Helena Kennedy: 'Women's struggles are not over'

Human rights lawyer Baroness Helena Kennedy QC became the first female co-chair of the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute earlier this year.

In the early 70s, there was no such thing as sexual discrimination legislation. Instead, men explicitly said, "We don't take women on here." This was what it was like in chambers in 1972 when I was starting out. Male lawyers felt it was not a good investment to hire women, because they'd just go off and have babies. So when I was 24 years old, I set up my own chambers with a group of five other young lawyers. We weren't there to make money. We went into the law for a purpose, to fight for social justice.

I was disadvantaged on many fronts when I entered the law. I come from a working class background - my father and mother left school at the ages of 14 and 13 - so I had no connections, and I was a woman. I was an outsider. I was the first in my family to go into higher education. But my mother never let me get too big for my boots.

As a young lawyer, there were very few females to look up to. I got the sense from those that were there that they rather enjoyed being the rare woman in a man's world. I hate seeing an unwillingness in women to make themselves available to their own gender. We have a responsibility to younger women coming behind us - that's what makes the world go round.

The Women of the Year Lunch, which I'm president of, is about women who do amazing things for each other and other people. There was a time when the lunch was only for women in hats of a certain class. But now it's a real celebration of women of all backgrounds who have done incredible things. There are women who have been through terrible experiences of losing a child or having cancer. And instead of taking it lying down, they put their pain into doing good for others. Women are fabulous.

I've worked on many difficult, challenging cases - the Guildford Four, the transatlantic bomb plot - but the case that has moved me the most was that of Mary Druhan, who was in prison for 10 years for a murder she didn't commit. Her conviction was quashed and she came out not knowing how to restart her life. There was also the inquiry into sudden infant death, where mothers had been wrongfully convicted of killing their children when they'd died of natural causes.

As a barrister, you can't completely detach yourself from your client. Cold detachment can lead to injustice and that's not the way forward. You need to be able to empathise with your client, get them to open up, so you know what it's like to be in their shoes and are able to fight their case properly. But you also have to create enough distance so that you're not incapable of making sensible judgements.

The difference in the way that the law treats women now is incredible compared to how it used to be. In the past, when you represented a woman who had been abused, the court used to say it didn't want to know about her past, it only wanted to judge her on the present. But if you don't contextualise a woman's history of abuse, then she will simply not get justice. It was a real battle to be allowed to present experts in court, who could explain the psychological impact that years of abuse would have on a woman.

Now, we are over these big hurdles, but there's a lot that remains. Police forces are told to be alert to domestic abuse cases, but they still don't hear what women are saying. Women try to alert the authorities, try to tell them an ex-husband is calling and threatening them, but the authorities don't listen and those women end up dead. We want to bring actions against police forces for these failures. That's the way we can bring real change. Our struggles are not over.