Hansard

I start with a declaration of interest: before I came to this place, I sat on the ministerial task force on violence against women and girls that was delivering the equally safe strategy.

I rise to offer the full-throated support of members on these benches for the Government’s excellent motion and the amendments. I welcome the consensual and respectful tone of the debate. The subject clearly unites the chamber, and I always welcome an opportunity to speak in such debates. However, the fact that we even have to debate the issue in 2017 is an indictment on where we are in our global striving towards modernity and the empowerment of women. It is a symptom of the mountain that we still have to climb in tackling this most gendered of all violence.

Each year, 3 million girls and young women are subjected to acts of barbarism and mutilation in the name of culture and tradition. That is a humanitarian outrage; it is an atrocity of eye-watering proportions.

Legislatures often walk carefully through the cultures and the traditions of other societies. We have to uphold and respect diversity, but where practices are involved that are dangerous, abhorrent and cruel, we must show willingness to tackle that head-on. I am glad to hear colleagues from all parties do that so eloquently in the debate.

As we have heard many times in this excellent debate—I highlight the words of Ruth Maguire, Clare Haughey and John Finnie—FGM may be an act of cultural acceptance or a rite of passage, but it has nothing to do with religion or faith. Nowhere in the scriptures, the sacred texts or the words of prophets are atrocities such as female genital mutilation laid out as articles of faith or commandment. Some communities have sought to ascribe a causal relationship between the two, but we must be in no doubt that, over the centuries in which that grotesque practice has been performed, it has been driven solely by the sexual jealousy and inadequacy of men.

The fundamental nature of FGM and honour-based violence is gendered, but its solution is not. As parliamentarians of all genders, we always have a duty to call out abuse, whether it be the cutting of girls and the beating of sisters or wives, and to say with resounding unity that such behaviour is criminal and obscene and has no place in our society. Together, we have made great strides in that agenda, and I commend the Scottish Government on its ambitious national action plan, which has our full support. It is a vital step in our collective response. It rightly elevates the issue to new heights in our national consciousness.

The plan sets out a blueprint for national and local government, the third sector, the police, schools and communities to work together to raise awareness and to share best practice, for example, on reporting. We need to learn from the lived experience of victims. By listening to those who would otherwise struggle to be heard in the first place, we can build interventions around the stories that they tell us on how they could have been helped or kept safe if a certain thing had happened or an intervention had been available to them. Those are the stories that we need to hear.

Right out of the traps, we need to foster in girls and young women an understanding of their rights enshrined in our culture and our laws. We need to build awareness of victimhood among those who may not even be aware that they are victims and foster safe spaces for them to disclose what has happened to them.

We must recognise that there are still frontiers in our society where we must answer the needs of equality for women. We must look at the attitudes to maternity rights and equal pay that exist in our board rooms. Such areas of commonplace discrimination add to a wider narrative that is ages old and, if they remain unchecked, they will ultimately feed the worst aspects of the barbarism and cruelty that we are discussing this afternoon.

I am heartily glad that the action plan is so grounded in a rights-based approach and that it roots policy on prevention and awareness raising firmly in article 24 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which calls for the prohibition of all traditional practices that are prejudicial to the health and wellbeing of women. John Finnie said that we do not need laws for this, but I take issue with that. I have stated many times, both in Parliament and outside it, that we will make rights real only when we fully incorporate the UNCRC into Scots law. Only then will children have access to justice and redress when rights of any kind are violated. That will have the societal effect of making rights real, because when, systemically, we are forced to consider the implications for children’s rights, we naturally foster a rights-based approach to public policy.