Fiona said:
"The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent point. This also happens to female police officers, as graphically described to the all-party parliamentary group on alcohol harm, which did a report on the issue. One senior officer said to us, “If I take a team through a club at night, by the time we have gone from one end of the club to the other, the female officer will have been felt up several times.” That is totally unacceptable."
Chris Bryant MP said:
"It is totally unacceptable; more than that, think about the effect that it has on emergency workers. It destroys their sense of self-worth, and means that they have to summon up courage when they go to work and often live in fear when they are at work. It also means that additional resources may be needed. Of course we have to deal with this issue.
I have a wider set of concerns around alcoholism. My mother was alcoholic and it killed her in the end. I worry that we sometimes use legislation too readily to deal with such issues. It is depressing that, in 100 years, the only thing that we have really come up with to deal with alcoholism is the 12-step process, which does not work for a lot of people who find it difficult to believe in another being above and beyond them. I hope that we will one day have far, far more significant research into what causes alcoholism and how we help people out of it, but the truth is that we will continually have to address the role of alcohol in fuelling violence and sexual violence, particularly against young women."
Fiona said:
"I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising that, because it is correct that alcohol plays a large part in assaults on emergency workers. Does he agree, therefore, that, while welcoming this Bill, we need to look further to address the issue of cheap alcohol as an underlying key cause of many of these assaults?"
Chris Bryant replied:
"The hon. Lady is absolutely right. All too often, in some of our towns and villages, it is far too easy to get very cheap alcohol, and vast quantities of it. Under-age people are growing up with the expectation that they will able not just to get half a pint of cider on a Friday night but to get a whole bottle of vodka, doing themselves irreparable damage. I have been doing a bit of work on traumatic brain injury of late, and in particular how it affects the criminal justice system. It is depressing that people who get violent after alcohol will often take enormous risks with their own personal safety or will get violent with others. The brain injuries that can result from alcohol develop especially between the ages of 14 and 21, when the executive function of the brain, which sits largely at the front of it, has not yet fully developed. The damage that is done is then seen in the criminal justice system, because we have thousands and thousands of people in our prisons who have brain injuries that were never properly looked at by medics and dealt with.
As the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) said, it would be bizarre not to include sexual assault when we are looking at other areas of assault. I know that the Government have been reluctant about this and have said that we want to treat sexual assault differently, but I think it is better for us to treat it in the same terms. Alcohol Concern recently said that between a third and a half of all emergency service people who responded to their research had suffered sexual harassment or abuse at the hands of intoxicated members of the public. Over half of ambulance service workers reported that they had been the victim of intoxicated sexual harassment or assault, and 41% of police had been sexually harassed by drunken people.
I do not want to pretend that legislation, of itself, solves a problem. That is true of the whole Bill, and I will say a little more about that when we get to Third Reading. After all, if legislation, of itself, ended offending behaviour, we would have no murder, no theft and so on. However, we need to send out a clear message that trying to touch up emergency workers, make inappropriate advances to them, or make even more advanced forms of sexual approach is wholly inappropriate behaviour. It prevents emergency workers from doing their job properly, undermines morale, and makes it more difficult for us to lead a safe life. That is why I very much hope that the Government will signify, first, on amendment 2, that they accept that spitting is part of common assault or battery; and, secondly, that sexual assault should be included as an aggravated offence."