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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

McKelvie, Christina SNP Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse Watch on SPTV

There are two distinct but entwined threads in this debate. The first is that men’s violence against women continues to blight our country and to cause immense misery and suffering; it destroys its victims and their families and it lurks like the malevolent Gollum underneath the surface of normal life. The second thread is about justice but more particularly about access to justice; hundreds and perhaps thousands of women in Scotland are being denied the right to see alleged attackers stand trial in court.

Abuse of women comes in many guises, and we have heard of many of them today; they range from verbal degradation, rape, beatings, revenge porn and ritual humiliation, to the ultimate evil of murder. I am, with my colleague Malcolm Chisholm, co-convener of the cross-party group in the Scottish Parliament on men’s violence against women. We have heard a great deal from groups such as Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid and Police Scotland about the kinds of evil abuse that certain men enjoy inflicting, mainly on their own partners but sometimes on their relatives or innocent strangers. It is not likely that members in this chamber would think that that happens only to a small minority of women living in very deprived areas of inner cities who fall victim to the Saturday night syndrome of the favourite football team losing the game and the alcoholic binge that usually comes with that, with the anger getting taken out in the privacy of the home. Have such women less right to justice? No, I do not think so.

We in Scotland have little idea of how much violence against women takes place. We know that almost 30,000 domestic offences took place between 2011 and 2012—that includes 307 attempted murders and 12 homicides, plus 485 sexual offences—and domestic common assaults made up 14,154 of the total. However, that is just the tip of the iceberg, and those involved directly with victims believe that the reality could be 10 times worse. We know that at least one in five women has suffered domestic abuse, but it might be more like one in three. That is a really scary thought.

We are not talking about a small section of society here, because men of all ages and backgrounds inflict abuse. I know from shocking and distressing stories that I have heard—I have heard some of them today—from women to whom I have spoken that marital rape is frequent and that the clichéd “I walked into the wall” story or the “I walked into the cupboard door” story are far more common than we might imagine.

Women’s Aid says that together we can change it. That is the crux, because it is only together that we can and must change it. Violence of any kind is wrong, but violence carried out on someone because they are female, physically weaker or can do nothing to hit back is exploitative in an even more extreme way. The law and those who practise it are sometimes viewed by society at large as antiquated, out of touch, resistant to change and restrictive. However, the new Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill is progressive and focused on human rights, and entitlements through the bill for both suspect and victim will improve access to justice.

Lord Gill, the Lord President of the Court of Session, said last month that the requirement for corroboration was a “good rule” that was the result of centuries of deliberations by the country’s finest legal and political minds. We used to think that capital punishment and burning witches were sensible, too, but perhaps we have moved on. The Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Lord Carloway argue that the requirement for corroboration is an outdated rule that has failed Scotland, and the Lord Advocate, Frank Mulholland, agrees with that. He has pointed out that in the past two years alone more than 2,800 cases of domestic abuse have been unable to proceed to court because they could not satisfy the requirement for corroboration. Research by the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service shows that 268 out of 458—58.5 per cent—of criminal cases over 12 months were dropped after the initial court appearance even though they would have had a reasonable prospect of success had there been no corroboration test.

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Meeting of the Parliament 17 December 2013

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