We are, here in the Welsh Assembly, a young institution, but this Assembly has indeed got a very proud record of honouring and enacting the principles and the aims of International Women’s Day, as do successive Welsh Labour-led Governments. Since devolution, we’ve been amongst the most gender-balanced legislatures in the world—the first to elect an equal number of able women and able men. The consequences of that representation in terms of policy and legislation cannot and must never be overlooked.

One of those landmark policies is the Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act 2015. It’s the first legislation of its kind in the UK and it is the only law in Europe to have a specific focus on violence against women. That, we have heard, has been contested in this Assembly, and I will stand, as my colleagues will, steadfast behind that.

I’m going to tell you a story that I heard on Saturday. It isn’t a nice story, and it’s a story about a young female who found herself in jail—she has now been released on probation. Without telling me who that individual was, I was told about her story. Her story is one of drug addiction that started at the age of nine, when she took her mother’s Valium tablets. She took her mother’s Valium tablets because she couldn’t face the day. Her mother locked her and her brother in the coalhouse, because that was the only way that she could keep those two safe from an abusive father and husband. Those two children sat in that coalhouse, and whilst they could hear their mother screaming they knew she was alive—they were absolutely terrified when it was silent.

She went on through her life, as a consequence of that abuse and the addiction that she had gained very early on to Valium, to become a drug addict and to find herself within the prison system. So, that is why—it is stories like that, and they don’t make good listening. But these are individuals—we cannot begin to imagine that fear that was going through the mother and her children’s lives. That is why we support a gender-based approach to domestic abuse, and we do it quite proudly.

I wanted to tell that story, because those stories are never told. People see somebody within the prison system, they see somebody who has an addiction, but they never ever stop to think—they never ask why. So, I did that last weekend, and I wanted to share that with you today, because it is essential that, when women are elected to office, they do the right thing by the women who will never be elected to office. And doing the right thing means sometimes telling the stories that people don’t want to hear, and bringing through legislation that will actually hope that those children will not become victims later on in life.

The other area that I want to focus on is women’s economic activity, and we’ve heard today grand statements about that from the other benches. The 2016 autumn statement told us that 86 per cent of the net gains to the Treasury through tax and benefit measures came from women, and that was up by 5 per cent from 2015. But the UK Government has continued to evade its duties under the 2016 equalities Act, and refused to carry out a gender assessment, unlike the Welsh Government. If they did that, and bearing in mind that the budget falls on International Women’s Day this year, they might find that the cuts that they have made to the public sector have hit women specifically by 80 per cent—80 per cent of all those cuts have hit women, and I think it’s time that they actually did carry out an equality impact assessment on what they’re doing.