Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)10 March 2021
A YouGov poll for UN Women UK that was published this week found that nearly every young woman in the United Kingdom had suffered sexual harassment. Claire Barnett, executive director of UN Women UK, pointed out that it is a human rights issue. As Ms Barnett said,
“It’s just not enough for us to keep saying, ‘this is too difficult a problem for us to solve’—it needs addressing now”.
It does need to be addressed now, and that is why putting off the issue until the next parliamentary session is not convincing. That is why I will vote against the Government whip to support Johann Lamont’s amendments on the issue today. Initially, I did not take that view, because I understand that the proposed sex aggravator is gender neutral. I preferred the idea of an offence of misogyny, or even a female sex aggravator, which was never on the cards—although, given that the hate crime protections in the bill extend to characteristics that do not exist in the Equality Act 2010, perhaps there is really no reason why that could not be the case.
I became convinced that the scale of the sexist violence that women experience at male hands, including the two women a week who are killed by men in the UK, meant that it would be bizarre to exclude them from at least part 1 of the bill. The thing that finally turned me to my current position was the Government’s decision to expand the definition of transgender identity to include cross-dressers who are not trans identified. That is not the definition of gender reassignment in the Equality Act 2010. It will seem bizarre to many people that men who enjoy cross-dressing are protected from hate crime, but women are not.
When we last debated violence against women last November, several members, including ministers, praised the femicide census, which documents the killing of 1,425 women by men in the UK last year, yet we seem to be saying that femicide is not hate. I know that a sex aggravator would protect men, but that is already the case under the 2010 act. In the 2010 act, sex is the characteristic, but it mainly protects women. In the bill, as in the 2010 act, the protected characteristics of race and sexual orientation also protect straight people and white people but would be applied most often in crimes against gay people and black people, who face the most oppression. Therefore, why not also include sex, which would protect women more than men?
A number of official women’s organisations, which have been mentioned by Johann Lamont and which work closely with and are funded by central Government, have backed the decision not to include a sex aggravator. However, as the ForWomen Scotland briefing points out, none of those organisations did any research, even in their own networks, before getting to that position. Those organisations suggest that men could weaponise hate crime in domestic violence cases, but our domestic violence laws are already gender neutral.
Members should be aware that there is a reason why funded organisations take such a view. In the past few years, a major ideological schism has opened up in feminist thought, which has its roots in university gender and so-called queer studies courses, in which it is argued that gender is a personal choice and that sex is an identity. That view is taken by the leadership of most Government-funded organisations. However, it is increasingly being challenged by a growing number of grass-roots feminist movements, which argue that gender roles are oppressive and that women face discrimination, violence and subjugation due to the sex that they were born.
The debate is polarised, but it is dynamic and changing. Only yesterday, one of the grass-roots feminist groups succeeded in a legal challenge to the UK census, which will force the Office for National Statistics to collect only sex at birth and legal sex information in the census. Just two years ago, when my committee took evidence on that issue for our census, the public authorities and some of those funded women’s organisations told us that it was not possible to do so. Those organisations also opposed Johann Lamont’s amendment 28 to the Forensic Medical Services (Victims of Sexual Offences) (Scotland) Bill, which ensured that rape victims were able to choose the sex, not just the gender, of their medical examiner. Make no mistake—such positions are as ideological as they are absurd and they have nothing to do with protecting women. I am therefore proud to support Johann Lamont’s amendments today.