Swinney's promises are just words without progress in tackling violence against women

So inured to the depravities of men towards women, we are perhaps almost unshockable. But with yet another homegrown case emerging of a husband drugging his wife and allegedly making her unconscious body available to dozens of other men aged from 29 to 74 – including one from Dundee – to rape and defile, we can longer believe that we live in a country that doesn’t have misogyny baked in.

And while not all men are rapists, all rapists are men, and they walk among us as fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, and friends.

Violence against women isn’t an academic question to be debated as some abstract concept; it’s a fact of life that shapes how half the population walk through this world.

Yes, it’s a man problem. But it’s left to women to navigate their way around it, learning coping mechanisms from an achingly young age. Avoidance, curfew, curtailment, isolation, and prohibition are just part of the structures we erect to survive. We are captives in a prison of common sense constructed to prevent men from attacking us. It’s become second nature. But it’s fundamentally wrong. And no man can possibly understand the cumulative effect of the all-round pervasiveness of the threat we face and the exhaustion that accompanies a lifelong battle to keep safe.

The first minister has made a great play of how he would “give the personal leadership required to tackle the epidemic of male violence against women and girls in our society”. He calls it a public health issue that needs a public health response. And I have no doubts about his sincerity in that.

But they are just meaningless words unless he makes tangible moves to make a difference. And with the best will in the world, educating boys about sexual stereotypes and consent, along with a Misogyny Bill already tarnished by the fact sex was never included in the government’s original hate crime legislation and became mired by the debate around gender, are not going to shift the dial on violence against women and girls (VAWG) alone without seriously tackling the systemic flaws in a judicial framework that has seen, among other things, early release of offenders, increasingly lax bail rules, a presumption of non-custodial sentences for under-25s and a delayed GPS tracking system. All of these made under the SNP’s 20-year watch have helped to loosen protections for women and Swinney has to accept his own culpability in that. 

And we will all have our tales to tell. But I am haunted by the recent and raw case of the teenage daughter of a friend of mine who was sexually abused over years by an older boy who told her that he was waiting for her to be 16 before he “did it properly”. A threat she lived with constantly causing her to self-harm, fall behind at school and sink into a depression before revealing it all to her mother just days before her 16th birthday and the approaching deadline.

The young man was convicted last year of sexual assault when other girls came forward who he had also abused. But after an agonising trial – in which lurid details of his depravity were read out in court – he was not jailed but put on the sex offenders register and given a community service order – simply because he was 23. As the sentence was read out, my friend’s daughter ran to the toilet where she slit her wrists. Her assailant continues to live in the same community while she is now receiving mental health support and confined largely to her bedroom by her own fears. 

Similarly, I was struck by the words of Danielle Conaghan who suffered a 15-year reign of terror at the hands of her husband. She spent almost two weeks in hospital fighting for her life only to be attacked again by him when he was let out on bail and came to the hospital to try to finish her off. Danielle joined a roundtable discussion with other women and the families of murdered women who had all suffered violence at the hands of a partner, convened by the Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay in Holyrood last week. Danielle said that talking to other women at the meeting about their experiences, they could have all been talking about the same man, the same level of violence, the same warning signs, the same dire legal recourse, and the same risible political response. The violence was, she said, “entirely avoidable” and politicians could take steps to stop it.

And case in point: it’s now 18 months since the Women’s Rights Network Scotland (WRNS) revealed the scale of sexual assaults and rapes happening in hospitals where mixed-sex wards still prevail and yet no action has been taken. Similarly, the WRNS has exposed the horrifying numbers of sexual offences in Scottish swimming pools and leisure centres, again, overwhelmingly occurring in mixed-sex changing areas, and yet still they continue.
Single-sex spaces are not the only solution to VAWG, but they were designed to legally help protect women from harm. And yet our public bodies and our politicians are still out of step, both in action and attitude. 

And last week the TUC, shockingly, committed over five million trade union members to reversing the Supreme Court’s judgment on single-sex spaces. Refuges, changing rooms, toilets, prisons, all at stake. Women were the backbone of the trade union movement, and the TUC is now proposing to rewrite the Equality Act to remove women’s rights in favour of those for trans-identifying men.

And for me, there is a simple fact – trans rights and women’s rights do have conflicts. The Supreme Court recognised that and so should we. I listened to Katie Hagmann, a new MSP and the convener of the Scottish Parliament’s equalities committee, speak so eloquently about her late “beautiful sister” who was trans and who, she believed, would not feel safe right now. And I agree. Hostilities for marginalised groups have increased across the board exponentially in recent times.

But I depart from her assertion that “equality is not a pie where sharing a slice given to one group leaves another group with less” because this is patently untrue when it comes to the way women’s rights to single-sex spaces have been sidelined or viewed as some optional extra when, in the context of the scale of VAWG that is now being recognised, that is indefensible. n