Meeting of the Parliament 22 December 2022
Not at the moment, because I would like to make a little bit of progress, thank you.
The UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, raised many serious concerns about the bill. She was right to say that the bill is a threat to women in all their diversity. As she made clear, dangerous men are a threat not only to biological women but to trans women, too.
Today, the Scottish Conservatives are talking not just about protecting women’s safety but about protecting everyone’s safety; society as a whole is at risk from the bill. Although most of us in Scotland are good, decent and reasonable people, rapists and sex offenders are not. It is ignorant in the extreme to believe that they will not take advantage of the loopholes that are ripe for exploitation.
As J K Rowling wrote recently:
“Nobody but the very naive can fail to be aware that predatory men are capable of going to great lengths to gain access to victims.”
These legitimate worries cannot be dismissed as scaremongering. That is an insult to every survivor of sexual assault and domestic abuse. Women do not have a phobia of trans people; we have a phobia of violent men. Nobody needs to scaremonger about the appalling levels of violence that women face; there is no need for exaggeration. Violence against women is the unfortunate harsh reality of our society. I ask every MSP here today: how can we allow a bill that risks the safety of women in Scotland to pass? [Interruption.]