Our Campaign: Westminster is Broken
This is our first campaign, the objective of which is to start a conversation about the culture of sexual misconduct and abuse in Westminster, the causes and how it impacts the culture of our politics today.
It is abundantly clear to us all that sexual misconduct is rife in politics, but it’s not just happening in Westminster – it is prevalent in every single political party. The primary objective of this campaign is to get the conversation started, but also to work with societies and other groups to put pressure on our parties to do better.
Campaign goals
This campaign carries multiple goals, because we believe that a holistic approach must be taken to tackling this growing problem, which we have outlined below.
- Raise awareness of how much sexual harassment truly happens, through testimonies, surveys, statistics and prevalence studies.
- Acknowledge the gender inequality within political parties and how this increases the power imbalance that may contribute to sexual harassment, by working with groups such as 50:50 and LWN.
- Advocate for better sexual harassment reporting procedures, including improved time frames, better protection for victims during investigations, raise awareness of external support services, make reporting more accessible and updated policies for increased online communication.
- Advocate for better safeguarding, including more connection between safeguarding and sexual harassment procedures, safeguarding training for members in roles, updated online safety guidance for safeguarding and protection of younger members.
- A survivor-centered approach of both campaign and parties, focusing on supporting victims of sexual harassment in politics and asking parties to pay more attention to how it affects victims.
Sign the open letter
We have written this open letter, which you are able to sign your name to, which will be sent to political parties once we reach our target.
Our Voice Matters 