Gender-based Bullying

Part of 2. Questions to the Leader of the House and Chief Whip – in the Senedd at 2:58 pm on 10 October 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:58, 10 October 2018

Yes, the cross-Government delivery framework on violence against women, domestic abuse and sexual violence sets out what we are doing and will be doing to meet the objectives contained in the national strategy on violence against women, domestic violence and sexual violence. Objective 3 is particularly focused on increasing awareness in children and young people of the importance of safe, equal and healthy relationships and that abusive behaviour is also wrong. We've been running two very successful campaigns. The This is Me campaign is trying to make sure that people don't accept gender stereotyping. I hope you've all seen it. It's been one of the most successful in terms of range and reach across Wales that we've ever run and it's been very popular with a number of the colleges and schools that I've visited. I was very privileged to launch it down in Rebecca Evans's constituency, actually, in Gower College, with a large number of very enthusiastic young people who were very keen to come out of the gender stereotypes. I hope you have seen it. It shows a range of things that always make me smile. An enormous piece of equipment pulls up and a person wearing the most beautiful pink wellies you ever saw gets out—obviously an expert driver of this huge piece of machinery and not at all what our unconscious bias would lead us to expect, and there's a male midwife featured there, there's a woman mechanic, but there are also people in their gender stereotypes, because actually there's nothing wrong with that if that's what suits you. So, the purpose of the campaign is to say that you should be the person you want to be, and if that conforms to a gender stereotype, fine, and if it doesn't, that's also fine. It's been very well received and it goes alongside our healthy relationships work, because we know that when people are trying to live up to a gender stereotype that doesn't suit them, that's when a lot of the problems start to occur. So, we've got a large number of programmes aimed at that.

We've got our Don't Be A Bystander campaign, which I hope you've also seen, which encourages people to take action where they see something that might look a bit weird to them and just to say something. We had very powerful testimony from some of the survivors there. Actually, it moved me to tears on one occasion, where one woman said that she was seen coming out of her shed early in the morning in her pyjamas by her neighbour, and her neighbour just said, 'Is everything okay?', because that seemed a bit odd to her, and she said that was the catalyst for her to think, 'No, it really isn't.' So, she said, 'Yes, it was'—this is her testimony, not mine—to the neighbour, but it made her realise that it wasn't, just that one little thing.

So, we've rolled out our 'ask and act' policies. Very large numbers of people have been trained now—if I flip through my papers, I can tell you: I think it's 70,000—and that's what that's doing. So, it's a simple set of things that you can do as a person—it's available if Members want to take it themselves, by the way, the level 1 for just ordinary citizens—that trains you in what to say if you think something is strange, just to give you the confidence to do it. So, people like firefighters, who often go into homes and then they see something—to give them the confidence to be able to know what to do. It's a very simple set of actions and it's very powerful. So, we're very determined, Deputy Presiding Officer, to wipe this kind of gender-based violence out of our communities.