Are asylum fears a distraction in the fight for women's safety?

0:00How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow. Coming up on the Sky News Daily with me, Neil Patterson. Don't let migrants distract from the real threat to women. The stark warning from the top cop charged with tackling violence against women and girls.

0:41How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow. Save our kids! Save our kids! Save our kids! No one would deny there is widespread concern over the levels of illegal immigration and asylum, particularly when it comes to violence or sexual crimes on women.

1:24The question is whether those concerns are valid. Well, according to the police officer in charge of tackling violence against women and girls, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Helen Millichap, they're a distraction. I'm concerned that the message could get missed in the current political discourse, which is where does the real threat come from? It's from a multitude of things. And that the political route around asylum seekers is diverting attention from those who make up the overwhelming majority of offenders. An unhelpful distraction then, given the government wants to have violence against women and girls in a decade.

1:59But with under-resourced police forces, log-jammed courts and prisons full to bursting, that was already looking tricky. We'll be looking in a bit more depth at the government's ambition with the former Victims Commissioner, Dame Vera Baird. She will be here shortly. But first, let's turn to our Home News correspondent, Molly Malone. Molly, clearly this is an important topic. So what exactly did Helen Millichap tell you? So this was a wide ranging interview, her first broadcast interview in this new role, which is the National Police Lead for Violence Against Women and Girls. And she talked about lots of things, funding fears, about the risks to meeting that target of harming violence against women and girls.

2:36But I also kind of wanted to ask her about what so many people are talking about at the moment in the political conversation when it comes to the threat to women and girls and particularly the threat posed by asylum seekers. And she made it clear that her view is that, look, where there is a risk, in her words, you've got to identify it, you've got to tackle it. And she doesn't want the kind of political conversation to overtake or amplify what she sees as the real threat to women and girls and where that threat comes from. This is a parallel then, isn't it, to sexual offending in general, that everyone assumes it is the unknown, but actually the vast majority of sexual offending, the victim knows the offender.

3:21Yeah, that's right. The police look at what they call volume crime. So domestic abuse, two million victims a year. And by nature of being domestic abuse, many times it's perpetrated by a partner or an ex-partner. And the same, she said, with many sexual offences is often the victim will know the perpetrator. None of which is to say that the Deputy Assistant Commissioner doesn't accept that immigrants do commit crime, including violent and sexual offences against women and girls. Exactly. And I think actually this is really important to say that I've spent time at some of these protests in Epping, for example.

3:57It's a wide range of people, right? It's women, girls and men. They all justifiably have their concerns about undocumented migrant men posing a risk in communities, a risk to women's safety. We saw in Epping, remember, a man was convicted for the sexual assault of a 14 year old girl and also of an adult woman. So this kind of idea is not coming from nowhere. But I guess the two things aren't mutually exclusive. It can both be true that people feel threatened by asylum seekers, people that they don't know in their community in terms of women's safety. but it can also be true that the policing and others in society want to remind people of what they see as the kind of real or overall threat the wider threat their view of what they see on the ground Helen Millichap's view is that the perpetrators are known so often to the victim and she doesn't want individual cases I guess to distract or amplify from what she calls the real threat I mean the government's ambition is to have the amount of violence against women and girls but And in terms of the situation that we're in right now, I mean, how well do we do when it comes to tackling this issue?

5:02I mean, two things to say here. One, the volume of what we're talking about. Domestic abuse, two million victims a year, half a million children. Those, by the way, are just estimates. Much of it, of course, goes unreported. But if you actually look, and I do from time to time look at the kind of public perception of how it's being handled. there was a yougov poll earlier this year that said that 52 percent of women think the uk has become more dangerous in the last five years eight in ten 79 percent think the government should be doing more to tackle it and add to that you know as you say the court backlogs the changes to sentencing people sending less people to prison freeing people early what we've seen play out over the last however many months the government make you know arguable reasons for why that needs to happen because of a ballooning prison population but you can imagine the signal that trials that are listed for 2029 sending less people to prison the signal that that sends to victims of crime and you see it play out in you know polling like that and of course there are also the support services for those who have found themselves the victim of crime and when when government doesn't pick up the reins it is often left to the charitable sector to to pick up the slack and and I'm wondering how they're getting on at the moment we've got the victims commissioner for England in Wales, the letter that she shared with Sky News, writing to the Justice Secretary actually twice now, first after spending review and now following up.

6:24Now we've got a new minister, which by the way, probably makes things a bit more complicated as well with any kind of targets, right, that reshuffle. But she's saying that victim services are financially at breaking point, that it's her fear that the needs of victims are slipping behind other priorities. And echoing that is Rape Crisis, the biggest kind of support service of its kind, saying that they've shut three centres in the last year. And that's thousands of people that are relying on that support. One chief executive in South London Rape Crisis Centre saying that people are dying because of it.

6:56So it's really serious stuff that we're talking about by way of the challenges, the funding challenges that those services are facing. Just a final question to you, Molly. You, your peers, your friends. How do you feel on a night out these days? Thank you for asking, actually, because part of the reason why I care about this story is because it's what my friends are talking about. And sometimes, you know, it's getting dark early. You worry. You're looking behind yourself. You hear situations about, you know, where people are carrying their keys ready to head into the front door. And every kind of survey will show you that a woman's perception of feeling safe on the street is not improving.

7:33Molly, thanks very much. Okay, so what now of that government pledge to get violence against women and girls significantly reduced? Well, Dame Vera Baird Casey is the former Victims Commissioner, currently Chair of the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Vera, just listening to Molly talk there about her report, what do you think about the issue? Do you think we are focusing too much on immigrants as a cause of violence against women and girls?

7:59Helen Millichap:It is absolutely clear that the people who assault and sexually abuse women and girls are members of their family or members of their social circle. So about 85 % of rapes, possibly a little more this year, are by people the person knows. It is very, very clear the people who do harm to women are those who know them. That's the sexual assault position. Domestic abuse, of course, is domestic abuse. That's because it's inflicted by a partner, and that amounts now to well over a third of all violent crime. So it is men who know women who are inflicting violence against them, including particularly sexual violence.

8:45Helen Millichap:These are things we have to focus on, and the culprits are not immigrants coming in small bows. Well, the government have pledged to reduce violence against women and girls by half over the course of a decade. You will have seen some ambitious manifesto pledges in your time, Vera. I'm wondering whether you think this one is actually achievable. I mean, no doubt that the ministers driving that agenda are absolutely determined that we will succeed. And they wanted, I think, a target so that they could be counted against it. And I'm hoping too that Jess Phillips and Alex Davies Jones have managed to get other parts of the government engaged in this issue because it's hard to think of a Department of State that is not an essential partner in driving this violence against women and girls epidemic truly down.

9:41Let's try then and dig into where the pressure points in the system currently exist.

9:46Helen Millichap:There is such a lot of overwork in the police. There is a massive, massive lag in the criminal justice system now. So that somebody alleging rape at this point, probably, if it gets prosecuted, which will take time, itself will not go to court for perhaps, you know, three or four years. Obviously, many people, therefore, just don't take through any of these complaints because of those factors. You will have spoken to women who found themselves in that situation, waiting years to even get an attempt at justice. What did they tell you about their experience of that? It is very, very strongly put that the abuse by the criminal justice system is often worse than the abuse they've suffered at the hands of their assaulter.

10:35Helen Millichap:And says in the most large capital letters, you're not the centre of all this victim, The defendant is at the centre of all this and the thing is going to be arranged around him. That is, you know, across the sphere of victims of crime, that is a problem that the courts arrange things around the trial of the perpetrator, the alleged perpetrator. I think the criminal justice system from top to bottom is quite a problem for victims generally, and a particular one because of the delays, especially for violence against women and girls' victims. I think another point to make is that many women who don't go to the police or who go to the police and then don't continue really desperately need the services of women's sexual and domestic violence support services.

11:26Helen Millichap:And there is a real worry just now that they are closing, that they are underfunded and that they can't cope with the people who need them. And again, women who've been assaulted having to wait many months before they can get the right advice and input about their trauma, that, of course, rape crisis can deliver. Domestic abuse services can deliver. People's lives are saved by rape crisis organisations and domestic abuse organisations. But they need to get there at a reasonable time, and that's only possible if they're appropriately funded. Do you think that we as a society take this issue seriously enough?

12:06It sometimes feels like we only ever really discuss it when, you know, Sarah Everard, Zara Alina, when we get one of those high-profile cases that sticks on the front pages of the newspapers and in the broader public consciousness.

12:19Helen Millichap:I know we don't deal with it seriously enough. You know, huge numbers of women are sexually assaulted and domestically abused daily. The impact on them, the way it affects their children, their whole household, their whole family is catastrophic or very often catastrophic. And it really is an epidemic we should tackle, you know, with a stronger set of measures as we did COVID, albeit it's very different. and you're right it does swell up with a major event and these are all very very important events which tell their own story but it is going on day after day after day i think the numbers are such that if you sit in a hall where there are 20 women probably you know a quarter of them or more are victims of domestic abuse of one way or another and then if you add together the women who have been sexually assaulted, it will be a higher number again.

13:19Helen Millichap:It is very, very important that this strategy does win out. Given that we don't appear to have taken this seriously enough, that the previous government strategies don't seem to have worked, why do you think that we can't get it right? If you think about how difficult it was, how ultimately successful it was to tell people that they shouldn't drink and drive, that was a major piece of you know public service culture changing and it took a long time but the depth of cultural presence of you know the the male domination the role of the man being what it is and the role of the woman being relatively subordinate or undervalued or the one who stays at home and so on.

14:08Helen Millichap:That is massively culturally entrenched. You know, it's something that we have to work on about general equalities. But the problem is, because there still is massive inequality, including, of course, financial inequality, so that people can't get away from violent relationships because they haven't got the funding themselves. Men know that they can dominate women because she can't get away, because she isn't in as well-paid job as there. all of that cultural entrenchment makes it an immensely difficult task. You know, 10 times or 20 times more difficult than stopping people from drinking and driving.

14:45My thanks to Vera, Molly, and to you for listening. And if you've been affected by anything we've been discussing, the details for the Samaritans are in the notes attached to the show. You can catch up with more of Molly's report over on the website, skynews.com. And if you like what you've been hearing, go on, give us a follow. The Daily is back again tomorrow.

15:06How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.