Jess Phillips honours femicide victims and says Government will ‘push harder’
Ms Phillips has read the names of women killed by men every year for a decade – this year being her first as a Home Office minister.
Jess Phillips has pledged the Government will “go further and push harder” as she read in Parliament the names of women killed by men in the past year.
It is the 10th year the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley has honoured victims of femicide, this year being her first to do so as the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls.
Ms Phillips was responding to the annual International Women’s Day debate where a number of MPs discussed their own experiences with rape, sexual assault, pregnancy, miscarriage and other issues faced by women.
Prior to reading the names, Ms Phillips said: “Last year I said that I felt tired and angry and weary. I was sick of the failures.
“But as I stand here today on the front bench, placed here by a Prime Minister inspired to action, who mentioned the reading of the list in the very first ever speech he made from this despatch box as the Prime Minister, alongside a Home Secretary and a flight of brilliant ministers who are totally dedicated to this, I feel hopeful.”
As she read the list of names, those in the public gallery rose to their feet and many in the chamber became tearful.
After commemorating the women, she said: “This is a fight that demands the very best from all of us, and we must rise to the occasion. Under this Government, this issue will get the attention that it deserves.
“We will keep honouring and celebrating women as we build a society in which they are respected and protected, and we will back up our words with action as we seek real and lasting change, undeterred by those who sit on the sidelines while the list of names grows longer.”
Ms Phillips highlighted that one in five homicides in the UK are domestic homicides, referring to Raneem’s Law brought in by the Government in memory of Raneem Oudeh and her mother Khaola Saleem, who were murdered by Raneem’s ex-husband in August 2018.
She said: “We must act now and be relentless in chasing the change. Many have mentioned today Raneem’s Law that the Government have brought in to embed specialists in 999 control rooms.
“And I hope that this shows how important this list, the issue of women killed, is to this Government, how it drives our actions because I read out the names of Raneem Oudeh and Khaola Saleem, her mother, on the years that they were killed.”
The minister also said the Government is seeking to “push forward massively on stalking laws”, and that too many women have died “because we didn’t take stalking too seriously”.
“One of the things the Government will do is allow people to know the identity of their online stalkers which currently isn’t the case and is based on the case of (former Coronation Street actress) Nicola Thorp,” Ms Phillips said.
“I’m going to call it Nicola’s Law because I want to start having laws for women who didn’t die.
“We must go further and push harder.”
Opening the debate, Labour former minister Dawn Butler appealed to men and boys at risk of “turning to the far-right” or becoming incels to change their behaviour and play a positive role in society.
The MP for Brent East questioned how it can still be the case that a woman is killed every three days by a man in the UK, saying: “Of course there’s a place for straight white men and boys and a very important role for them to play in society, and we will hear a lot today that one woman is killed every three days and 97% of them are killed by men, the majority of them white.
“So if we want to protect women we need to reach out to those men – the ones that are informed, the ones that are kind, the ones that are loving – and we need to say that we need you now more than ever before.
“Because right now there are some serious, toxic, misogynistic men and some of them stray and they are harming women, they are harming society, they are harming gay people, they are harming black people and this is the very foundation of which we live and we need to say ‘no’.”
Concluding the debate Ms Butler became choked up, saying she felt “more emotional than normal”.
She said: “I fear that things are going to get worse. I fear that that list is going to get longer because we are at that tipping point, and if we don’t stop what’s going on globally around the world, if we don’t call it out, it will get worse.”
Ms Phillips has also pledged that the Government’s violence against women and girls strategy, expected to be published in the summer, will include action specifically addressing the root causes of abuse including “underlying behaviours held by some men and boys”.
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said “a line has been crossed” when the safeguarding minister became the target of misogynistic abuse online after US billionaire Elon Musk described her as a “rape genocide apologist”.
