FEMICIDE, REFUGES AND THE MOON ON A STICK

FEATURE

FEMICIDE, REFUGES AND THE MOON ON A STICK

JESS PHILLIPS Q&A 11TH MARCH

Jess Phillips MP

The day after she had read out in Parliament the names of the 127 women killed in the UK over the past 12 months where a man was charged or convicted, Jess Phillips MP came to talk to SLS members at the Mercure Hotel in Telford.

It was a grim rainy day, but the Yardley MP was on ebullient form. ‘People ask me why I’m so cheerful’, she grinned. ‘When I worked in the refuge we had a proper laugh.’

Ms Phillips began by describing her own feminist upbringing: ‘[as a child] I went to Women’s Liberation Playgroup, which was a feminist collective set up by my Mom*… we would make things like banners for the women at Greenham Common’. By the time she had her own first child, she was working with refugee women from Sierra Leone and Rwanda. ‘I could make myself sound really worthy’, she said with her trademark down-to-earthness, ‘but I set up Stay and Plays for the women partially because it meant I could go to work and also take my child with me.’

Turning to her work as an MP, Ms Phillips talked about her role in the drafting of the Domestic Abuse Bill, which received Royal Assent last year. ‘It’s not my Bill, it’s the Government’s’, she pointed out, ‘but it’s got more of me in it than it has of the Government!’

It was four years’ work, and she described how she became a party to Gina Miller’s Supreme Court action to oppose the attempted prorogation of Parliament in 2019 partly because, had Boris Johnson succeeded, all legislation would have fallen, and work on the Bill would have had to start again from scratch. Ms Phillips commented ruefully that, after Theresa May stepped down as PM, the Bill wasn’t seen by the Government as a priority: In opposing Miller’s action, the Government told the court that the prorogation ‘wouldn’t affect any really important legislation’.

The part of the Bill that Ms Phillips is proudest of, she told our audience, is that there is now a statutory duty to provide refuge accommodation in every Local Authority area. ‘Previously,’ she explained, ‘the only two things Local Authorities had to provide were adult social care and bins. I just wanted women to be as important as bins.’

What does she regret about the Bill? ‘There’s nothing about welfare,’ she told us, ‘very little about the availability of housing, and there’s nothing about rape and sexual violence [when] 56% of all sexual violence happens in a domestic setting.’ She also regrets that ‘it doesn’t say the word ‘woman’ in the Bill, anywhere.’

Ms Phillips lamented the cumbersome parliamentary process that produces legislation such as the Domestic Abuse Bill: ‘When you wake up and you can no longer smoke in the pub, it feels to you like it happened overnight… [but] that piece of legislation took ten and a half years!’

And the only pub in the country where you’re still allowed to smoke? ‘The one in Parliament’.

Ms Phillips was scathing about the family courts, particularly in Public Law Children Act proceedings, which she described as too often ‘colluding with perpetrators’. Perhaps her greatest scorn, however, was directed at the practice of sending female victims of domestic abuse on courses run by the voluntary sector as a ‘tick-box exercise’ if they want to keep their children. She sees this as part of a pattern of looking for faults in the abused rather than in the abuser: ‘You have to be the perfect victim… you have to have never done anything wrong’.

The fact that 1% of rape cases results in someone being charged – ‘not convicted; charged’ – is a source of real anger. Ms Phillips described the case of a woman in her constituency who was raped by a total stranger while out running on a canal towpath. The police seized her mobile phone. ‘What is it that could possibly be on your phone that could prove that he hadn’t raped you?’

As a woman in rape proceedings, ‘you are not a party to the proceedings… you are a suspect in the case that you have brought.’

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After Wendy Bulman of Shropshire Domestic Abuse Service had spoken about the service which she manages – painting a vivid picture of the sometimes unrealistic demands placed on the organisation by the Local Authority – SLS President Gemma Hughes invited questions from the floor.

There was a vigorous debate, as members quizzed Ms Phillips on the merits of training vulnerable women to avoid serially getting into relationships with abusive men, and the prevalence of unfounded rape allegations.

On the first question, Ms Phillips was adamant: ‘Abused women have literally nothing to learn; the people who have to learn are the men who are abusing them.’ Abusers, she said, seek out vulnerable women over whom they can exert control: ‘Nobody chooses to be abused.’

On the second question she was if anything even more adamant. She simply did not believe that women made vexatious rape allegations; however, ‘even if 50% of rape allegations are false, that means that 49% of rapists are getting off scot free.’

Finally, a member of the audience asked whether Ms Phillips was confident that domestic abuse services would be properly funded under a Labour Government. ‘I don’t feel confident that anyone will fund it to the level I want,’ she replied with no hesitation at all, ‘because what I want is the Moon on a stick.’

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The SLS Committee would like to thank Jess Phillips for giving freely of her time to come and speak to us. Everybody who attended came away knowing more and thinking harder about domestic abuse and male violence against women and girls. Ms Phillips did not take any fee for her appearance, accepting only a bag of Doritos and a cup of tea. The event raised £600 for Shropshire Domestic Abuse Service.

*In her book Everywoman, Jess Phillips addresses the vexed question of ‘Mom’: ‘Every time I write about being a mother, I receive comments about my use of the term ‘mom’. Just so you know, it’s not only the Americans who use it; in Birmingham and the wider West Midlands we say ‘mom’ too’. ■

Jess Phillips and Wendy Bulman