Hansard

Yesterday, I received a note from a friend who was one of the first prosecutors in the first domestic abuse court in Glasgow. She said:

“Good luck tomorrow, more legislation is seldom the answer, but this Bill has potential to effect meaningful change, even just in the conversation it has prompted. Mary Beard said you can’t fit women into a structure that’s coded as male, you have to change the structure and this legislation, on the foundation of Equally Safe, seems like a good attempt to do that.”

There have been 40 years of tireless work from the likes of Scottish Women’s Aid, the speaking out project, Rape Crisis Scotland, Engender, Zero Tolerance, White Ribbon Scotland, the STAMP—stamp out media patriarchy—project, the women’s centre in Hamilton, my colleagues on the cross-party group on men’s violence against women and children, which I co-chair with Claire Baker, and many more.

Today, we make history. On what I am sure is a landmark day for Parliament—one of the proudest days on which I have had the privilege to serve in the chamber—we can begin the process of healing scars that have existed for centuries.

I urge support not just from Parliament—we have that—for the voices of the women and men across Scotland who have, for far too long, been the victims of the abhorrent abuse that the bill seeks to rectify. The Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Bill will safeguard all victims and ensure their secured wellbeing as a matter of priority.

From a human rights perspective, stage 3 shows that the Scottish Parliament, as a guarantor of human rights, is committed to the more equitable wellbeing of all its citizens by protecting the most vulnerable people through the creation of newly identified criminal offences. The bill will close a gap in the law and enable the police and prosecutors to protect victims of domestic abuse better.

The new offence, under the bill’s strict new measures, will ensure convictions when there is a recognised pattern of behaviour during the course of abusive incidents. Psychological forms of abuse, such as coercive control, are not covered by existing legislation. The gap was identified, through consultation, as letting victims down. Let us not let them down today. The new measures will ensure that, when abuse against partners or ex-partners has been reported, all types of abuse are considered, in order to ensure that survivors have easy access to justice with dignity.

It is vital that improvements in domestic abuse legislation go on to recognise the ever-changing patterns of behaviour. Professionals, working with victims and their families, must be able to count the number of incremental changes as an ordered number of incidents over time. Patterns may vary a little between perpetrators, but the incidents all share controlling, coercive, threatening, degrading and even violent characteristics.

Domestic abuse is perpetrated on victims of all identities, but it is driven by other community pressures and discrimination in society more widely, including sexism, racism and class divide. It is a gendered issue. That is why, as a gendered crime, domestic abuse is overwhelmingly experienced by women—but not exclusively so, as we know. The new legislation will help us to detail characteristics more effectively because they apply to people who are already marginalised and are subjected to the isolation, denigration and derision that are imposed by social contexts. Domestic abuse needs to be viewed as more than violence—especially for partners who are more likely to become victims of hate crime by virtue of their identity and who are at risk because of their gender.

Emotional wellbeing, physical health, financial security and self-esteem are inextricably linked to inequalities of power. Methods of control are insidious: behaviour might be subtle, but equally harmful. The bill will ensure that victims have a voice and are treated with the gravity and seriousness that they deserve—for example, when social media are used to spread images to shame and intimidate. I brought the issue of revenge porn, on which we now have legislation, to the chamber in September 2013. The changes will cover such behaviour more robustly.

The Scottish Parliament stands alongside those who, for far too long, have thought that their voices would be silenced by their abusers, and those whose ambitions and dreams have been limited by the pounding of fists or the power of controlling words. Finally, we can ensure that victims of domestic abuse will have their voice, our support and their justice.