What can be done to stop violence against women and girls in the UK?
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00:00That's the attitude. So there's so little respect for women in there, isn't there? It's
00:08all about respecting the man's property in inverted commas. So you're absolutely right
00:15that we need to work to change men's attitudes. And we've got, you know, we're existing at
00:21a time of a really worrying increased wave of misogyny online and offline. We see it
00:28all around us. We see some key kind of influences who capture an awful lot of attention, particularly
00:33from young men who are really twisting their minds.
00:37Police forces in England and Wales continue to see a backlog in rape prosecution cases
00:42and damage by a funding crisis.
00:45And those programmes which give space to men to talk with other men about what it means
00:51to be a man and what sort of man they want to be, what kind of masculinity they want
00:56to adopt, particularly when it's led by people who are inspired by feminist ideas and ideas
01:03of equality and respect between the sexes. Research shows that those kinds of interventions
01:09can be really effective. So I really hope that this current government will think about
01:13how we work with young people, not just in schools and colleges, but in that youth and
01:19community work as well.
01:22Before coming into power, Labour pledged to establish 80 new rape courts across England
01:26and Wales in order to fast-track cases as part of wide-ranging plans to tackle violence
01:31against women and girls.
01:33And again, the research shows that individual laws don't make much difference. But to tackle
01:38this issue, you need a range of different interventions, the sorts of things I've talked
01:42about at different levels, in different environments, so that we're building a society which says
01:48we don't tolerate unwanted sexual intrusions, instead of treating it as almost inevitable.