Women in the UK face assaults like those in Cologne ‘every week’, according to Jess Phillips MP.

Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, told a BBC Question Time audience that violence against women is not just an issue with refugees coming from the Middle East and North Africa.

Jess Phillips MP said the UK shouldn’t ‘rest on its laurels’ (Picture: PA)

Responding to a question about women attacked in Cologne, she said: ‘There is violence against women and girls that you a describing, a very similar situation to what happened in Cologne could be described on Broad Street in Birmingham every week, where women are baited and heckled.’

‘We have to attack what we perceive as being patriarchal culture coming into any culture that isn’t patriarchal, and making sure we tell people not to be like that,’ she continued.




‘But we should be careful in this country before we rest on our laurels when two women are murdered every week.’

Britain has agreed to take more unaccompanied refugee children (Picture: Reuters)

Earlier in the programme she had also said the UK should accept more asylum seekers, including at least 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children, and make the effort to integrate them into society.

Britain has agreed to take in more unaccompanied minors, but has not yet stated how many.

Violence against women in the UK Around 85,000 women are raped and more than 400,000 women sexually assaulted in England and Wales every year

Two women in England and Wales are killed every week by a current or former partner

Violence against women costs society an estimated £40billion a year Source: End Violence Against Women

More than 800 women in Cologne claimed they were sexually assaulted or robbed by groups of young men over New Year’s.

There were also complaints of assaults in other major German cities, such as Hamburg, Munich and Berlin.

Protesters in Cologne after the New Year’s attacks (Picture: Getty Images)

Phillips herself was subject to a barrage of rape threats last year after she suggested International Men’s Day was unnecessary.

‘As the only woman on this committee,’ she said last November, ‘it seems like every day to me is International Men’s Day.’

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