Now women MPs tell how sex pests targeted them too
FEMALE MPs and peers spoke out about sexual harassment at Westminster yesterday after deciding to break their silence in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
Conservative peer Baroness Jenkin said ‘men used to hit on you all the time’ when she began her career and revealed that an MP once stroked her neck.
Theresa Villiers, a Tory MP, said she had to fend off ‘groping’ hands at a Conservative party function in the 1990s.
Labour MP Mary Creagh said she was sexually assaulted as a child in her school playground and had her bottom pinched by a priest as a teenager.
And Labour colleague Jess Phillips said her boss tried to attack her before she become an MP, and she had also been assaulted in a bar.
Their testimony comes as a wide range of women have been talking about their experiences of sexual abuse and harassment following a growing Twitter campaign under the hashtag ‘me too’.
Baroness Jenkin, 61, said: ‘I was with an MP once in a car and he was trying to stroke my neck. I was swerving all over the road. Men used to hit on you all the time. They would say, “I had a dream about you last night’’,’ she told the London Evening Standard.
The peer said she had brushed off the incidents when she arrived in Parliament as a 22year-old secretary.
‘These things affect people differently,’ she said. ‘I haven’t thought about it for 40 years. I’m not upset about it. I just hope it’s not common today.’
She added: ‘ Women of my generation and older have suffered an extraordinary amount of abuse from an astonishing array of institutions, churches and schools.’
Miss Creagh said she was seven when she was attacked in the playground. ‘ I had my underwear torn off during a game of kiss chase and was sexually assaulted by about 12 boys,’ she said. ‘They were older than me, about ten or 11.’
She added that when she was 16 her parish priest pinched her bottom – an incident she recalled years later when the priest ended up in jail for assaulting others.
Miss Creagh also said that a teacher who had given her a lift drove her to his house and turned off the lights before trying to kiss her. The former shadow environment secretary said ‘silence has to become abnormal’ in cases of sexual harassment and assault.
Miss Villiers, 49, recalled attending a Conservative function in the late 1990s when she was a candidate for the European elections.
She said: ‘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 organisers.’
Mrs Phillips, 36, said her boss had tried to assault her after a night out before she became an MP. She said: ‘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 paralysed with fear. Someone came in and dragged him off.’
She also told how she was attacked in a bar in France. ‘I was 19 or 20 and a young group of lads were talking to us and flirting with us,’ she said.
‘We said we weren’t interested then one of them grabbed me and put me up against a wall and groped me. I slapped him and was thrown out. That was proper sexual assault.’
She added that she and friends were regularly targeted when they were aged 11 to 15 by a man who committed a sex act in front of them on their way to school. They gave statements to the police.
Labour women and equalities spokesman Dawn Butler called for a new body to be set up to support staff and MPs.
The Weinstein Company is being investigated by New York prosecutors over possible civil rights violations, including sexual harassment of employees. It follows widespread allegations of misconduct by its co-founder, film mogul Harvey Weinstein.
He has denied allegations of non-consensual sex.
‘Paralysed with fear’