How come Dubai is safer for women than London? I am ashamed

You will be amazed at how many women in this city are afraid of being raped or seriously sexually abused. That’s because, in my experience, so many women have either actually been sexually abused or know someone who has. This fear impacts every aspect of our lives and I can tell you personally that the mental gymnastics you have to do daily to feel safe is exhausting. And to be honest, we all know that there is nothing we can do to feel safe because it is not us who are to blame, but the men who want to harm us.

Sexual assault is something that is all too common in this city and something I now fear not only for myself but also for my niece who will be returning to London from Dubai later this year. This is a city where I have seen her have a freedom that I know she won’t find in London.

I’m not saying that women and girls in Dubai don’t face sexual harassment or violence, but I am saying that I walked around Dubai alone and with my niece and it felt so much safer than London could ever be. And now that she’s moving back, I fear for her more than ever after this week’s shenanigans in SW1.

We have sunk so low in this country that I now have to think about who is a rapist in Westminster and think twice about the people I engage with in my work to protect women and girls from female genital mutilation.

Let me explain.

When I heard Labor MP Jess Phillips speak in Parliament this week, in a debate about whether MPs arrested for rape should be banned from Parliament, I could wholeheartedly agree with the anger in her voice.

The House of Commons commission initially proposed carrying out a risk assessment to determine whether an MP should be banned from entering the House if he or she has been arrested for violent or sexual offences. However, the proposal has been amended to set the threshold for banning at the point of prosecution, significantly raising the bar for excluding an MP from the premises.

It’s honestly surreal that this debate had to happen, but it did, and during it Jess spoke about victims she had spoken to: “Just today… I spoke to two women who were raped by Members of this Parliament.” These are two women who, if these proposals had failed, would have had to see their abusers in their workplace every day.

A place where the country’s laws are also made. A place where the people who work there should be held to a higher standard of responsibility, not a lower one. I know that our Parliament is sometimes a bit medieval with its strange traditions, but the idea that an MP who has been arrested or is known to have raped someone can walk around the House of Commons is beyond strange.

Fortunately, Liberal Democrat Wendy Chamberlain’s proposal to reset the threshold for banning parliament to the arrest of an MP was adopted. Even then, you have to ask yourself: Is this good enough? We know how few people can or do report their rapes, and that in a place like Westminster, where the balance of power is so distorted, it is even more difficult for a woman or man who has been sexually assaulted to come forward. So is the arrest threshold too high? I say yes. We need a better system to hold those in power to account and also exonerate victims in Westminster and beyond.

Again, I can’t believe I’m writing this, but here we are, and if our parliamentary committees can’t find ways to ensure the safety of women and girls, it’s time we pushed political parties harder to do theirs to better screen candidates. They should seriously consider withdrawing the whip from MPs against whom complaints of sexual assault or harassment have been made.

And I say complaints rather than arrests or charges for the crime, because change begins with victims becoming believers. People rarely lie about sexual assault – this is propagated by perpetrators. It takes incredible courage to speak out about sexual assault.

When the women Jess spoke to came forward and named their abusers, they should have been given priority and protected by firing their abusers rather than having to deal with a debate aimed at denying them to provide more protection.

Nimco Ali is an activist and Evening Standard columnist