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 …”

“The shorter the timelines, the more time we spend preparing the work to get evidence rather than delivering. There is maybe a discussion that we could balance this out. In particular, if we can get our methodology of measuring effect up and running, it will become far easier for you to hold us to account.”

“On the national action plan, you are working in conjunction with the FCDO. This is done at an official level, with officials at every level. It is well-connected. The delivery mechanisms are sometimes different. I do not want to go over old ground, but we need to work collectively to measure the effectiveness of our pr…”

“There is also a slight difference—in some but not all cases—in the way the different Departments deliver, which may be through a charity or a second or third-order connection, whereas ours is often our own people delivering in conjunction with a host nation, an ally or a partner, which means it is easier for us, perhap…”

“They are part of defence.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“In the military or internationally?”

“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.…”

“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…”

“Re-educating them to send them back, in some cases, to fight for them. It is absolutely horrifying.”

“It comes hand-in-hand. Once you remove the societal norms that a country is structured around, and the law in particular, and the likelihood of surviving a conflict is reduced, some people, groups and organisations use sexual violence as a weapon of war to enact terror. It is really unfortunate, but we see it across th…”

“Agreed, 100%.”