Healthy Relationships
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Jardine. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Maya Ellis) on a refreshing, measured, fantastic speech. Like the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), I expected a slightly different topic, but it was pleasing to hear so much about the importance of strong families. Maybe we can do this debate again and I will write a slightly different speech. Between us all, we will cover various aspects that are relevant and important. I would also like hon. Members to know that I, too, am watching season 4 of “Bridgerton”—a classic Cinderella tale—which is very enjoyable. Healthy relationships are underpinned by respect. In most cases, the way we would wish to be treated ourselves is probably a good place to start our relationships with others, but we continue to see high levels of violence against women and girls, as well as other kinds of abuse such as coercive control, with no real signs of reduction. That suggests something is going badly wrong, and the Government have rightly set challenging ambitions to address this huge societal problem. We very much welcome the Government’s recently published VAWG strategy and their ambition to halve such violence, and we hope it will build on the work undertaken by the previous Government. The Conservatives elevated violence against women and girls to a crime type that policing leaders must treat as a national threat, and we committed over £230 million to the tackling domestic abuse plan from 2022 to 2025. That included quadrupling the funding for victim and witness support services by 2024-25, and it complemented the £300 million investment in the 2021 tackling VAWG strategy as part of the goal to drive down the prevalence of domestic abuse. The previous Government also created two new offences: stalking and stalking involving fear of violence, serious alarm or distress. That made it easier for victims to hold stalkers to account. On top of that, we also outlawed upskirting to further protect women and girls, criminalised revenge porn and deepfakes, and introduced the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 and, accordingly, domestic abuse protection notices and orders. We are clear that robust action against offenders is vital in the fight against VAWG. Although relationship education in schools can go only so far in addressing male violence against women and girls, it nevertheless plays an important role in educating young people on what positive and healthy relationships looks like, and the importance of putting in place clear boundaries. Those skills are vital in navigating relationships, recognising potential abuse, including coercive control, and knowing how and when to seek help when needed. Relationship education was made compulsory in all primary and secondary schools in 2020. It has several core objectives: to foster pupil wellbeing, to develop resilience and character, and to ensure that pupils are happy, successful and productive members of society. In spite of that, shockingly, nearly three women every single week are killed by men, and many, many more are raped and abused. The risks and harms arising from the online world are feeding this problem. Pornography is available online at the touch of a button on smartphones. Let me be clear: this is harmful stuff that depicts strangulation, rape, violence and degrading acts such as spitting on young women. Any young man seeing such misogynistic content day in, day out will inevitably view women and girls differently. They will be more likely to see them as an object to use and degrade. By comparison, the relatively trivial amount of time spent learning the opposite in a classroom cannot hope to offset that. The single best thing we can do to stem the tide is to introduce a ban on smartphones in schools for under-16s and increase the age limit for social media to 16. That will not address the whole issue, of course, but it will massively help. The Conservatives have backed it all the way, and I ask the Minister to do so too. The Government’s proposal to ban strangulation content is welcome and a positive step forward. I am concerned that our strong desire to eradicate VAWG has led to boys and men being unnecessarily demonised. There is a difference between calling out abusive behaviour and labelling a whole set of masculine attributes as toxic. Masculinity is a wonderful thing—the yang to femininity’s yin—and it is certainly not toxic in the great majority of cases, particularly when it is not fuelled by online porn. Our answer to a genuine question about the abuse of girls has been to tell a generation of boys, “You are the problem,” and then we are surprised when that approach, instead of nurturing healthy relationships, creates resentment and pushes more young men towards the very online subcultures that feed off grievance and rejection. Instead, we need to positively embrace what being a good man, a good partner and a good father look like. Fundamentally, boys need positive role models from which to learn and model their own relationships. That is why fathers and other male role models are so important. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s thoughts on that. When it comes to education on healthy relationships, we have seen an ever-growing load of subject matter covering issues from relationships to mental health. Good RSHE can be a protective factor when it is age-appropriate, factual and taught impartially, but it is also important to recognise that schools should not try to replace the education that should be the family’s role. There is a careful balance to be struck. As well as confident, self-assured boys, we need confident, self-assured girls who are clear about their boundaries and what behaviours they are willing to accept and not accept. That means not telling them that selling their bodies is empowering, not expecting them always to be kind, and not telling them that the feelings of men are more important than their safety. On that point, I hope we might hear something today about the Government’s unresolved approach to gender-questioning guidance for schools and the release of the long-awaited code of practice on single-sex spaces following the recent Supreme Court ruling. The Government cannot claim to support healthy relationships so long as they leave schools to navigate the issue without proper guidance. It is incumbent on this Government to reinforce rules that entitle our girls and women to privacy from males when they are getting changed—that is basic safeguarding. We received the draft non-statutory guidance on gender-questioning children back in December 2023, but two years later, schools and parents are still waiting for it to be published. Will the Minister confirm when we can expect to see both the gender-questioning guidance and the revised code of practice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission? My final point is on the need to be honest about where the deeper formation of relationships happens. Schools matter and good teachers can be life-changing, but let us not lose sight of the fact that children spend most of their time outside the classroom. The attitudes that shape relationships are forged primarily at home, as well as online and in peer groups. If we want healthy relationships, we cannot pretend that a curriculum document can substitute for a loving and nurturing family structure. Families can come in all different shapes and sizes, but the important thing is that they are loving, nurturing and respectful. Children learn how to interact with others from their main caregivers. What are the Minister’s plans to support strong families, given that it is likely to be the most impactful way a Government can ensure healthier relationships?