Outrage is the right – though not the only – reaction to violence against women and girls, to grooming, to rape. It was my reaction when I met two of the women who had been deceived into long-term intimate sexual relationships by undercover police officers deployed to infiltrate their organisations, and learned of their stories. I was even more outraged to learn there is police guidance that this is not acceptable; but that it is not an absolute bar.
I wish my private member’s bill could be presented in the Lords chamber by some of the women. The peers to whom they spoke in a private meeting last week could not hide their shock. These women are not, and were not, terrorists. They planned and went on protests (one told us all she had done was release battery chickens) but they were members of campaign organisations under police surveillance.
It seems upwards of 68 women were targeted into apparently close, often 'forever', relationships, only for their partners suddenly and worryingly to disappear. Then over time it became clear they had been using false names, often those of dead children. Sometimes children were born of the relationships.
It would need a psychiatrist to explain the life-changing damage caused. But it’s not difficult to understand why such an experience means it is so hard, for many impossible, ever to trust again, including trusting themselves.
This is not a matter of a few bad apples. Not even a barrel load. The inquiry established by prime minister Theresa May, which has been sitting for 11 years, has so far identified 30 officers, but the total is not known. The inquiry has brought together many of those targeted. They have found one another, and found their experiences are so similar. As they would be: the spycops had managers, even regarding them as mentors. There was a so-called Tradecraft Manual in use. So no wonder their stories echo one another.
I had never thought to use this term: state-sponsored abuse.
Intimacy, the very closest, has been an instrument of surveillance. It’s not just a risk to be managed by better safeguards. So reform cannot mean simply adding safeguards. My bill would make it an offence, with a sentence based on the offence of rape. By logical extension, it would also be an offence to encourage or assist such conduct, and there would be a duty of candour on the part of undercover operatives and their handlers.
The undercover officers themselves seem to agree. Two who deceived women in this way acknowledged to the inquiry in their oral evidence that had it been a criminal offence to deceive a member of the public into sexual activity they would not have done it.
The government will no doubt respond that nothing should be done until they have the outcome of the inquiry. My bill is in no way intended as a criticism of the inquiry, but we do not need to know its conclusions to know this conduct is very wrong. It must be outlawed, and that can be done now.
Sally Hamwee is a Liberal Democrat peer and the party’s lead home affairs spokesperson in the Lords
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