Labour would introduce a women’s commissioner

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, has told the Guardian that Labour would introduce a woman’s commissioner who would focus on improving women’s safety.

The person in this new role would be responsible for inspecting and reporting on issues related to women’s safety – including female genital mutilation and forced marriage.

This will be part of a wider move made by the Labour leadership to put violence against women and girls at the heart of the party’s crime agenda and part of Cooper’s supposed call to make the issue of sexual and domestic violence one of the Home Office’s “core pillars”.

Cooper also hopes to outline that if Labour should win in 2015, their first Queen’s speech would include a violence against women and girls bill.

This all comes ahead of an event focussing on tomorrow where Cooper will reveal the proposed bill. She is expected to say:

“Women are being let down – by this government, by the criminal justice system, and by those who turn a blind eye when women are abused … A Labour government will put women’s safety centre stage – with new laws, higher standards, stronger prevention work.”

Other measures Cooper will outline tomorrow are said to include:

•  Introducing new criminal charges for people who post so-called ‘revenge porn attacks’ (where people put intimate pictures of their former partners online) on the internet , or who blackmail them with these pictures.

• Making sex and relationship education compulsory in schools and updating this education to address online safety (including a focus on online pornography).

• Banning community resolutions – where the police help to resolve minor offences by helping to facilitate informal agreements between the parties involved – for perpetrators of sexual violence and domestic abuse. Instead, perpetrators might end up with a criminal record.

To oversee rape cases that are dropped by the police, Cooper also plans to introduce checks for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). She will say,  “When more women are going to the police with allegations of rape and yet fewer cases are reaching court, let alone ending in conviction, we need to look at reforming the criminal justice system.” 

Meanwhile, criticising the government, Cooper will say they treat domestic abuse as hardly “a fringe issue”.