Chamber and committees

I thank Gillian Mackay for securing the debate.

Abortion is a legal right in Scotland; it is essential healthcare for women, and access to abortion services absolutely must be unimpeded.

Women and women’s organisations across the world have fought for the right to access safe and legal abortion for decades. Increasingly, international human rights law supports their quest, despite the current rolling back of rights that we are seeing in some places.

Safe and legal access to abortion services is a basic healthcare need. Anyone who chooses to have an abortion or to access sexual and reproductive health services should be able to do so without fear of harassment, intimidation or abuse.

As we know, abortion is legal here in Scotland, and women must be able to access abortion services freely and without harassment. The reports of patients across Scotland who have experienced intimidation and harassment from protesters outside abortion services, examples of which Gillian Mackay read out, are deeply concerning. No woman should be harassed or intimidated for accessing abortion services, and no woman should feel scared to access that vital human right because of protests or vigils taking place near abortion services. After all, according to Engender, one in three of us will use such services in our lifetimes.

In our 2021 manifesto, the Scottish National Party committed to supporting local authorities to use their powers to establish byelaws to create protest-free buffer zones outside clinics that provide abortion services. The Scottish Government’s women’s health plan, which was published in August this year, is the first stage of a long-term commitment to reducing health inequalities for women, and it pledged to improve access to abortion and contraception services.

As a former Women’s Aid worker, I have seen at first hand the emotional strength that is required of women when they make the decision to have an abortion. I have supported women to access such essential healthcare after they have had previous forced pregnancies, as contraception was forbidden by their abuser. Collectively, let us imagine having every aspect of our existence controlled by an abuser, finally managing to escape that hell, finding ourselves pregnant in a Women’s Aid refuge, perhaps with a few children in tow, making the decision to seek an abortion and having to run the gauntlet of a protest or a vigil simply to access lawful healthcare. Women who are already under immense pressure and about to go through an already traumatic process should not have to deal with anyone else’s opinion when accessing such healthcare.

Establishing byelaws at a local government level should be the simplest and quickest way to create protest-free zones around abortion services. If local councils can act in such instances, they should, but examples such as the recent attempts by the City of Edinburgh Council and Glasgow City Council to establish buffer zone byelaws highlight the need for clarity at a local level. It cannot be a postcode lottery. Right now, we must ensure that local government has absolute clarity and is empowered to take swift action to pass such byelaws to ensure that all women can access clinics free from harm.

As abortion rights are under increasing threat around the world, I was heartened to hear recently in the chamber the First Minister assure us, in her response to Monica Lennon, that she is open to exploring all options to ensure that women are able to access abortion free of harassment. I look forward to supporting her in that endeavour.

I am sure that the First Minister shares my disappointment and deep concern at the announcement by Rocialle Healthcare Ltd that its Guardian surgical textiles facility in Girvan, which is in my constituency, will close in 2022, with the loss of 75 jobs over the next four months. That is a long-established business and employer that provides the national health service with surgical drapes, gowns and tray wraps, as well as having provided personal protective equipment during the pandemic. I would be grateful for the First Minister’s advice on what the Scottish Government can do to support that very skilled workforce and our very fragile rural economy, which will be hugely impacted by the closure decision.

I am delighted to bring to the chamber this crucial debate on the urgent need to reform our laws on prostitution, and I thank colleagues from all sides of the chamber for their support. I pay tribute to the Minister for Community Safety, Ash Regan, for her strong leadership and unswerving commitment on the issue.

Prostitution is violence against women. As a former Women’s Aid worker and homelessness worker, I have supported women—often very young—who were trafficked from Ayrshire to Glasgow and subjected to the most traumatic sexual exploitation. I heard accounts by women who had been abused by their partners and made to perform sexual acts on their partner’s friends, often for his amusement and financial gain. The Scottish Government rightly recognises that in “Equally Safe: Scotland’s strategy for preventing and eradicating violence against women and girls”.

The Government is to be congratulated for its pledge—made in this Parliament, through the programme for government—to challenge men’s demand for prostitution in Scotland. Reducing men’s demand while supporting women to exit and recover after sexual exploitation must be the overriding objective of public policy on prostitution. It is clear, however, that that policy objective cannot be achieved without legislative reform, because Scotland’s prostitution laws are outdated and unjust. Men who exploit women by paying for sex enjoy impunity—online pimping is legal, while women who are exploited through prostitution can themselves face criminal sanctions for soliciting. We recognise that prostitution is violence against women, but our laws do not, and the consequences are all too real.

First, demand for prostitution is being enabled rather than deterred. Only 4 per cent of men in Scotland have paid for sex in the past five years, according to the latest figures, and it is demand from that minority of men that is driving the brutal prostitution trade in Scotland and the trafficking of women into it. Men who pay for sex are making a choice; they are not helplessly responding to uncontrollable sexual urges. Their choice to seek out and pay a person to perform sex acts on them is influenced by a range of factors, including the very small risk of criminal sanction. In 2018, a study by the University of Leicester asked more than 1,200 sex buyers, “Would you change your behaviour if a law was introduced that made it a crime to pay for sex?” More than half the respondents said that they would “definitely”, “probably” or “possibly” change their behaviour, yet right now, unless a man solicits a woman in a public place, there is no risk of criminal sanction for paying for sex in Scotland. A sex buyer knows that if he perpetrates that form of violence against women, the criminal justice system will be a passive bystander.

Another intolerable consequence of our outdated prostitution laws is that commercial pimping websites operate openly and legally, and they are fuelling sex trafficking across the country. Those highly lucrative websites make their money by hosting advertisements for prostitution—they are, in effect, the red-light district of the internet. Men who want to sexually exploit women can anonymously and freely peruse ads on those sites; select women from an online catalogue according to their own location and preferences; and order them as easily as they might order a takeaway.

A groundbreaking inquiry by the Parliament’s cross-party group on commercial sexual exploitation found that those websites incentivise sexual trafficking and sexual exploitation in Scotland. They make their grotesque business of trafficking women into prostitution and advertising them to sex buyers substantially easier and quicker by centralising demand on a very small number of online platforms.

In addition, despite prostitution being recognised in our national strategy as a form of gender-based violence, our prostitution laws can make it harder for women to leave the sex trade and recover. Sanctioning and punishing women for their own exploitation is wholly counter to the policy objective of supporting women to exit prostitution. Those women can face enormous barriers to exiting the sex trade and rebuilding their life—those can be practical, physical or psychological, including the effects of trauma, and injuries sustained can be horrific and mental scars long-lasting. Financial difficulties, coercion by pimps and abusive partners and having a criminal record for soliciting can also put blockers on the road to recovery. As a society, we should offer victims support and not sanctions.

Diane Martin, a Scottish survivor of prostitution and trafficking who was awarded a CBE for her tireless work in supporting women to exit and recover from sexual exploitation, has said:

“I want to be part of a Scotland that completely rejects the idea that women and girls can be for sale, treated as commodities by men who believe this is their right and entitlement.”

I agree, and I am delighted to support the campaign that Diane is now chairing to end that entitlement: A Model for Scotland. It is an alliance of survivors, organisations and front-line services that is calling for a new progressive legal model to combat commercial sexual exploitation in Scotland. That model must do the following: decriminalise victims of sexual exploitation; provide comprehensive support and exiting services for victims; wipe previous convictions for soliciting from victims’ criminal records; criminalise paying for sex; and prohibit online pimping.

By shifting the burden of criminality off victims and on to those who perpetrate and profit from the abuse, those reforms will bring Scotland in line with the approach that is taken in Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Israel, France and elsewhere. Spain also looks set to join that growing list, with the Spanish Prime Minister declaring earlier this month:

“We will advance by abolishing prostitution, which enslaves women.”

Two decades after Sweden shifted the burden of criminality in 1999, research there reveals that, since that approach was introduced, public attitudes on paying for sex have transformed, traffickers are being deterred and demand for prostitution has dropped. The most recent research on prevalence found that, from the base sex-buyer figure of 12.7 per cent in 1999, only 7.5 per cent of men now pay for sex, and of those, only 0.8 per cent had paid for sex in previous 12 months—the smallest proportion recorded in two decades, and the lowest in Europe.

Evidence from the United States also highlights the effectiveness of action against pimping websites. In 2018, those websites were criminalised in the US, and an analysis of the impact of that legislation one year later revealed that the prostitution advertising market had been significantly disrupted and demand had dropped. Commenting on the legislation, Valiant Richey, a special representative and co-ordinator for combating trafficking at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, told members of the Parliament:

“That bill passed and the market declined by eighty per cent in seventy-two hours ... I’m not aware of any anti-trafficking legislation anywhere in the history of the world that had such an impact on the market in such a short time.”

The Scottish Government has pledged to challenge men’s demand for prostitution and support women to exit, and it is now time to deliver on that pledge. We need a model for Scotland that shifts the criminality off victims and on to those who perpetrate and profit from sexual exploitation. It will be a model of which Scotland can be proud, and its adoption will mark a historic step forward in the battle for equality between women and men.

I am aware that some people might not have heard my question, so I will repeat the last bit of it. Can Rona Mackay tell us how the community council in her area ensures that all the voices in the community are being heard and that it is not the same people around the table all the time? I suppose that the question is about how you ensure wider recognition of every voice in your community.

I will make a wee change of direction. Stretched resources have meant that we all need to work towards efficient government, in all spheres of governance. Do councils have the desire and the scope to work more collectively over regions to deliver services? If so, what needs to change for that to happen?

You made a key point when you talked about the reorganisation of local government in the 1970s. We still see the effects of that now. If we listen to people who do not feel empowered in communities, we find that they hark back to the days of their burgh council or town council, when they had a set of people who met locally in the area and one councillor who went to a wider national body. Given that people still hark back to those days, how do we make sure that the local governance review delivers the community empowerment and the functional and devolved power to local communities that we need?

Deputy First Minister, you will be aware of the recently published international review that was conducted by the local governance review team. Quebec, where I grew up, is the location of one of the case studies. Despite the gradual growth in municipal powers over the past decade, with nearly all local budgets being raised through local taxation, there has not yet been a significant increase in citizen participation. Which countries and examples from the review are getting the relationships and resource allocations between the different spheres of government right?

Has anyone else put an R in the chat box, convener?

As we have just heard from the COSLA president, functional empowerment is a key aspect of the local governance review. Considering that efficient government is within your remit, is it a Scottish Government commitment to have more regional and collaborative approaches to service delivery?

Thank you.