Caroline Nokes – 2022 Speech on the Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Bill

The speech made by Caroline Nokes, the Conservative MP for Romsey and Southampton North, in the House of Commons on 9 December 2022.

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), who has done such an incredible job to get the Bill to this point. I appreciate that it has a long way to go yet, but I welcome the cross-party support for it and the comments made by my hon. Friend the Minister.

I do not recall the first time that I spoke in this Chamber about public sexual harassment, but I vividly recall doing an interview with “Woman’s Hour” in 2019, when I was ridiculed for saying that public sexual harassment should be a specific crime. I remember the commentary on the website afterwards saying I did not know what I was talking about, and I remember the Daily Mail calling me mirthless because I did not think it was funny. The reality is that public sexual harassment is never funny: it is always scary and it dominates the lives of too many women.

There has been some focus this morning on the lives of young women, but the stark reality is that there is probably not a woman in this place who has not experienced public sexual harassment at some point. It can happen at any age to any person, and it does happen to men as well, particularly young gay men. They need our support every bit as much as women do.

I certainly remember why I first started talking about this issue: it was largely because of a coalition of really impressive women and women’s organisations—people who had come to see me and raised the issue with me. I am going to list them all, because I argue that, once we have on our side Our Streets Now, Plan International, the Girl Guides, the Soroptimists and the Women’s Institute, we have brought together a very impressive coalition of women of all ages and backgrounds who are prepared to speak up and determined to do so. When we read the statistics, they are absolutely terrifying. They show the sheer scale of the problem. When an issue dominates the Girlguiding girls’ attitude survey and dominates the experiences of young women at school, college and university, we have to reflect that it is well past time that we did something about it.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Minister, who will have the pleasure—I suggest—of responding to my right hon. Friend’s Bill, of taking it forward, and of seeing it eventually go on to the statute book. However, there is a long history of other committed female Ministers, many of whom, over the past few years, have sidled up to me and said, “Keep going: keep pushing at that door.”

Let me give some indication of the scale of support there has been. I remember my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), on many occasions in Westminster Hall, begging me to keep going—to keep on asking difficult questions, and to keep on ensuring that this issue remained uppermost in people’s minds—but, of course, she is not the only one. My right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) has held this brief, as have my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean) and my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Mims Davies), who was in the Chamber earlier: she too has played a role in keeping this issue on the priority list. There is also, of course, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), not to mention the former Members of Parliament Amber Rudd and Sarah Newton, both of whom also held this brief at various points.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells said, back in December last year we saw the Law Commission’s review, which clearly stated that the Government should consider making public sexual harassment a specific crime, although, interestingly, at that time the commission rejected the idea of adding misogyny to the list of hate crimes. I was not particularly happy about that, but I was prepared to wear it on the grounds that we would see public sexual harassment made a crime. It was a shame that there was not enough time for the Government to do that, but I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for bringing the issue as far as this point.

I want to pay tribute to some of the brilliant women out there in the community who are working both for and alongside the police, whom I consider to be real champions in this regard. The Minister mentioned Maggie Blyth, the deputy chief constable of Hampshire constabulary—my home force—who is also the national police lead for violence against women and girls. I also pay tribute to our police and crime commissioner in Hampshire, Donna Jones. I have attended many events relating to violence against women and girls where she too has proved herself to be a real champion in sticking up for the 51% of the population who are affected by these matters. Another is Caroline Henry, whom I met the day before yesterday to talk about the issues affecting women and girls.

Let me give a specific example to show why I think the Bill is so important. I have heard successive Ministers say that such legislation is not necessary, because there is existing legislation to protect women and girls from sexual harassment. I am going to recount the story of a constituent who spoke to me about it, and my subsequent conversation with the then Minister about what had happened to that constituent. This was a 22-year-old working in the retail sector—a very glamorous job, pushing trolleys around the supermarket car park in the depths of February. I want Members to imagine her uniform: a puffer coat made of hi-viz material, a pair of leggings, heavy boots, a bobble hat, and, because this was at the height of covid, a mask. She said to me, “I hate lunchtime.” I thought that was bizarre: I thought most young people quite liked having a lunch break. She said, “I have to work from 12 pm until till 2 pm, because that is when the supermarket is busiest and I have to return all the trolleys to the front door, and I hate it.” I said, “Why? What is so difficult about lunchtime?”

I apologise for generalising, and I apologise to all those employed in the construction industry who will hate what I am going to say next. My constituent replied, “Because that is when the builders come for their lunch.” When I asked what happened when the builders came to the supermarket to get their lunch, she said, “They make comments about me, they follow me around the car park, they talk about how my bum looks, and this week one of them came up to me, put his hands on either side of my face, and told me that I was too beautiful to be pushing trolleys.” I looked at her in horror, and then I went to see the Minister at the time and said, “You’ve been telling me for months that there are crimes already being committed and that there is legislation to protect people like my constituent who tells me that she hates lunchtime and spends it pushing trolleys back to the entrance of the supermarket as quickly as she can, because that is where the security guards are—she spends her lunchtime trying to be within range of the security guards. What was the specific crime there? What legislation can we use to protect girls like her?” She looked at me and said, “I don’t know. I don’t think a crime has been committed there.” I entirely accept that we must not demonise all men and we must not demonise all builders, but that is the type of behaviour that this legislation is designed to counteract, so I welcome it wholeheartedly.

We know that 50% of young women have experienced sexual harassment in schools or colleges. We know that 37% have experienced it on public transport. I pay tribute to the amazing work done by the British Transport police, among other organisations, to highlight the unacceptability of it and the strategies and tactics that we can all use to stop being bystanders and to intervene and help women in situations where they are uncomfortable and are being harassed. We know that 33% of sexual harassment happens in public buildings and that 75%—three quarters—of all women have experienced sexual harassment at some point in their lives. All of us in this Chamber know a victim of it, which also means that all of us in this Chamber know a perpetrator. It is the perpetrators who we need to identify and we need to stamp out their behaviour.

I want briefly to talk about the cultures behind public sexual harassment. My Select Committee has done and continues to do significant work on this. I remember telling a colleague that we were doing some work on the cultures that underpin male violence against women, and she looked at me and said, “You’re trying to overturn 2,000 years of male behaviour, are you?” I said, “Yes! Absolutely—that is what we have to do.” We have to put a marker down somewhere. If we are not prepared to do it now, today, in this place, then do we wait another 10, 20 or 1,000 years? Are we prepared to do that? I am certainly not. I find that it is very liberating being a woman in your 50s; you suddenly find that you are in a terrible hurry to get stuff done now. Now is today, and the Bill is that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells.

My Committee is doing some great work looking at the experience of young women in education settings, and it is harrowing. I did a roundtable with the Agenda Alliance for women and girls at risk, which includes girls who have been through the care system and girls who have experienced all sorts of horrors in their lives. Many of them told me about their experiences in pupil inclusion units; we have to be careful about the terminology we use, in terms of whether it is exclusion or inclusion. Girls in those settings are heavily outnumbered. In some instances, it is 90% boys and 10% girls. One of the girls told me that there is a poster in her education setting talking about consent, and every day, that poster is slashed and torn off the walls. She said, “How do you think that makes me feel? It makes me feel that I am not worthy. It makes me feel that I am in danger and at risk in my education setting.” She was perfectly happy to accept that it was a suboptimal education setting, and that there were many reasons why she had ended up there, but she said, “I should be valued and protected as much as the boys in that place.”

The work that the Committee is doing is fascinating, important and worth while, but it is harrowing to hear the stories and the experiences, particularly of black women working in the music industry and of how they can be sexualised, victimised and harassed because of their skin colour, their sex and the fact that they want to get on in an industry that is incredibly male-dominated and competitive. They feel that if they make a fuss, their careers will be pushed to one side.

We heard a couple of weeks ago from Fern Whelan, the ex-England footballer, about the experiences she had as a footballer. We like to think that sport is a great leveller and that everybody is equal, but the harassment that women still face in football is significant, and it continues when they move on to careers in the media after they have finished their playing careers. She told a fantastic tale of how she had made a comment and was endlessly trolled for it, with hundreds of comments basically telling her to get back into the kitchen, while her male contemporary had made the same comment and not one single person had reacted to it in any way.

While these incidents may appear to be the less serious end of harassment, it is cultural, and it is embedded in all the places that women go, where women work and the activities they want to take part in. It is crucial that we pursue the culture. I absolutely accept that it is not all men; there are some brilliant men. I think in particular back to 2020, when women were feeling empowered and emboldened to speak up about their experiences walking home, and I shared the fact that, when I leave this place at night, I do so with my flat keys in my hand and wearing a pair of trainers. I know that they are not much beloved of Madam Deputy Speaker, who would prefer none of us to wear trainers in this place, but actually as a woman it is much easier to run home in flat shoes. I suspect that few of my male colleagues have ever reflected on their footwear before trotting home across Westminster bridge.

We must tackle the cultures. We must recognise this good Bill, which my excellent colleague has brought forward, as a first step. There will be a very long way to go yet for all of us to stand up for brilliant young women like Maya and Gemma Tutton, who have been such an inspiration to me and others in this place, and ensure that this is a first step and that we continue the work.