00:00TV presenter Zahra McDermott has called for primary school children to be educated on consent
00:06to prevent violence against women. She was among campaigners gathered outside parliament
00:11to call for more investment in refuge services for domestic abuse victims.
00:18We are here today for one of Refuge's really important campaign, Home is Where the Hurt is,
00:24and essentially it's a campaign raising awareness for the fact that a lot of the time women are
00:29told that the most dangerous place for them is on the streets, but actually for a lot of women it's
00:34inside their home. I think what we are hoping for is some more funding in the sector of creating
00:42safe houses and refugees for women when they're fleeing domestic violent relationships or abusive
00:48relationships. They need somewhere to go. Often women are fleeing relationships with nothing but
00:55a shirt on their back literally. They have got a five minute window to leave and run and you know
01:00it takes a lot of courage for someone to walk away from an abusive relationship so we need to make
01:06sure
01:06the infrastructure is there to allow them to go to somewhere safe. Holding placards resembling estate
01:12agent boards they surrounded a pink front door with the number 75 on it which represented the number of
01:18women they say were killed by domestic homicide in the year ending March 2025. Georgia Harrison who is 31
01:27years old was also at the protest. Miss Harrison an ambassador for refuge said a lot of people think
01:34that abuse comes from strangers in dark alleys but actually there are so many more women suffering
01:39every day in their homes. But with domestic abuse in general I think the most important thing is just like
01:45young women being able to see the signs of when they're in an abusive relationship it isn't always
01:49physical like people seem to think that you have to have like black eyes to be in a domestic abusive
01:54relationship but you don't there's so many ways to coerce someone there's tech control there's literally
01:59just emotional abuse where you make something so small to the point where they don't love themselves
02:04anymore and that is what perpetrators want to do so I really just want to raise awareness for young
02:08women to notice the signs before it's too late. Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently sat down
02:14with victims of domestic abuse to listen to their stories as well. It's so important this work
02:21that we're doing and it's so important that you're in number 10 doing it because this is the centre of
02:26government under this room is where the cabinet sits and it's really important that you're in the
02:31centre of government working with us on this because we can't do this without you and therefore
02:38having you here today is hugely important as Claire will attest and Sarah when I was chief prosecutor
02:46a number of years ago now one of the big issues that we had to deal with was how we
02:52tackle violence
02:53against women and girls and we made a number of really important changes to the criminal justice system
02:58but we've got to go further
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