Chamber and committees

To ask the First Minister what resources the Scottish Government will be providing to Police Scotland for the investigation of complaints made under the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021. (S6F-02959)

The First Minister has reiterated several times that the act, which comes into force on 1 April, must deliver what Parliament intended and that people must not be criminalised for expressing their opinions. I agree. Some organisations are still concerned that the legislation will be used maliciously to silence legitimate opinion. It would be helpful for the Scottish Government to engage with those groups.

Does the First Minister agree that how the act is interpreted by the police and how the police are trained on it are key and that resources for that are crucial? Does the First Minister understand my concerns that the police are not properly resourced and, crucially, not properly and adequately trained to implement the act as it was intended? We agree that the act could risk criminalising innocent people and further stretching police resources. I ask the First Minister to make the act work and to make sure that there are full resources to ensure that what Parliament intended is delivered.

Funding was not in place last year in time for local authorities to decide to use the provisions relating to firework control zones. Is the minister confident that preparation is complete for this year and that local authorities such as Glasgow City Council, which needs those powers, will be more able to use them?

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. My app was not working. I would have voted yes.

In a letter to me about the Horizon scandal, the Lord Advocate said that

“prosecutors could not and would not have raised proceedings on the basis of the Horizon evidence alone”,

and I am aware that the Crown Office used an independent report that was prepared by the forensic accountancy firm Second Sight Investigations, which was presented to it by the Post Office as corroboration. The director of Second Sight has said that its interim report “revealed system flaws” and problems with the prosecution process. I am therefore keen to understand why the Crown Office was content to use the report as corroboration. If the Solicitor General is not able to say today why the Crown Office still proceeded to use that report as corroboration, will she at least commit to writing to me on that point?

Image-based abuse often involves girls being coerced into creating or sharing nude images, which are then shared with someone else without those girls’ consent. A report by Revealing Reality, a think tank funded by the Home Office, found that that was a particular problem for school pupils and that, for many boys, sharing nude images without consent was seen as a way of gaining respect from their male peers. The report also found that boys often do not understand that what they are doing is abusive.

I acknowledge the Scottish Government’s work in this area by cabinet secretary Jenny Gilruth and by the minister Siobhian Brown. Would the First Minister consider conducting research not only on the impact that that abuse has on girls but on its extent, so that we can be clear about what exactly we are trying to tackle?

The Scottish Parliament has a strong record in our commitment to improving the lives of women and exposing what sexism and discrimination look like in our daily lives. Crucially, in today’s debate, we are highlighting that the liberation of women from violence and discrimination is a global fight. I have enjoyed all the speeches this afternoon, and I am pleased that some men are still joining us to speak, because it is important to all women that men speak in such debates.

I also congratulate Kaukab Stewart, the first woman of colour in her post. As members can see, she is already getting under way with very serious work, and I fully support the programmes that the minister outlined today, which are working with African nations such as Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia.

New research suggests that boys and men from younger generations are more likely than older baby boomers to believe that feminism has done more harm than good and that women’s equality has gone far enough. I could not believe that when I saw it, but I have seen the figures, even if other members have not. The idea that women’s equality has gone far enough means that today’s debate is a testimony to the fact that we still have much further to go. As another member said, it is clear that women are still overlooked in everyday life and that we are still not represented in our full strength of being half the population in virtually every part of society, public or private.

Recognising the complex nature of intersectional feminism and the diversity of women and having different experiences is also important and worthy of further work.

Worryingly, a fifth of men between the ages of 16 and 29 also look favourably on social media influencers and self-proclaimed misogynists who have said that women should bear responsibility for being sexually assaulted.

Today, I raised with the First Minister the important issue of image-based abuse, which Jamie Halcro Johnston referred to in his speech, and I welcome the work that Siobhian Brown and Jenny Gilruth are doing in that regard. Girls are subjected to huge pressure from boys, and boys seem locked into stereotypes—somehow, they believe that they will gain respect from their peers if they participate in such action. Releasing intimate images without consent is a form of violence against women and can be damaging to girls’ lives in the long term.

The prevalence of easily accessible pornography is part of the picture. I raised the issue, as many other members did, in one of the previous debates. I mentioned the OnlyFans site in the most recent debate and raised my concerns about the safety and exploitation of women online. They need protection because men do not always stick to the rules. I met OnlyFans representatives, because they pursued me to meet them, and I pressed them on some of those points about women’s safety online.

Today, many of us have had the opportunity to meet the Caldwell family, who campaigned for almost 20 years for justice for Emma Caldwell. It is not only about the horror of her murder. The man at the centre of that had violated and committed crimes against other women, and, when I was looking at the issue over the past few months, what spoke to me was the justice agencies’ treatment—certainly 20 years ago—of women. Somehow, because of the lives that they led and the danger that they were exposed to, they were not taken seriously if they reported that they had been raped. Perhaps some things have changed, but a lot more needs to change.

It is estimated that more than 7 million women throughout Yemen require urgent access to services that address gender-based violence, yet such services are extremely limited or completely absent.

In conclusion, I return to the global picture. The World Bank report that was recently published states that the gender gap for women in the workplace is even wider than previously thought, so it is clear that we have a lot to do in order to hand on a future to the next generations of women, so that they can hope for something much better.

Yes—I think that that is completely wrong. I agree with Ruth Maguire on that and with what Rhoda Grant had to say about commercial sexual exploitation of women, and I have believed that for a long time.

Many members have talked about women bearing the brunt of war. In every conflict, women face sexual violence and daily suffering. Maggie Chapman made the point that women are often very remote from any of the decisions that are made about war. Sexual violence against Israeli women and against Palestinian women is equally unacceptable.

I cannot speak without addressing—as other members have mentioned—what has happened in the Gaza strip in the past 150 days. Women in Gaza are steps away from famine and complete catastrophe, with no escape. I am grateful to my colleague Carol Mochan, who yesterday confronted us all with the reality of the 50,000 women in Gaza who are pregnant. Many of those women are malnourished and unable to breastfeed, and many of those pregnancies will not reach full term. There is no baby formula, and not enough aid is reaching the Gaza strip in order to give them a chance.

There are also women in the occupied west bank of Palestine who are forced to give birth, or who miscarry, at checkpoints. Some cannot get to their health appointments, and there are mothers who see their sons imprisoned under occupation and shot in the street. A resolution of the Palestinian conflict is long overdue. As Paul O’Kane rightly said, the only way to give all women, and men, in that region peace is by seeking a two-state solution.

Yemen, too, is a very poor country—in fact, it is the poorest country in the middle east. It is another country that is worth mentioning because it has the highest maternal death rates in the world: one Yemeni woman dies in childbirth every two hours from preventable causes. Child marriage is a coping mechanism that many Yemeni parents turn to as they deal with the precarious situation in which they are living. Families face not only mass displacement but devastating economic crisis and the collapse of many vital social services.

It is the job of this Parliament to ensure that no family should ever have to wait two decades for justice. The long and commendable fight that the Caldwell family, whom I, too, had the humbling pleasure of meeting today, have endured to get justice for their daughter, Emma, has also served to question the fate of other women, such as the four vulnerable women who were murdered in Glasgow in the 1990s. They have highlighted the injustice of serious violence against women that is so prevalent in our society.

Scottish Labour stands four square behind the Government and Angela Constance on her decision to hold a public inquiry to establish, among other matters, why there was no prosecution in 2008, when it appeared that the Crown and the police had enough evidence for that to happen. A public inquiry must get to the truth of that, which should include probing all the criminal justice agencies, which have questions to answer. What happened between 2008, when it is believed that there was sufficient evidence, and 2024, when there were finally a conviction and a sentence?

The cabinet secretary has said that she will consider appointing an inquiry chair from outside Scotland. Scottish Labour would support that, given the unique nature of the inquiry that is required here, so that the family can have full confidence in the inquiry’s conclusions. If I might press the cabinet secretary a little, notwithstanding what she said about judicial matters relating to the appeal, I am sure that she would agree that the inquiry should be conducted in a timely manner following that appeal.