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Meeting of the Parliament 17 December 2013

17 Dec 2013 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Violence against Women

Baillie, Jackie Lab Dumbarton Watch on SPTV

I absolutely do, and I will talk about Police Scotland in a minute.

Scottish Women’s Aid tells us that two women will be murdered each week by their partner or ex-partner, and Zero Tolerance backs that up with the very chilling statistic that for those in the 15 to 44 age group, men’s violence kills or incapacitates more women globally each year than cancer, malaria, road traffic accidents and war combined. It is clear that the scale of the problem remains.

We used to talk about the three Ps—prevention, protection and prosecution—and I will address those elements in reverse order. On prosecution, we know that the domestic abuse courts are struggling, the case load is increasing and there is no additional resource to cope. There have been no prosecutions for female genital mutilation or for forced marriages, and there are very low numbers of prosecutions for trafficking, even though we know that those problems exist in Scotland. I very much welcome Police Scotland’s renewed focus and the priority that it places on tackling domestic abuse and rape, but we need to be sure that the courts have the capacity to back up its work. I hope that the minister shares that aspiration.

On protection, I note that services are being cut despite demand increasing year on year. Women’s Aid reports that 92 per cent of its services are working with reduced budgets, a third have had to make cuts and a quarter have had to make staff redundant. The impact of that is that women are increasingly being turned away as refuges have closed or reduced their capacity. If we are to encourage women to leave their abusers, we must ensure that there is sufficient resource in place. Notwithstanding what the minister has said, I urge her to address the matter alongside the strategy with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities.

Finally, prevention is where the real prize lies. Changing attitudes and cultures takes time, but it is absolutely where we need to be, and that is the type of action that we need to take. A 2005 survey on young people’s attitudes to gendered violence found that one in five young men believed that women provoked violence, and that one third of young men and one sixth of young women thought that using violence in an intimate relationship was somehow okay.

The challenge that we face is changing their attitudes and culture so that we can change the acceptance of gendered violence in the next generation. While I note the delay in publishing the strategy for consultation, I hope that the minister takes the time to get it right. I know that she will bring all her skills to the task, and we are committed to working with her in doing so. We need nothing short of a revolution to end the abuse of women, and I look forward to the strategy providing the framework to do just that.

I move amendment S4M-08612.2, to insert at end:

“against a backdrop of an increase in the total recorded number of domestic abuse incidents.”

16:25

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Meeting of the Parliament 17 December 2013

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