Women’s safety is at the heart of Labour’s agenda, the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, told Jane Martinson in the Guardian as she discussed plans to introduce a watchdog for women’s safety.
If elected Labour will appoint a commissioner to improve women’s safety, promising to “put violence against women and girls at the heart of its crime-tackling agenda,” which would be something akin to the children’s commissioner.
The remit of the watchdog would focus on the traditionally difficult to identify and prosecute crimes such as female genital mutilation and forced marriage.
Cooper said this government has let women down and this is absolutely right.
Signalling she is serious about the proposals Cooper said that a Labour Government would also introduce a violence against women and girls bill in its first Queen’s speech.
I have said before women must feel safe in the knowledge that they will be taken seriously if they report crimes made against them. It’s scandalous that conviction rates remain so low and that still, two women a week are killed by partners or former partners. Announcements like this indicate how a Labour government can really make an impact, precisely because it will take issues like these so seriously and really develop robust ways to address them.
Seems bizarre that 40 years after so called equality legislation we are now in need of a commissioner on women’s safety due to the rise in violent attacks on women and girls in public and domestic environments. I’m not sure how fit for purpose this will be since the current children’s commissioner presides over a country where 1 in 3 girls is sexually assaulted in school by their male peers and yet none of this violence is accountable. I think a system run by men will fail in regards to gender violence as badly as it has failed in its treatment of child victims since even the police have been proved to be more protective of child rapists than the raped.