Female MPs reveal harrowing experiences of harassment in wake of Harvey Weinstein scandal

Female politicians today revealed their experiences of being sexually assaulted and harassed to encourage victims to speak out.

Labour MPs Mary Creagh and Jess Phillips have told of harrowing events that span back to their childhoods to help other women break their silence in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

Tories Theresa Villiers and Anne Jenkin, a baroness, have also spoken about how harassment and unwanted advances featured in the early days of their careers.

The catalogue of incidents experienced by the four women includes:

• An attack in a school playground

• Sexual assault in a bar

• An attack at a party

• Being fondled by an MP in their car

• Being groped at a political event

Today the shadow women and equalities minister, Dawn Butler, called for a new human resources body to be set up in Parliament to support staff and MPs.

Ms Creagh, the former shadow environment secretary, said “silence has to become abnormal” in cases of sexual assault and harassment.

Ms Phillips said she was speaking out for the sake of the women who “don’t have power to”. The politician, who chairs the women’s Parliamentary Labour Party, said she was attacked by her boss in her twenties before she became an MP. She said: “I was working in a bar and I remember going to a party and we went back to someone’s house and my boss was there. I had fallen asleep on the sofa and when I woke up he was undoing my belt and trying to get into my trousers. I was absolutely paralysed with fear. He was loads older than me — maybe 25 years older.

“Someone else came in the room and dragged him off me. Then I went back to work the next day ... it’s hard to comprehend that these things are happening until after the event.

“For most women you can look back and say ‘I wish I had told the police’, but knowing what I know in working in sexual violence services I doubt they would have been able to do something.”

This came after an attack in a bar in France where she was with a friend who was studying on her year abroad. She said: “I was 19 or 20 and a young group of lads were talking to us and flirting with us. We all had boyfriends and we said we weren’t interested in them and then one of them grabbed me and put me up against a wall and felt my vagina.

“I spat in his face and I slapped him. I was older then and I’m a relatively vocal human being anyway and I was thrown out of the bar. When we left that group just laughed at us. That was proper sexual assault.”

Ms Phillips, 36, said she and friends were regularly targeted aged 11 to 15 by a man who masturbated in front of them on their way to school. They gave statements to the police but she does not know if he was caught.

Ms Creagh, 49, has told of how she was attacked aged seven in her school playground. She said: “I had my underwear torn off during a game of kiss chase and was sexually assaulted by about 12 boys. They were older than me, about ten or 11 years old.

Ms Creagh said that when she was 16 her parish priest pinched her bottom. She had forgotten about this but the priest ended up in jail for assaulting other people. She said she had no idea when she was younger that he had hurt others. “We loved him and he was very charismatic,” she said.

She also recalled that a teacher who had given her a lift drove her to his house and turned off the lights before trying to kiss her. “He semi-apologised to me in the car on the way home. I then had to go to school and be taught by him.” She said she told the headteacher four years later when she feared someone else at the school might be at risk from the same man.

She said: “Women of my generation and older have suffered an extraordinary amount of abuse from an astonishing array of institutions, churches and schools, and for boys.” Ms Villiers, 49, said she had never been the victim of serious harassment but: “I recall one instance in the late Nineties when I was a candidate for the European elections and attended a Conservative function.

“As I was leaving at the end of the evening after having made my speech, I had to fend off some groping hands from one of the event organisers.”

The ex-Northern Ireland Secretary urged people who have suffered at the hands of people at work to come forwards. Last week she praised Tory MP Maria Miller, who told Channel 5 that she had suffered harassment. Ms Villiers said: “It is an abuse of power and for too long many women have felt reluctant to report it. I hope Maria’s example encourages others.”

Ms Butler, who has spoken of her experience of harassment, today said she had heard of people who work in Parliament being sexually harassed.

She said: “In most workplaces you can start dismantling structural barriers because you have an HR department but in Parliament each person is essentially self-employed.”

Baroness Jenkin, founder of the Tory Women2Win campaign to boost the number of female MPs, said she brus-hed off incidents when she arrived in Parliament as a 22-year-old secretary. On reflection, she believes the culture of an almost all-male Parliament in the mid-Seventies meant at times she was certainly harassed by older men.

“I was with an MP once in a car and he was trying to stroke my neck. I was swerving all over the road,” said the peer, 61. “Men used to hit on you all the time. They would say, ‘I had a dream about you last night’... these things affect people differently. I haven’t thought about it for 40 years. I’m not upset about it. I just hope it’s not common today.”