A stranger tried to rape me on the street... as first-ever female Metro Mayor, I will be tackling violence against women as a priority
IT’S 100 days since West Yorkshire elected its first Metro Mayor, and she is ticking off her 10 manifesto pledges at lightning speed.
Buses, green jobs, skilled jobs for young people, a Creative New Deal for the region, affordable homes, championing diversity, tackling the climate emergency, support for local business, building back after Covid, affordable housing – all assigned funding.
But Britain’s ninth Metro Mayor is also the first woman. And it becomes clear there is one manifesto pledge that Tracy Brabin – the former MP for Batley and Spen and ex Coronation Street actor – is utterly determined to fulfil.
“Tackling violence against women and girls,” she says. “As the first-ever woman Metro Mayor in the country, I’ve made this a priority. I was sexually assaulted when I was at university. A stranger tried to rape me on the street. They caught him and he went to prison and he served his time.”
Brabin was 21 and in her second year at Loughborough University when the attempted rape happened on the way home from a party. “As he shoved me to the ground trying to rape me, I fought back, but I was battered,” she said when she spoke about the attack in the House of Commons after being elected as an MP in 2016. Somehow, Brabin had memorised his number plate, leading to his arrest. But the attack made her afraid to walk alone, and she slept with a knife by her bed.
“It was the worst thing I could ever imagine happening to me,” she said. Now she says it was also a transformative experience that indirectly led her to becoming Mayor. “It motivated me to join the women’s movement, it made me a feminist, so there was also a positive outcome,” she says. As Mayor, Brabin, 60, is tackling the issue in a number of ways. Unusually, her post’s powers include the Police and Crime Commissioner’s, and one of her first actions was to appoint Alison Lowe, Leeds’ first black woman councillor
– herself a survivor of domestic violence and child abuse – to be her Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime.
“I’m a victim of crime myself,” Lowe said on her appointment. “I was sexually abused as a child. I also lived in a domestic violence situation… There’s a lot of victims out there who haven’t got a voice, and I’ve been one of those women, and Tracy has been one of those women.”
As well as Lowe’s appointment, Brabin says: “We have pledged to increase the number of officers and staff by 750, take a victimcentred approach to crime and to put women and girls at the centre.” Meanwhile, rape survivors will be supported by 25 new advisers who will stay with them throughout the prosecution process. “What happened in Plymouth has laid bare the misogyny in society,” Brabin says of the murder last week of five people by a man who had engaged with the extremist ideology of the misogynist ‘Incel’ movement.
“I’m meeting the Chief Constable to discuss shotgun licensing,” she says. “But we have to look upstream. We need early intervention. We’ve got girls who say they don’t report being touched up in the school corridors because it’s so normalised.
“We are rolling out an education programme in schools about consent and being a positive bystander. I recently did a round table with students at universities across West Yorkshire. We’ve got a safer streets campaign and a bid into government to make sure our public spaces are open and more part of women’s lives.”
As we speak, women in Afghanistan are facing new violence and invisibility under the Taliban. We discuss the country’s inspirational first-ever woman mayor Zarifa Ghafarai, 27, who yesterday said she is sitting “waiting for the Taliban to come and kill me”. Brabin is fearful of “the horror that is going to be unleashed. To take the Taliban’s word is to be a fool. Women are facing a return to the medieval ages. No wonder our heroes of the armed forces feel so despairing”.
Until May, Brabin was the MP for Batley and Spen, a seat left empty by the murder of Jo Cox. When Brabin resigned to stand as Mayor, Jo’s sister Kim Leadbeater won the seat in the
teeth of a vicious election campaign. “George Galloway is a charlatan,” Brabin says. “We’ve already seen what happens when you divide a community in Batley and Spen. Jo was killed by a far-right white supremacist. We’ve seen what happens when politics becomes all about identity, and people deepening that divide.”
Kim, she says, “will begin the healing”, while Brabin is now “serving the people of Batley and Spen in a different way,” in a role with power and money. “Even in the Shadow Cabinet it’s hard to make really big impactful changes,” she says. “I came into politics late, so I’ve got a real sense of urgency to make life better for people in West Yorkshire. As Mayors we do all we can to support Levelling Up in our regions, but we need more than soundbites from government to really get on and deliver.”
She says of Boris Johnson: “The Prime Minister’s recent comments on coal mining and Margaret Thatcher show how out of touch he is with people in West Yorkshire. I know he likes to think he’s funny, but it was a real arrow in the heart to people who lost their jobs, their homes and their loved ones.
“It makes you ask whether the Government have really got Yorkshire in their hearts or are there strangers in government? It’s revealed what they really believe.”
Girls don’t report being touched up at school as it’s normalised