Chamber and committees

Evidence shows that women who are exploited through prostitution experience extraordinarily high rates of complex PTSD, and the trauma experienced is comparable to that suffered by state torture survivors and combat veterans. Symptoms include emotional dysregulation, identity disruption and lasting relational difficulties.

Although services such as the Anchor service in Glasgow and the Rivers centre in Edinburgh provide excellent care, specialist complex PTSD assessment and recovery support services remain quite scarce across Scotland. Will the Scottish Government commit to investing in long-term, trauma-informed recovery programmes, specialist complex PTSD diagnosis and practitioner training? Will it commit to recognising such exploitation as gender-based violence that impacts those women and girls deeply, and to ensuring that they get the support and sustained interventions that they need?

To ask the Scottish Government what plans it has to improve the provision of mental health support for vulnerable women and girls with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related conditions, including where this is the result of commercial sexual exploitation in prostitution. (S6O-05100)

The Parliament passed that law more than three years ago to protect the public and our emergency services. There have been four bonfire nights since the law was enacted, and the constituents and emergency services that I worked with to introduce the law remain at their wit’s end. With respect to the First Minister, I note that firework control zones do not work without controls on purchasing.

Only the United Kingdom Government can ban fireworks, but the public consultation on the issue was one of the most responded-to consultations that this Parliament has ever run. In constituencies across Scotland, communities on the front line—mine is one of them—have become annual bonfire night war zones. Those communities deserve the use by Scotland of all the powers that we have available to us to help them, but they are now bracing for impact. Firefighters, police officers and paramedics continuously put themselves in harm’s way to protect the public, and they deserve more than warm words—they deserve the delivery of the law. The licensing system is still undelivered, and vital fire stations such as Marionville, in my constituency, face closure. Public trust is on the line, so will the First Minister commit to looking again at implementing the law in full?

To ask the First Minister for what reason the Scottish Government has reportedly abandoned key provisions of the Fireworks and Pyrotechnic Articles (Scotland) Act 2022, including the proposed licensing system, as communities prepare for potential disorder during bonfire night. (S6F-04405)

One of the difficulties for the committee is that research, evidence and a number of studies have been presented to the committee—in writing or through oral evidence sessions—that appear at face value to directly and completely contradict each other. One side says one thing and the other side says the other. Is there any guidance or criteria that the committee can apply in order to spot whether research or evidence meets a high bar?

When we look at things that are presented as evidence, I suggest that we need to look for high sample sizes and at whether the research is statistically representative, and we need to ensure that any research that has been undertaken does not have any links at all to the sex industry. It must not be funded by the sex industry; it should be independent.

I direct that question to Jo Phoenix, in particular, because I think that she mentioned that, but Ruth Breslin might also want to comment. How should the committee work its way through all the research? If it is possible to work it out, what percentage of the research meets a very high bar of robustness?

I cannot speak for the committee because I am not a member, but I am sure that it would be interested in taking up that suggestion. Do you have anything to add, Ruth?

I thank the cabinet secretary for that commitment.

Tackling exploitation means tackling the demand that fuels it. Every grooming network and every trafficking chain exist because there is a market, and that market is sustained by the unchallenged demand to buy sex.

If Scotland is to protect our most vulnerable women and children, we cannot just accept that people are vulnerable to poverty, coercion, addiction and grooming. We must target the demand that drives the profits from their exploitation. People are not products to be traded. Victims are trapped in cycles of exploitation through organised crime, online exploitation and prostitution. We need to tackle the root cause through a clear legal deterrent that makes the purchase of sex a crime.

Will the Government commit to criminalising sex buying through my unbuyable bill, in order to reduce that demand and dismantle the market for those heinous exploitation networks across Scotland?

The Dundee grooming gang case proves that Scotland is not immune to organised grooming gang sexual exploitation, but I agree that Police Scotland deserves real credit for bringing the perpetrators in Dundee, and in Glasgow’s beastie house case, to justice. To truly protect the vulnerable, however, we must detect the patterns of organised exploitation before the harm happens.

Police Scotland’s freedom of information response and the Government’s response to my recent written question expose fundamental gaps in our data systems. Police Scotland confirms that it has markers for exploitation but none for group or gang-based abuse. The interim vulnerable persons database has an at-risk marker for child sexual exploitation, but it cannot flag when that abuse is organised or networked. If we cannot even identify grooming gang patterns, how can we dismantle them? Will the Government now commit to an independent data collection audit as part of the work of a national task force, in order to close those dangerous data gaps?

To ask the Scottish Government, in light of the recent sentencing of a grooming gang in Dundee, what urgent action it will take to establish a national task force to identify and dismantle any exploitation networks targeting children and vulnerable adults in Scotland.

Thank you, convener, and good morning to the witnesses. Thank you for attending.

It often seems that a voice is missing from the debate, and for me, that voice is that of the buyers. We know that sex buyers are around 99 per cent male, so it is the voices of the men who pay to buy sex that are missing. Could Diane Martin and Amanda Jane Quick give the committee an idea of what the attitudes of sex buyers are to the women whom they pay? As I probably will not get a follow-up question from the convener, I will add the second part of my question, which is, if the Parliament decides that it does not want to progress the bill, what do you think the consequences of doing nothing will be for Scotland?