Agenda item

Report of the Cabinet Advisor on Safety for Women and Girls.

This report explores and sets out recommendations on how to ensure women and girls have the knowledge and confidence to navigate services, access support and create projects, and how our community can take practical action together to provide safer estates, streets, and venues.

Consideration was given to the report of the Cabinet Adviser on Reducing Violence and Abuse for Women and Girls.

Councillor Nasrine Djemai Cabinet Adviser on Reducing Violence and Abuse for Women and Girls gave the following key responses to questions:

• Domestic abuse and violence covered a huge area, in future she would want to look into how this affected the LGBT community and would want to speak to LGBT charities and organisations.
• A way of creating safe venues in the borough was to have open lines of engagement, encouraging venues to have a collaborative approach for example this would involve sharing information about perpetuators of harassment or violence between venues and alerting the police.
• Self-defence was one of the tools people could use to look after themselves and act confidently. Nine times out of ten perpetuators of violence were deterred from trying to approach a person that acted confidently.
• Self-defence was not only a good tool used for defending yourself from an attack/harassment, but it was also good for physical and mental wellbeing and the confidence from this could be used throughout all aspects of life. It would be good if this could be shared throughout all Camden schools providing kids the opportunity to take this up if they wished.
• Discussion about self-defence had taken place with kids at Regents Park School who had shown an interest in taking this up.
• Hopscotch was already undertaking a project in Haverstock School with focussed sessions among young people on positive masculinity and negative behaviours. Attitudes were slowly beginning to change, the challenge was how this could be sustained long term and the service spread across all schools in Camden.
• In relation to discussions with young boys about Andrew Tate, the discussions were quite uncomfortable for the young boys as they appeared not to have been exposed to these conversations. The discussions needed to include a whole range of issues, however discussions about Andrew Tate did not feature that much in the conversations.
• An experience of a single mum with a 14-year-old son was that the son was aware of who Andrew Tate was from social media he was however not seen as someone who was good or admired. A way of tackling this was through continued education of children from a young age.
• Having self-defence on the secondary school curriculum along with Personal, Social. Health and Economic Education (PSHE) would shape the way violence and harassment was viewed.
• There was the need to have more women in all areas that crimes and harassment of women could be reported to and who could serve as role models.
• Educating children in primary school about decency and about respect for women was already being done through reading and storytelling and speaking about kindness. It was suggested that it was important to have this in secondary schools because that was when there was more awareness.
• In terms of the Police Strategy of tackling violence against women, the Executive Director Supporting Communities advised that a report was due after 12 months. At the moment it was only 4 ½ months into the strategy, there was no outcome yet because it was new.
• A lot of women when reporting incidents of sexual harassment to the Police had felt a sense of despair as they were either not taken seriously or not believed, particularly when reporting to male police officers.
• It was important that people were educated and made aware, this included educating older men as well.
• The issue of violence and abuse against women and girls was a societal issue affecting everyone and the idea was to have a central space with the available resources and information.
• In the modern age of technology, it should not take too long to set something up which provided a link to all the resources in the borough. It was suggested that the Council could actively take a stake in having a platform and offering this to residents so they could access the service they required. Making access available to everyone.
• A way of tackling and publicising the issue was to make use of public spaces such as bus stops, schools and also using online platforms such as Instagram and twitter to call out abuse and hope it served as a deterrent. This would also create an awareness and a cultural shift.
• An example of this was the Mayor of London’s recent call out campaign with posters on Transport for London. This had caught a lot of attention and has had a positive effect.
• There were suggestions that representatives from the Youth Council, students from Universities could be approached to provide more information on these issues regarding violence, abuse and sexual harassment faced by these groups.

The Cabinet Member for Safer Communities commented that it had been a learning curve for her thanking the Cabinet Adviser for her commitment and hard work and for taking the opportunity to shape the Council’s approach to safety for women and young girls.

The Chair informed the Committee that the Violence Against Women and Girls Update should have come to this Committee meeting but there had been a mix up in terms of producing the report, the Council’s position on violence against Women and girls was due to be presented to the next meeting of the Committee.

The Cabinet Adviser was thanked for her excellent report and

RESOLVED –

THAT the report be noted and that the recommendations as set out in the report be endorsed by the committee.