Hansard

It is a pleasure to follow that excellent speech from Pauline McNeill. Like the cabinet secretary and others today, I am thinking of all the women who have lost their lives to men and those who continue to suffer abuse from men here and around the world.

I wanted to speak in this debate to raise the two main issues that concern me in terms of making sure that we are doing all that we can to tackle violence against women and girls. On the first, which is why we are we still seeing violence against women, I will speak as a man, a husband and a father of three girls and a boy. I hope to rise to the challenge that was rightly set by the cabinet secretary and Pam Duncan-Glancy in their excellent speeches. In the second, I will speak as a local MSP who is concerned about local proven domestic abuse services.

Others have already talked about what drives abuse and violence against women and girls, who is killing them and whose behaviour needs to change in order for the violence and killing to stop. It is men. Those of us men who say, “It’s not all of us; not all men are the same”—as I have seen in response to my social media posts today—completely miss the point, as Jim Fairlie said in an excellent speech. It is true that not all men kill or abuse women, but it is also true that when women are killed or abused, they are killed or abused by men.

Indeed, it should shock, anger and shame all of us and give us renewed focus to tackle violence against women when we know that, as Elena Whitham said in her incredibly moving speech, the @CountingDeadWomen Twitter account is today, on the international day for the elimination of violence against women, publishing the names of all the women who have been killed by men in the UK so far in 2021. It started tweeting a woman’s name every five minutes from 8 am, and it will take it until 7 pm to publish the names of all 126 women who have been killed by men in the UK this year. How much longer would it take to recognise the 87,000 women who are killed around the world, as the cabinet secretary highlighted?

We need action to stop that, which is why I welcome Police Scotland’s new “Don’t be that guy” campaign. The abuse of women—the killing of women—does not come from nowhere. It comes from unacceptable behaviour being tolerated, left unchallenged and allowed to progress. The “Don’t be that guy” campaign involves all of us challenging the behaviour of others. That can sometimes be difficult, but it is not nearly as difficult as it is for the women who are suffering the abuse.

We must commit to stopping the casual sexualisation and misogynistic abuse that are masked in apparent jest, which in so many of the cases that are listed in the motion was the starting point for the male perpetrators.

The second issue that I want to raise continues the prevention theme and is about local domestic abuse services for my Airdrie and Shotts constituents. For years, North Lanarkshire Council has been looking to restructure domestic abuse services, which was of major concern to Monklands Women’s Aid. When Alex Neil was the constituency member of the Scottish Parliament and I was the local member of the UK Parliament, he and I worked closely with Monklands Women’s Aid and the Women’s Aid’s other groups in North Lanarkshire to try to stop the council tendering for domestic violence services. For more than 40 years, Monklands Women’s Aid had been successfully meeting the needs of the women and children in Airdrie, Coatbridge and beyond. Women’s Aid services are the grass roots and, as such, they have been founded, developed and run by women for women. Domestic abuse is their core focus, and they continue to overperform year on year in their attempt to meet the demand for Women’s Aid’s specialist services, which work according to gendered analysis, at the local level.

North Lanarkshire Council undertook a review of all domestic violence services, including statutory, public and third sector provision. The review identified gaps in statutory provision, specifically in relation to services for men. As a result, the council chose to enact procurement activities to widen and meet broader equalities duties. In doing so, it sadly disregarded the voices of the women who use Women’s Aid’s services, as well as the recommendations in the document from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and Scottish Women’s Aid, “Good Practice in Commissioning Specialist Domestic Abuse Services”, which stresses the alternatives to commissioning specialist women’s aid services. The new service provides services to men and women. In doing so, the council became the first local authority in Scotland to defund proven grass-roots services. The result was the loss of 70 per cent of the capacity of Women’s Aid’s local services.

What has baffled and angered me in equal measure is that, by meeting a need—a much smaller need, for services for men—and lumping gendered services together, North Lanarkshire Council has jeopardised the trusted route that the women who manage to find the courage to flee an abusive relationship recognise, which is their local Women’s Aid centre. That is a perfect example of well-meant policy being misinterpreted at the local level to serve a broader equalities need and, by doing so, harming those who are most at need—women.

There was absolutely no need to pursue that course of action. North Lanarkshire Council could have set up and funded a dedicated service for male victims, if there was a demand for it. Figures that I have received from North Lanarkshire Council show that the new service that it has procured has received substantially fewer contacts than Women’s Aid’s groups in North Lanarkshire. Local women who need domestic violence support are voting with their feet and—just as we warned—they have no desire, unless they are automatically referred by the local authority, to use a service that they do not see as being a dedicated service for them.

Although Monklands Women’s Aid has seen its funding cut substantially, demand for its services has sadly risen by approximately 20 per cent in the same period. As Meghan Gallacher said in her excellent contribution, North Lanarkshire is the area of Scotland with the third-highest prevalence of domestic abuse. If it had not been for the Scottish Government’s equally safe fund, I fear that Monklands Women’s Aid would have had to shut its doors. I have nothing against Sacro, which delivers North Lanarkshire Council’s new service, and I am sure that North Lanarkshire Council was well meaning with that procurement, but I cannot see how, when the current tender comes to an end, the council can do anything other than fund services that meet demand.

I am also concerned that we should recognise the danger of erroneous gathering of statistics that are based on flawed categorisation, and how that skews the understanding of need and the subsequent dissemination of resources.

If we are to tackle gender-based violence, we have to support gender-based domestic violence services. We have to change male behaviour, and we must stop expecting women like Sarah Everard to constantly change their lives in order to protect themselves from men. As we know, in Sarah’s case, even her mitigations were not enough.

If we do not give women safe and trusted places to go to flee escalating domestic abuse, violence against women will continue. That is why I say to men, but also to local authorities, “Don’t be that guy”.