Hansard

I express my disappointment that there are not more men in the chamber today. [Applause.] It gives me no pleasure to speak in the debate, because, in this day and age, we should not need to have it.

Over the years, women have been given lots of advice. They have been told not to walk home alone and not to dress too provocatively or show too much skin. They have been told to mind their drinks while out socialising and not to get too drunk. They have even been given secret codes to tell bar staff what to do if they feel in danger. They have been given all that advice in order to protect them from the threat of male violence. Now, it appears as though the new threat is a syringe.

It is not a young man’s generational thing; it is a multigenerational, classless, continuous thing that needs to be faced up to. Recognising international day for the elimination of violence against women and girls tells us that it is a global issue, but the danger in focusing on the global perspective is that we risk failing to ask the most fundamental question of all: what do we do right here and now? When I say “we”, I mean men and boys. Why is it that we think that the solution to male violence is to tell women and girls how to protect themselves from us? The most obvious answer is surely to stop the behaviour that hurts them in the first place.

If, from today’s debate, we manage to get any message out, we need to get the message across to men that we are responsible for our actions. During the marches after the rape and murder of Sarah Everard, I read a banner that said, “Why don’t you just stop killing us?” Let us think about that for a second. Well, that message has clearly not been heard, because more than 80 women have been killed by men since March.

I am not asking how many more women have to be killed before we start to do something about it. I say that we should start to do something right now and for real. It is not an issue for somewhere else; it is an issue in every town and city right here, in Scotland. We must look at ourselves, how we behave and how we teach the next generation.

As a boy, I was taught to treat girls in the same way as I would want my sisters to be treated. However, that life lesson did not fully arm me with the knowledge and understanding that we should teach all our young men and boys about what it is to be a female in our society. It does not matter whether she is someone’s mother, daughter or sister; what matters is that she is someone. My daughters and wife explain to me the turmoil and fear that a girl feels when she is walking home and a random guy calls out or wolf whistles. It is even worse when there is more than one male and, with safety in numbers, they egg one another on to check her out. They never seem to understand why their compliment is not welcomed or why fear kicks in for a lone female as she walks home at night and a man walks behind her or, worse, crosses the street and starts walking towards her.

This is, of course, when people start to chip in with the “not all men” argument, but how does someone who has grown up learning to fear males know that a man is safe? She does not. It is on us. It is men’s responsibility to create the space to allow that fear to be dispelled. That means being fully mindful of how our actions, however innocent, could be interpreted.

We teach our children from an early age that unwanted male attention is acceptable. If a wee boy pulls a pigtail, hits a girl or tries to steal a kiss, we tell the wee girl that he is showing that he likes her rather than telling the wee boy that his behaviour is wrong and explaining to him that, if he likes the girl, he does not get her attention by hitting her. Even at that early age, we are setting out the societal norms that are entirely skewed towards females accepting male dominance and violence as a form of affection or endearment, and we are saying that the refusal of females to accept those advances is somehow a breach of male entitlement. As we grow, the lads mentality and male entitlement grow with us. Society accepts them as the norm.

The distance between laddish banter and sexual violence is far shorter than we are prepared to believe, and we need to challenge and change that culture. The Police Scotland video campaign “Don’t be that guy”, born out of the murder of Sarah Everard, is a good start to the conversation. It is an easy phrase to adopt in male company, and it can quickly change the direction of a conversation that is going the wrong way.

I recently read a book by Brené Brown, who talks about challenging someone who has gone over the line. Her argument is that the discomfort of challenging that lasts about eight seconds, whereas the feeling of allowing behaviour that flies in the face of our own values to go unchallenged never goes away. From experience, I can say that she is right on both counts.

However, while a man calling out the behaviour of other men will lead to a few seconds of discomfort for us, for a woman that discomfort comes with fear that she might just have entered an unsafe situation that could lead to aggression and violence extremely quickly. That is the real-life experience of many women in these situations, and it should not be.

In every facet of society—in schools, colleges, universities, sports clubs, sports stadia, the workplace, this Parliament and, just as important, the home—it is up to us to change that culture. We can legislate and set punitive sentencing for domestic, sexual, physical or psychological abuse, but all that is doing is treating a symptom and not the cause. We need to stop the abuse before it starts.

We must recognise that what we males see as harmless fun can be frightening to a woman. We must teach our boys and girls that those cute wee behaviours are not cute; they are the future of a continuing patriarchy, and the lad’s lad mentality is dangerous because it leads to tacit approval of the escalation of sexism and misogyny to, more seriously, domestic abuse, assault, rape and even murder. That means that we males have to look in the mirror, ask ourselves some serious questions and, as my daughter rightly pointed out, feel that personal discomfort of recognising something in ourselves, or something that we might have said or done—a joke, a bit of banter or whatever it wis—and accept that it is no longer, and never was, acceptable. It is up to every one of us right across the country to recognise—and we do—the behaviours and comments that cross the line, and, for the sake of the safety of women and girls, when we see it or hear it, to call it out and take that eight seconds of discomfort and say, “Don’t be that guy.”