Hansard

I thank Claire Baker for securing the debate and bringing the matter to the Parliament. I endorse her view that the work that Tess White and Michelle Thomson have done in this Parliament on violence against women is notable and should be recognised.

I was shocked to read that, every year, more than 20,000 victims in the UK experience strangulation. I attended the briefing that Claire Baker hosted with the Women’s Support Project and Beira’s Place, which opened my eyes to something that, at the time, I knew very little about. It alarmed me to learn that, according to the UK Crown Prosecution Service, children were present for more than a third of non-fatal strangulation offences—I found that staggering.

At the briefing hosted by Claire Baker and others, I learned that the timeline of being strangled goes like this: in 6.8 seconds, the person is rendered unconscious; in 14 seconds, there is anoxic seizure; in 15 seconds, there is loss of bladder control; and, in only 30 seconds, there is loss of bowel control. Many members have talked about strangulation leading to a fatality—it takes only 62 seconds before that could happen. It is clear from that timeline why non-fatal strangulation often occurs at the most dangerous stage of the escalation of violence associated with later homicide.

I was particularly concerned to read about the normalisation that other members have talked about in relation to non-fatal strangulation, often known as choking, in young people’s sexual habits. Strangulation has seeped into popular culture and social media, and there are reports that it has even been mentioned as a sexual preference on dating apps. We must act to prevent that normalisation by educating both men and women about the consequences of non-fatal strangulation.

There have been reports from sex education providers and teachers that they have been asked by children in school about how to safely choke a partner—needless to say, there is no way to safely do something like that. As has already been mentioned, a study found that 43 per cent of sexually active 16 and 17-year-olds in the UK had experienced it.

Pornography is cited as the most common way for young people to learn about strangulation. Addressing the harms of extreme pornography must be central to our work on violence against women and girls. If we are to address violence against women and girls in the future, we need to confront the issue at the earliest opportunity, especially with children, to counter those damaging portrayals. We need to be clear that violent pornography normalises harm to women and girls. I was pleased to see the amendments to the UK’s Crime and Policing Bill that criminalised the possession and publication of pornographic pictures of strangulation or suffocation, with duties on platforms to study the proliferation of those images.

I turn to the question whether we should legislate. The current framework is such that non-fatal strangulation is mainly treated as assault, which is defined in the common law as an attack on another person with evil intent. Penalties can range up to life imprisonment. Prosecutors are not required to prove visible injury or harm in order to secure a conviction for assault, provided that the act was intentional. However, as others have said, there are challenges in tracking how prevalent the issue is because there is no specific stand-alone crime and no individual marking system to accurately count and monitor such cases across Scotland. I think that, as Carol Mochan mentioned, it is worth exploring whether data could be collated at the Crown Office to give us at least an accurate picture of the scale of the problem. Although the issue has not been mentioned in the debate, members of this Parliament have raised the act of stealthing, which is the intentional act of secretly removing a condom or another barrier method without consent. That has also been prosecuted in our courts and is not a stand-alone crime.

We cannot rule out having a crime of NFS. We have a different legal system in Scotland from that in England, so we have flexibility in law making, and doing that should not be ruled out. It should be part of the work of the Parliament in the new session to consider it, and it should form part of the strategy of the Government of the day—whoever that may be—for its work on violence against women and girls.