’s Harriet Harman will urge the government to enshrine a victim’s right not to have their previous sexual history cross-examined in court when the bill comes to the Commons on Monday, an amendment that has widespread cross-party support.
The government was also challenged by the Liberal Democrats’ Wendy Chamberlain to make misogyny a hate crime as part of the domestic abuse bill. A cross-party amendment will be voted on in the Lords next week to make all police forces in England and Wales record misogynistic crimes as hate crimes, a campaign started by the Labour MP Stella Creasy.
“The challenge to the government is: pass the domestic abuse bill. It’s been in the offing for four years. Legislate to make misogyny a hate crime. Make sure that those occupying positions of trust are people we really can trust,” Chamberlain said.
Phillips said it was abhorrent that the government still did not collect detailed data on the numbers of women killed each year and the circumstances of their deaths.
“In this place we count what we care about, we count the vaccines done, we count the number of people on benefits, we rule or oppose based on a count and we obsessively track that data,” she said. “However, we don’t currently count dead women … Dead women is this thing we’ve all just accepted as part of our daily lives. Dead women is just one of those things. Killed women are not vanishingly rare – killed women are common.”
Phillips, who has made it a tradition to read the names at each year’s IWD debate, said she was indebted to the work of Karen Ingala Smith and the Counting Dead Women project who compiled the list.
Harman, who is the mother of the house, as the longest-serving female MP, criticised the words of the Met police commissioner, Cressida Dick, who said abductions of women on the street were rare but acknowledged the fear many women would be feeling.
“Every young woman, every day, walks under this threat,” Harman said. “So women will find no reassurance at all in the Metropolitan police commissioner’s statement that ‘it’s extremely rare for a woman to be abducted off the street’ – women know abduction and murder is just the worst ends of a spectrum of everyday male threat to women. So let’s hear no more false reassurances, let’s have action.”
Harman said the government could show it was serious to “banish the culture of male excuses from the criminal justice system” when the sentencing bill comes to parliament.
The former Tory cabinet minister Maria Miller said Everard’s disappearance had “sent shock waves around the UK” because many women could relate her last movements to their own regular routine.
“For many women this news story will bring back memories of threatening situations they found themselves in, through no fault of their own, being sexually harassed on the streets walking home from meeting friends, anonymous threats of physical violence on social media, sexually assaulted in plain sight in rush hour and public transport on the way to work,” she said.
“We should not accept a culture of violence towards women, we should not be complicit in covering it up, and we need to give women effective mechanisms to report what happens, to expose the scale of the problem, to call it out publicly and to punish those who perpetrate this culture of fear.”
Caroline Nokes, the chair of the women and equalities committee, said she had seen an “outpouring of stories from women about keys, headphones … sticking to lit streets. We all know the reality is you will not be attacked by a stranger, but the fear is there, and the fear is real.”
The former Conservative cabinet minister Andrea Leadsom said the strength of feeling merited cross-party action. “I feel angry that women walking home in the dark have to be scared of the person walking closely behind them, and sad because for far too many women even getting home safely doesn’t mean they’re safe from harm. So I say to all colleagues right across the house, let’s never let party politics get in the way of protecting women and girls.”
Labour’s Rosie Duffield, who spoke last year of her own experience of domestic abuse, said there had been an “outpouring of collective rage over the last 24 hours” and compared the anger to the Black Lives Matter protests.
“Sarah Everard has reignited a fire within us, much like George Floyd did. Enough is enough. We must take a long, hard look at society, at social media, at misogyny, at ourselves. And let’s hope that next year’s list is virtually nonexistent,” she said.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the MP who represents the Streatham constituency where the apparent abduction took place, said women in the community had been “shaken to the core” by the incident.
“I choose to challenge the disgusting victim-shaming that we have seen since Sarah’s disappearance, it should go without saying that victims of gender violence are not to blame. Sarah did nothing wrong. All she did was walk home,” she said, adding that she would join a vigil being organised for Everard on Clapham Common near where she went missing.
Marsha de Cordova, the shadow women and equalities secretary, criticised the minister for women and equalities, Liz Truss, for not attending the debate.
“This International Women’s Day debate falls a year into a pandemic that has had huge consequences for women, especially black, Asian and ethnic minority women, disabled women and mothers. It is the first time since the beginning of this pandemic that ministers have put aside time to talk specifically about women, despite the hugely unequal socioeconomic impact of the pandemic,” she said. “It is unacceptable that the minister for women and equalities did not even bother to turn up for the debate.”
