Just wow really. Is the tide really turning? Is Labour really listening?
Labour MP for Gower, Tonia Antoniazzi, during the Commons debate on crime and safe streets for all, said:
Data must be accurately sex-disaggregated in order to fully understand the impact of all crimes on women and girls. In order to combat sexism, we need to count sex, and in order to combat discrimination against other groups, there is a need to record separate and additional data. The offending patterns of men and of women show the highest differential of all, so we need to monitor the sex of victims and of perpetrators of all crimes.....
‘I understand that at least 16 regional police forces now record suspects’ sex on the basis of gender identity, following the advice of the National Police Chiefs’ Council. Data based only on self-identified gender does not give accurate data on which to build a violence against women and girls strategy, nor to effectively plan services that support all victims and target all perpetrators whatever their sex or however they identify.
‘If police records are not robust and correctly disaggregated by sex, we end up with unreliable and potentially misleading data in reporting. For example, the BBC asked 45 regional police forces in the UK for data on reported cases of female perpetrators’ child sex abuse from 2015 to 2019. The data received indicated that there was an increase of 84 per cent. Data corruption means that we cannot tell whether this large increase is due to an increase in female offenders or those identifying as women, and that detail matters.
‘Women make up 3 per cent of the arrests for all sexual offences. The number of women convicted for these crimes is so low that the mis-recording of the sex of the perpetrator skews the data very quickly. Where offence categories are very rarely committed by women, the addition of just one or two people can have a significant impact on data. For example, a biological man convicted of attempted murder and other offences at Birmingham Crown court in 2017 was recorded as female, thus falsely elevating the number of females convicted of attempted murder that year in England and Wales by around 20 per cent. We need to know what action the Government will take to ensure correct police record keeping and prevent the potential corruption of data on crimes and their impact on women and girls.’*
Full speech:
hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2021-05-17/debates/704EF355-2257-4D67-9F0C-A712E6442227/SafeStreetsForAll#contribution-26BAA3CE-A681-4E28-BFBE-B136CFEC6D4F
James Kirkup's article on the matter in the Spectator:
www.spectator.co.uk/article/mps-are-finally-engaging-with-the-gender-identity-debate