LABOUR MP Jess Phillips highlighted the sheer scale of violence against women today by reading out the names of every victim killed last year at the hands of a man.
The poignant and powerful moment was observed in complete silence as the MP read out the names of 118 women killed at the hands of men last year.
Jess Phillips, reading the tragic list
Sarah Everard was taken as she walked home from a friends
At the end of the list she said she had considered including Sarah Everard’s name on her list.
She said: “There has been much debate over what I would say at the end of the list – her name rings out across all of our media.
“We have all prayed that the name Sarah Everard would never be on any list.
“Lets pray everyday, and work everyday to make sure that nobody’s name end up on this list.”
A Met Police officer is in custody after being arrested on suspicion of murder and kidnap over Sarah’s disappearance, with human remains found in woodland in Kent.
As police continue their investigation MPs in the House of Commons fell silent as Ms Phillips read out the 118 names of the women killed by men in the last year.
Ms Phillips was given permission to read out the list – normally barred in parliament.
She said: “In this place, we count what we care about, we count the vaccines done, we count the number of people on benefits, we rule or oppose based on a count and we obsessively we track that data.
“We love to count data about our own popularity.
“However, we don’t currently count dead women.
“No governments study is done into the patterns every year of the data of victims of domestic abuse who are killed, died by suicide or die suddenly.
“Dead women is a thing we’ve all just accepted as part of our daily lives – dead women is just one of those things.
“Killed women are not vanishingly rare, killed women are common.”
Earlier Conservative former minister Maria Miller opened the Commons debate to mark International Women’s Day by paying a tribute to Sarah Everard.
She told MPs: “I want to start by sending my thoughts and prayers to the family and friends of Sarah Everard who are going through such a painful time.
“Her abduction has sent shockwaves across the UK. Sarah did everything to avoid danger and, let’s be very clear, women are not the problem here.
“But for many women this news story will bring back memories of threatening situations they have found themselves in through no fault of their own; being sexually harassed on the streets, walking home from meeting friends, anonymous threats of physical violence on social media, sexually assaulted in plain sight in rush hour on public transport on the way to work.
MPs listened to the long list
“Many choose not to talk about this, choose not to report it for fear of not being believed or taken seriously – but the research shows these sorts of events are parts of women’s everyday life and that is why what happened to Sarah Everard feels so very close to home.”
Mrs Miller added: “We should not accept a culture of violence towards women, we should not be complicit in covering it up and we need to give women effective mechanisms to report what happens, to expose the scale of the problem, to call it out publicly and to punish those who perpetrate this culture of fear.”
Labour former minister and Mother of the House Harriet Harman criticised Dame Cressida Dick’s comments regarding the disappearance of Sarah Everard.
She said: “This International Women’s Day debate comes in the shadow of the menace of male violence against women.
“Women will find no reassurance at all in the Metropolitan Commissioner’s statement that, and I quote, ‘it is extremely rare for a woman to be abducted off the street’.
“Women know abduction and murder is just the worst end of a spectrum of everyday male threat to women.
“When the police advise women don’t go out at night on their own, women ask why do they have to be subjected to an informal curfew?
“It is not women who are the problem here, it is men, and the criminal justice system fails women and lets men off the hook.
“Whether it is rape or whether it is domestic homicide, women are judged and blamed.”
Before the debate Home Secretary Priti Patel said “every woman should feel safe to walk our streets without fear of harassment or violence”, after Dame Cressida sought to reassure the public.
“It is thankfully incredibly rare for a woman to be abducted from our streets,” Dame Cressida said.
“But I completely understand that, despite this, women in London and the wider public – particularly those in the area where Sarah went missing – will be worried and may well be feeling scared.”
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