Meeting of the Parliament 30 November 2022
This debate is specifically about the role of men in challenging and eradicating violence against women and girls. I am sorry that some have chosen to weaponise it against already-marginalised groups in society.
The framing of this debate recognises that gender-based violence is primarily a problem of men being violent towards women, including trans women. The behaviour that must change is that of those men, not of the women and girls who endure the consequences.
It is not a problem about how women look, where they go, how they act or dress, or what they say, so why are we here? Why have I not gone home, and why have all the other women MSPs in the chamber not gone home and left the men to it? After all, they are good at challenging and eradicating, as a glance at colonial history shows us. Why not just let them fix it?
That is a tempting thought—that men have some sort of antimisogyny, antipatriarchy toolkit that they can whip out and that lets them say, “Hey presto! There you go ladies—you won’t be having any more problems with that bit of the patriarchy.” The problem, for all of us, is that they do not have one. The worse problem is that some of them think that they do.
There are three things—we might call them tools; we might call them weapons—that men are, within the patriarchy, encouraged to use in what is presented as their fight against gender-based violence.
The first is violence against women. I do not just mean direct acts of individual physical force, because violence is not only those acts; it is the millennia of assumptions, messages and patterns of behaviour that are embedded in the way that we think, feel and act. They manifest in structural violence, economic and emotional abuse and coercive control. They justify a narrow and exclusionary perception of which women are worthy of protection and of pseudo feminisms that keep those gates locked. They also underlie the myth of binary determinism—that men and women are, in some ways that matter, essentially different and that the best that we can hope for is a heavily armed truce.
The second useless tool is violence against other men. The noble knight sees the damsel in distress, slays her vile attacker and takes her home to a high tower. That is because, according to that view, perpetrators are other, alien, monsters and fiends; they are the subjects of fear and the objects of revenge. Just as those knights wore the favours of women to enter the joust, the label “For the victims” is pinned on to policies that are punitive, regressive and tragically counterproductive. Meanwhile, the realities of violence—the ones that do not fit the fairy story—are more and more difficult to identify and address.
The third useless tool is violence against the earth and against the living beings—human and non-human—with whom we share it. A most perilous way to be a woman in the world today is as a protector of nature and of indigenous communities. It is no coincidence that every war is justified by invocation of women and children, and that, in every war, women and children are raped.
It is no accident that every wave of anti-migrant rhetoric speaks of a threat to women, and that the women who are most likely to be attacked include migrants and refugees. It is no accident that the longest-lasting effects of the fossil-fuelled so-called “civilisation”, which was to liberate us all, are the deeply gendered blows of climate injustice.
If we throw away those weapons—those familiar forms of violence—the task ahead perhaps feels like a more daunting one. However, those tools, as Audre Lorde told us, were never going to dismantle the master’s house. We have better ones, and they are not reserved for a single gender. Men do not have to choose between being perpetrators and being protectors, creeping behind us in the shadows or striding ahead with sword bared. You can walk beside us as allies.
There is so much to be done, and we have to do it together. We can recognise that vulnerability is not a characteristic solely of being female, but of being human. We can recognise that gender-based violence is not a matter of misogyny alone, but is powered by multiple forms of oppression and prejudice, including racism, homophobia, transphobia and the unspoken assumptions of privilege. We can remember the origin of the word “intersectionality”—that the intersection is not a good place, a comfortable meadow to share our stories, but a noisy, polluted and perilous urban junction with juggernauts bearing down from every direction. The task is not to have a cosy chat; it is to stop that traffic, and neither men nor women can do that alone.
Together, we can take apart the myths and behaviours of patriarchy, learning not only from our parents and siblings but from our children—paying attention to the language that we use and the myths, histories and misconceptions that so often lie behind it. We can explore ethics of care, remembering that, although fighting fire with fire makes for a good song, a blanket does a better job of putting out the flames. We can model strategies of resistance rather than simple combat, recalling that, although this is an urgent task, it is also a long-term one, which is undertaken not only for women and girls today, but for the future generations whose wellbeing, or trauma, we have the capacity to affect.
Gender-based violence wounds us all, visibly or invisibly, as communities, families and individuals, and whatever our gender identity. However, we can act to make change, with care, determination, vision and solidarity—not because you are men, not because we are women, but because we are all human.