Hansard

I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests: I worked for a rape crisis centre before I was elected.

Deputy Presiding Officer,

“You deserve to be punched. And then some.”

“That’s surely a bloke.”

“You need dealt with.”

“Go to Palestine then, and see how they treat women there.”

“You’re an it.”

“Why don’t you f-off back to Rhodesia.”

Those are all direct quotes from comments on my social media. It is a pretty sanitised selection; nonetheless, it is a wonderful mixture of sexist violence and imperial misogyny. Those are just the tiniest drops in the ocean of online violence that women and girls face all the time.

During these 16 days of activism, we gather again to confront a truth that should haunt us all: violence against women and girls is not only pervasive but deeply political. It is produced and reproduced by the patriarchy, by inequality and by systems and structures that place men’s comfort above women’s safety every day. As the saying goes, to those who are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Engender’s briefing for MSPs lays it bare: violence is endemic. In 2023-24, Police Scotland recorded nearly 64,000 domestic abuse incidents. Sexual violence is rising and online abuse is growing, with one in six women in Scotland having experienced digital violence. Young men are being radicalised into misogynistic extremism at alarming rates.

As Katy Clark outlined, the Open University’s 2023 survey found that 17 per cent of women have experienced online violence. The figure is much higher for younger women, with more than a third having witnessed online violence. Further, 71 per cent believe that current legislation is ineffective, and 11 per cent of women who experienced online violence say that it progressed to offline violence.

The survey also found that online anonymity, the ease of getting away with it and misogyny are the most commonly perceived reasons why people—mostly men—commit online violence against women and girls.

The survey reported that nearly a third of those who experienced online violence were more likely to seek support from friends than the police. More than three quarters of those who reported online violence were not satisfied with the outcome, and 85 per cent said that it affected them, with six in 10 reporting that it had a negative impact on their mental health and wellbeing.

Those numbers are horrific, but behind them are real stories that are worse. One survivor recently recalled:

“He didn’t need to hit me in the street. He could reach me on every device I owned. I felt like there was nowhere in the world that he couldn’t get to.”

Another said:

“I stopped reporting because nothing changed. Except the threats got worse.”

Another survivor said:

“I reported every threat he made online. Screenshots, timestamps, everything. They told me it was ‘just words’. Two weeks later he was at my door.”

Those are not isolated stories; they are the reality for thousands of women across Scotland.

Digital violence is not separate from real-world violence. It is the same violence but delivered through new tools—tools that are designed, owned and regulated overwhelmingly by men, and used by the far right to radicalise, recruit and spread hatred.

We must be absolutely clear that the far right does not protect women. It harms women, and it uses our safety as a weapon to justify racism, transphobia and attacks on migrants. Many who shout loudest about protecting our women are perpetrators of abuse. Last year’s riot arrests plainly tell us that, as does what I have witnessed personally on the streets of Aberdeen and Dundee. Misogyny is the gateway drug of extremist politics.

However, misogyny is not only out there; it is here, too, in this political environment, in our work communities and in this building. Women MSPs, along with women of colour, disabled women and trans women, know that our everyday online spaces are filled with misogynistic threats.

We know that some of that hostility is fuelled—directly or recklessly, deliberately or not—by political actors. When fellow parliamentarians share or encourage posts that identify women MSPs who vote in certain ways on sensitive topics, they effectively create targeted lists. They are actively making us less safe. Calling that “accountability” is a grotesque distortion. It is intimidation, and the parliamentarians who have done that should be ashamed of themselves. Such behaviour must end.

Neither can we ignore those who are most at risk. Trans women and non-binary people experience even higher levels of violence. Sex workers who are pushed underground by criminalisation are made less safe by our laws. Migrant women with no recourse to public funds remain trapped with abusers because our system denies them the means to survive with dignity and independently. Disabled women face disproportionate levels of coercive control. Racism compounds misogyny. All that is part of the same structure of gendered oppression.

If we want to end violence, we have to dismantle the patriarchy. That requires primary prevention—the deep structural work that Engender and others rightly demand. It requires women’s equality to be embedded in every policy area, including housing, transport, education, planning and social security. It requires toxic masculinity and harmful gender norms to be challenged, and it requires political courage. Survivors are tired of our caution. As one woman said:

“I kept waiting for someone to be brave enough to say the real problem is men’s violence and to deal with it. I am still waiting.”

If we are serious about eliminating gender-based violence, those kinds of comments cannot go unacted upon.

Let us be brave today. Let us name the problem: the patriarchy—structural sexist violence. Let us commit to real change.