Let’s face facts: when it comes to violence against women, it is men who are the biggest threat

Imagine dropping off your child every day at a nursery believing they were being cared for and then discovering one of the staff was a serial paedophile who raped children in his care and used them to make pornographic images? That is the absolute horror that the mums and dads of the toddlers that attended the nursery where the predator Vincent Chan worked and preyed on defenseless children must be going through –  a living hell, torturing themselves about the ifs and maybes of what may or may not have happened to their children at the hands of an audacious and twisted predator.

Similarly, imagine being a young girl, a troubled teen already suffering trauma, taken away from parents and into care where you should feel safe, protected and defended. And instead, you are left to your own devices and find solace in the attention of older men who provide you with drugs, alcohol and gifts that make you feel wanted. They then rape you and pass you around others who do the same because that’s what so-called grooming gangs do. And then imagine telling the people that are meant to care for you, and they dismiss your claims as fantasy, label you as promiscuous, attention-seeking, and blame you for putting yourself at risk to the horror that is assailing you.

And once again, imagine you are a woman admitted to a psychiatric hospital because life has managed to break you, and in your vulnerability, you find yourself the victim of sexual assault and when you try to report what has happened, your own psychotic diagnosis is turned against you and your claims are put down to your state of mind. 

Predators prey on the vulnerable, that’s the nature of the beast and when victims are too young to speak or too traumatised, too ill, or too easily discredited as witnesses, the job of the abuser is made that much easier. That’s why we have safeguards to mitigate.

I have spent decades of my professional life picking away at the hellish consequences of abuse, listening to survivors and trying to interpret the motivation of abusers. Hearing things I can never unhear, things described that I can never erase from my mind and that continue to haunt my thoughts.

And while I have men in my life – a husband, friends, relatives, a son, who are all good men – I still recognise that it is men that are the principal problem when it comes to the abuse of women and girls. And yes, I hear you, there are women that abuse. But let’s face facts: when it comes to violence against women and girls, it is men that are the main risk factor.

So why on earth, when faced with a report that headlines the fact that women are being raped and sexually assaulted in Scottish hospitals, a place where surely the principles of safety, dignity, and healing should be at the very core, isn’t there a clear urgency to act? 

Instead, nine months on from a damning report by a grassroots feminist organisation that spent precious voluntary time sifting through hundreds of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to uncover the scale of abuse in hospitals, next to nothing has been done.

Shockingly, the Women’s Rights Network Scotland discovered there had been 276 sexual assaults and 12 rapes over five years in just 57 of the 198 hospitals in Scotland that even record this information. A clear indication that the true number is significantly greater.

But despite the known evidence of criminality on hospital estates, there is no data telling us the true extent of this violation, who the perpetrators are – patients, staff, visitors – or even their sex. And the reason why it is important to know these fundamental details is so that appropriate action can be taken. And yet, since the WRNS raised the issue in March, only three health boards have taken any tangible steps to address the problem, and even these are entirely administrative and minimal.

And what really bothers me amid all that inaction, is that I haven’t heard one health board attempting to deny that these rapes and sexual assaults happen or had the humility to say sorry.
Of all places, in a hospital women’s safety should be guaranteed. But like in Scottish prisons, where some of the country’s most damaged women are currently being housed with trans-identifying men, the Scottish Government appears remarkably benevolent to the practice, and in the case of mixed-sex prisons is even fighting in the courts for it to continue.

Removing men from women’s single-sex spaces might not be the only answer to this epidemic, but it’s an obvious one. Mixed-sex hospital wards, like in prisons, are absolute anathema to the concept of safeguarding for women.

And while there might not be an obvious link to all of this and the Sandie Peggie case, the fact is, that despite the Supreme Court ruling, they are all connected by the casual disregard adopted towards single-sex spaces and which has, undeniably, become mired in the whole debate around sex and gender and been given state-sanctioned affirmation by the rhetoric that trans women are women, hereby paralysing sensible discussion and next steps about keeping men out of spaces for women.

Earlier this month in parliament, MSPs did a lot of handwringing about tackling violence against women and girls during a debate on 16-days of activism. It was all very laudable, all very consensual. But a day later in the same place, the WRNS was presenting an update on its evidence into rapes and sexual assault in hospital in a roundtable discussion attended by too few parliamentarians – four and none from the party of government.

One woman told me at that about how her father, a welder, was tasked with fitting protective guards to radiators in a psychiatric ward to stop female patients from getting burned while, at the same time, he witnessed male patients on the same mixed ward being aggressive and sexually threatening towards female patients. It’s come to something when an inanimate heating appliance is considered higher up the scale of risk to women than the obvious villainy of men.