Chamber and committees

The reality is that a large part of the oncology department in Tayside has gone and, as we have heard, vacancies have proved to be impossible to fill. Does the minister think that it is acceptable that women in Tayside must travel miles from home for breast cancer treatment? Can she tell us what the threshold is for these arrangements to come to an end?

I am a black belt in karate and have done martial arts for a long time. There are significant risks with mixed-sex sparring. Should schools provide single-sex sports?

I will have to read out my second question, because the list is quite long. In Scotland, we have the Scottish patient safety programme, the NHS incident reporting and investigation centre, Health Improvement Scotland, professional regulatory bodies such as the General Medical Council, the Patients Rights (Scotland) Act 2011, the patient advice and support service provided by Citizens Advice Scotland and the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman. In your view, will the commissioner create duplication in the saturated patient safety landscape?

We had a session yesterday in a sports club and one of the topics on which we got feedback was the attitudes of boys and men. Could more be done, whether in schools or sporting, to provide more education for boys and men?

A joke or something else that someone has said can be hurtful to women and girls. Do you have any thoughts on how that education might be done?

Some submissions that the committee received in response to its call for views emphasised that patient safety would be better served by investing in safe staffing levels. We explored that idea in some detail. For example, doctors undertake twice as many patient contacts each day as is recommended, which is caused by poor workforce planning.

Do you envisage the commissioner having a role in safe staffing, given the implications for patient safety?

Focusing on the positive, could there be a role for the patient safety commissioner in spreading good practices in one part of the Scottish NHS across the whole of the NHS?

Thank you, Katie and Jenni. I thought that your “Young Women Lead 2021” report was excellent. It found that communal changing rooms could be a barrier and an obstacle for girls and young women, particularly with regards to privacy and being able to be free from harassment. Do you support women-only changing facilities? That is my first question.

My second question is: do you have any examples of best practice in the provision of safe spaces in changing facilities for women and girls?

What is your opinion?

This week, Wayne Couzens was sentenced to a further 19 months in prison for three offences of indecent exposure. That is on top of a whole-life sentence for the horrendous murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard in March 2021. Sarah Everard was simply walking home from a friend’s house when she was kidnapped, raped and murdered.

I begin with Wayne Couzens’s latest sentencing because Baroness Kennedy, who chaired the independent working group on misogyny and criminal justice in Scotland, said in relation to that horrendous case:

“This police officer was known to be peculiar in relation to women but also had recently been exposing himself and nothing had been done about it.”

She continued:

“If you don’t act on the lower level stuff, then it creates a subsoil from which much more serious crime like rape and homicide takes place.”

So many women and girls—too many—have experienced the so-called “lower level” stuff. Some might know that they have experienced misogynistic conduct and behaviour at the hands of men, in person or online, but others do not. It has become normalised rather than criminalised. Misogyny needs to be better defined so that people understand what it is and what it looks like. They need to have the right language.

There are laws that address threatening and abusive behaviour, stalking and breach of the peace, which are often seen as less-serious crimes. However, those laws do not capture the sex-specific experience of misogynistic behaviour. They do not capture the fear and the humiliation that are experienced by women and girls.

We know that sexual crimes in Scotland are at their highest level on record. In Aberdeenshire, in my region, the number of rapes and attempted rapes soared by 104 per cent in one year. Police Scotland responds to a domestic abuse call every nine minutes and officers attend around 60,000 incidents every single year.

One such example involved Erland Borwick, a fisherman from Inverbervie, who was jailed for 16 months earlier this week after witnesses said that he threw his girlfriend around like a rag doll. It is reported that Borwick described his actions to the police as “a massive domestic”. That incident was not an argument; it was cruel and it was a violent assault that resulted in serious injury and permanent disfigurement.

If we do not challenge misogyny—if perpetrators can get away with misogynistic harassment and abuse—we will never change from the status quo and women and girls will never feel equally safe; they will never see justice.

The reality is that when it comes to violence against women and girls, the criminal justice system in Scotland needs significant reform—not only in how the law captures misogynistic crimes but in the way that victims are treated. To that end, the recommendations from the independent working group on misogyny and criminal justice in Scotland, which was chaired by Baroness Kennedy, seek to address gaps in the law relating to misogyny. Lady Dorrian’s reforms, meanwhile, seek to improve the experiences of women and children in the criminal justice system.

The consultation on reforming the criminal law to address criminal misogyny that the cabinet secretary has outlined today feels long overdue. Many women were frustrated that sex was not included as a protected characteristic in the hate crime framework two years ago, and this latest consultation process is only just getting under way, with no legislative deadline in sight. We will, of course, closely scrutinise the draft legislation when it is introduced in the Scottish Parliament. In the meantime, I urge the Scottish Government to consult women and women’s groups as widely as possible on the proposals.

A question that parliamentarians and policy makers often reflect on is the extent to which changes in the law can change behaviour at societal level. When it comes to misogynistic crimes, my feeling is that any changes in the law must be accompanied by sufficient resources to make perpetrators truly and meaningfully accountable for their actions. That means having enough police and court capacity to ensure that changes are deliverable on the ground as well as in statute. It means that the punishment should match the crime and it means that the victim should be prioritised over the offender.

For too long, women have had to change their behaviour to protect themselves. It is time for the system to change to protect us and, as we have heard today, boys and men need to call one another out.