Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 26 November 2020
Last week, I hosted an event at which we discussed how women have been particularly adversely affected during the Covid-19 pandemic. We spoke of the financial impact, the caring imbalance and the disproportionate health outcomes. We also discussed the devastating number of women who have been attacked or killed by their partners during periods of restriction and lockdown. There has been a surge in the number of calls to domestic abuse helplines, and the Scottish Government has quickly provided extra funds to our partners to enable them to meet the demand for support for those women.
Scottish Women’s Aid’s chief executive officer, Marsha Scott, has said:
“Covid-19 has given abusers more tools to control and harm women and children.”
Many have warned of the danger that women with abusive partners are in during this period. Most notable among them is my colleague Ruth Maguire, who amended the emergency coronavirus legislation to safeguard the human rights of vulnerable people, including women in abuse situations.
Swift reaction to the surge in violence against women is one thing, but what we do to address its root causes, through work such as equally safe, is another. So, too, is closing the gender pay gap. The fact of the matter is that from women’s economic disadvantage comes the opportunity for abusive men to coerce and control. Women’s disproportionate lack of wealth is still very much an issue. Financial dependency creates a power imbalance, and my worry is that, with the proven adverse economic effect of the virus on women’s employment, we might see that exploitation and imbalance worsen.
Like Alison Johnstone, Rona Mackay and Joan McAlpine, I read the “Femicide Census” report. It was one of the most compelling but difficult to read reports that I have ever read, with some of the most horrific information contained in it. It reports the number of women who have been killed at the hands of violent men and details the figures and backgrounds of cases between 2009 and 2018. It has three full pages, in very small type, of name after name. Reading it, I could not help but wonder how the 2020 census will look in comparison to those of other years.
The census highlights two areas in which the horror of the murder of women is diminished. One is how their murders are portrayed in the media, and the other is how men’s court defences often victim blame or put forward diminished responsibility on the part of the offender, which can also lead to sentences being reduced. Rough sex is becoming an all-too-frequent murder defence, and it easily feeds into a titillating narrative that is all too often seized on by tabloids. Those who report on such murders or write the headlines alongside the reports have a duty to call it what it is. Death by strangulation is murder; it is not a sex game gone wrong.
In four minutes, I cannot go into consent education or young men’s all-too-ready access to violent porn, but I firmly believe that having a lack of the former and too much of the latter is a root cause of male violence towards women. I also believe that the continued commodification of women’s bodies and the glamorisation of prostitution is a backward step in this battle. “When I grow up, I want to be a prostitute”—said no girl ever. Our cultural tropes, readily deployed in femicide reporting in the tabloids, enable the defence of, “I just snapped”—the man driven to violence by the behaviour of a woman. Loss of control or victim blaming accounted for more than a third of defences employed in femicide trials in the UK in the period of the census.
Can we reverse the trend? In the majority of cases in which a man has murdered a woman, he has committed violent acts before. The warning signs are often there. Empowering women to leave is a women-led solution, and I commend the Government on the work that it is doing, but a man-led solution is sorely needed. Violent men are the problem that needs to be solved. Toxic masculinity is the most stubborn and pernicious cause of femicide. What we do about that will take longer to discuss than four minutes in a debate.
16:28