Stalking is a crime that shatters lives. It's a cumulative dread that builds in the mind, a mass of moments of infringements on a survivor's psyche and sanity, a campaign of quiet terror that pulls a person apart piece by piece. I've worked with a number of survivors of stalking, and the mental anguish that they're put through is debilitating. Stalkers blow families apart, destroy relationships, make you feel unable to walk down the street or even open your laptop without their presence making you feel diminished or under threat. I've worked with women whose stalkers installed spyware and listening devices in their homes, who suffered PTSD, women whose stalkers turned up at their workplace, who had their keys in order to copy them, women who received death threats, one woman who received a text from her stalker with a picture of a noose with the words, 'Not long now, my flower.' And, worst of all, women whose families were left to tell their stories for them because they had been murdered by their stalkers. 

I heard these testimonies, Dirprwy Lywydd, when I was part of a campaign in Westminster between 2010 and 2012 that resulted in new stalking laws being introduced. Working with the late, great Harry Fletcher, who is so missed, we set up an inquiry chaired by Elfyn Llwyd MP. We took evidence from practitioners, legal experts and, yes, survivors and families, about how the system was failing victims. And thanks in large part to the testimony of those brilliant women, we persuaded the UK Government to introduce new laws, announced on International Women's Day 2012, only a month after we published our report. The new clauses were subsequently passed within, I think, a record-breaking 11 days by both Houses of Parliament. Yet, Dirprwy Lywydd, it infuriates and disheartens me that, 10 years later, we need to have this debate—and we do—because police forces are not receiving the right training and prosecution rates are stubbornly low. The stalking laws, so long fought for, are not being used and women are still being failed by the justice system. Our motion calls for the Government and police and crime commissioners to ensure police forces understand the real nature of stalking and that mitigations available to them are used.

As we've heard, between January 2020 and March 2021, only two full stalking protection Orders were granted in Wales, despite 3,000 stalking offences being reported to the police—3,000. And I mention the real nature of stalking because, too often, it is played down or missed. The national stalking helpline found that around 50 per cent of survivors were unsatisfied with the police response to their case. In a quarter of cases, it was because the police didn't recognise the pattern of behaviour as stalking. 

With stalking, Dirprwy Lywydd, it is the pattern that creates the crime. Individual incidents taken alone will seem utterly inconsequential, but together they amass menace, and stalking is defined in law in a very particular way in terms of the impact the behaviour has on a victim—behaviours that cause serious alarm or distress. If police aren't given training in how to catalogue patterns of behaviour, to think of the cumulative stress put on the victim, and not only to see the one thing in front of them—the flowers that have arrived in the post for the fourth time that week, the messages sent on Twitter under new and elaborate guises, the stalker happening to be parked outside a person's home. It isn't the individual instance that creates alarm; it is the aggregate effect. And if the police officer dealing with your case isn't sympathetic to the nature of what stalking can do, you can feel trapped in this torture. 

Finally, Dirprwy Lywydd, our motion calls for women's safety to be a cornerstone in the design of public spaces. We don't have just physical spaces in mind here, but online spaces too. Women or any victims of stalking should not be forced to retreat from public spaces out of fear. Until policing and justice are fully devolved, our powers over improving people's lives in this area will only be partial. We owe it to survivors like those amazing women that I've worked with to do everything we can to end the torment of stalking.