Speeches by Carns.

“The reality is that what has happened in Afghanistan is a tragedy; let us not shy away from the issue. Hope has been blanketed out for a large chunk of women and girls in Afghanistan. The charities that are working in-country are doing an amazing job, sometimes at great risk, to help those most in need. The ability to …”

“Yes. When I reflect back on my military career, we see this root and branch within the MOD. Almost every element of the single services, whether it be a command and control headquarters or something else, usually has a human security individual who has been trained, which obviously covers WPS within that. Throughout my…”

“I am the Minister for the Armed Forces.”

“It is really difficult, but we can have some measurement of effect. It may be just a statistic of how many people we have trained, how many people we have seen and, if they conduct surveys at the end of the courses, have they seen it is valuable? It would be very difficult to track, but how many of these women actually…”

“Yes. On top of that, since 2015 we have had the gender protection adviser role in the United Nations, focused particularly on the DRC.”

“We are always trying to prevent conflict—that is primarily what defence does—but we have to be prepared if conflict were to break out. When we move from, in some cases, the previous 20 years of wars of choice to wars of necessity, there is a bigger bill when it comes to some of the capabilities we need to field. That i…”

“We are working with the CMCC on the piece around Gaza, where we have females there providing support and understanding. They are the interface between the military, civil society and, indeed, the charitable organisations. I have a whole list of countries that we are working in, including technical support to Brunei on …”

“It is really important that we have senior women throughout our civil service within the Ministry of Defence, and within the Ministry of Defence serving population. Earlier, I mentioned the Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff. We have some really senior and super-effective women in the Army, Navy and Air Force, and long ma…”

“I can start. The best way to prepare for and prevent conflict is to be ready for one. It sounds quite counterintuitive, but a strong defence reduces the likelihood of conflict. We could argue that the way in which the withdrawal from Afghanistan was conducted sent a signal to the world that the west was weak and, along…”

“There are benefits of equality, yes, but primarily performance. There is also a communications issue here, where the more women you have in these places, the more hope you give to a whole swathe of people who look up, emulate, and realise that they can achieve their ambitions. I fully support it. If there were more wom…”

“Absolutely. If you read it, it is a tragic case about a woman stuck in the command chain and not really feeling she can go anywhere. That is exactly where we have designed this from. It obviously happened some time ago. It does not make it easier to deal with, but there has been a lot of action since then, and since th…”

“Gunner Jaysley Beck.”

“Absolutely, and this is where we had all the NATO female leaders come together. The UK is leading in some of this space, but we are not ahead in everything. Some of the Nordic countries have a lead on us, and we are learning this collaborative approach to learning best practice in this area. We need to get to a space w…”

“When I was the Minister for Veterans and People, I sat down with various different groups, one of which was Women in Defence. We would take a plethora of all different ranks from very senior down to the other ranks, and we would just hear their experiences. Some of those were negative; the majority were positive. The k…”

“We have a zero-tolerance policy which runs internally across all our military. It is primarily against any unacceptable sexual behaviour and it is dealt with at the most severe level. A lot of those changes came in after the Gunner Jaysley Beck case. We work with other countries to make sure they have a similar policy.…”

“In the military or internationally?”

“It comes along with the breakdown of national and human norms. Conflict desensitises people to the most extremes and, as a result, societal norms break down.”

“Absolutely. It is women, peace and security that is docked in. We call it human security in the military and part of that is the women, peace and security piece.”

“We can give you a list. It goes back to the statistics we talked about earlier. In some past cases, we have done a lot of work but we failed to capture the exact impacts of it. It is quite difficult to do in some cases, but we could make a better effort at doing so. My commitment to you today is that we will take it aw…”

“The financial mechanism as a measure of effect would give you a false reading. In a lot of programmes that we run, we train up a swathe of people and expect them to take it on through the train-the-trainer package. I would not want to speak for Minister Elmore, but I have a feeling we would welcome work on how we measu…”