Chamber and committees

Our Equally Safe Strategy Delivery Plan committed to develop a campaign to work with men and boys to recognise that we need to challenge misogyny to pave the way for the effective dismantling of the gender-based structures and attitudes which enable and support violence against women and girls. We recognise that men and boys need to be part of the solution.

Officials have undertaken extensive desk research and insight discovery work to support the development of a campaign to tackle this issue. This work has been supported by an investment of £35,000 to date and further investment planned this year to develop, produce and launch the activity in the first quarter of 2026. We will work closely with our partners in the statutory and third sectors throughout the campaign development.

We have undertaken a literature review and engaged with a range of specialist organisations to understand the issue and what is required to address it. We are currently developing a policy definition of extended family abuse, including exploring how it interacts with intimate partner abuse and honour based abuse and other forms of VAWG.

We will continue to work with specialist organisations and academics in the Addressing Violence Against Minority Ethnic Women and Girls Network, and mainstream services including Social Work Scotland, Police Scotland, COPFS, NHS Scotland and local authorities to inform our work. We will share the draft policy definition with partners in Autumn 2025.

We are working closely with the Mhor Collective and specialist violence against women and girls (VAWG) services, to identify the digital inclusion needs of women and girls who have experienced technology-facilitated VAWG and improve the support that is available to them.

We have established a VAWG Digital Inclusion Network, made up of specialist violence against women and girls (VAWG) services to consider how we can improve access to information and advice for survivors of technology-facilitated VAWG. This includes developing and sharing appropriate resources with the organisations supporting survivors and building the digital skills and confidence of staff and volunteers working in those organisations. We are funding the Mhor Collective, who have a long track record of digital inclusion work, to lead this work.

Recognising the barriers that exist for certain groups, we are considering the digital inclusion needs of minority ethnic women and girls, women involved in commercial sexual exploitation and women in rural and remote areas.

The Forum, established as part of our Equally Safe Delivery Plan commitment to develop a collaborative programme of support to enable local and national partners to adopt a public health approach to preventing violence against women and girls (VAWG), has met twice to date, with a third meeting scheduled for October 2025.

The Forum is facilitated by the Improvement Service and seeks to enable collaboration between local and national partners to identify ways of embedding a public health approach in practice, identifying and overcoming barriers to implementation, sharing local experience, and supporting its wider application.

With the purpose of the Forum being identifying and overcoming barriers to implementation, sharing local experience and supporting its wider application, no formal recommendations have been issued. However, early learning from the Forum includes recognition of the challenges in shifting resources towards prevention, the importance of engaging a broad range of policy areas, and the value of identifying tangible, evidence-based actions that stakeholders can take within their own services.

The Forum continues to provide a collaborative space for peer support and shared learning, helping to embed a public health approach to ending VAWG across systems and sectors.

Defining an issue is a vital first step towards creating a shared understanding of the problem. This lays the foundation for ensuring our collective response is more effective and leads to better outcomes for victim-survivors. This is particularly important in relation to honour-based abuse which has been misunderstood by professionals, meaning it is often not recognised and the required support to survivors not offered.

We have developed a policy definition of honour-based abuse that will provide staff responding to survivors with a consistent understanding of honour-based across different sectors. To do so, we undertook a literature review and worked with specialist organisations and academics in the Addressing Violence Against Minority Ethnic Women and Girls Network, and mainstream services including Social Work Scotland, Police Scotland, COPFS, NHS Scotland and local authorities to inform our work. We are currently working with these partners to explore practical ways the definition can be applied across services.

Developing a statutory definition will require extremely careful consideration and consultation to ensure it captures the complexities of honour-based abuse and aligns with legal frameworks. We will continue to work with our experts and partners to work through these challenges thoughtfully and ensure that our approach to addressing honour-based abuse, including a statutory definition if necessary, is robust and effective.

The Scottish Government is committed to developing the role of nurse sexual offence examiners.

The Scottish Government and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service have together supported a test of change involving Queen Margaret University nurse graduates, so that they can undertake sexual offence examinations and give evidence in court. If approved by the Lord Advocate, this test of change could pave the way for nurses to undertake the role of sexual offence examiner in future.

We continue to fund places on a Post Graduate Certificate (PG Cert) in Advanced Forensic Practice course at Queen Margaret University – the first of its kind in Scotland. This qualification is a pre-requisite for nurses undertaking the role of sexual offence examiner in Scotland.

We also fund a skills lab at Queen Margaret University so that sexual offence examiners and recently qualified nurse sexual offence examiners can maintain and update their skills.

Developing a multi-disciplinary workforce model may also support the sustainability of services in remote, rural and island communities.

There are currently 24 qualified nurses with a further 10 working towards this qualification. Assuming all of the nurses graduate by July 2026, the total number of PG Cert qualified nurses in Scotland will increase to 34.

The Scottish Government fund the Gender-Based Violence and Learning Disabilities Steering Group facilitated by the Scottish Commission for People with Learning Disabilities (SCLD).

The Steering Group’s Action Plan for 2024 – 2027 aims to reduce the risk of Gender-Based Violence against women and girls with learning disabilities and to improve access to support services and justice services for women and girls with learning disabilities who experience Gender-Based Violence.

Proposals are also being developed for the Learning Disabilities, Autism and Neurodivergence (LDAN) Bill, which intend to ensure that the needs of people with learning disabilities are better identified at any point of contact in the justice system.

This includes work to ensure justice agency staff are better trained to engage appropriately with people with learning disabilities and what support, such as access to advocacy or an Appropriate Adult, is put in place to ensure meaningful involvement. Proposals for the Bill also include improvements to accessing advocacy.

The following table shows the number of offences involving the alleged use of an air weapon (where identified) between 2009-10 and 2021-22. This has been split into two time periods, 2009-10 to 2014-15 and 2015-16 to 2021-22. The reason for this specific split is the introduction of an improved methodology for collating these statistics from 2015-16 onwards. As such the two time periods are not directly comparable as the earlier one is likely to contain a small degree of underestimation.. Further information on the change in methodology and the presentation of data by single years is available at Recorded Crimes and Offences Involving Firearms, Scotland, 2020-21 and 2021-22 - gov.scot.

The latest Crimes and offences involving a firearm Official Statistics relate to 2021-22. Future updates will follow the conclusion of a further review by analysts from Scottish Government and Police Scotland into the methodology for producing this data. Unlike other crime-based official statistics, the current approach relies on the manual review of crime records to identify relevant cases, which is resource intensive and requires significant time to complete. An update on the outcome of this work is planned for early Autumn, and users can register for this through the SCOTSTAT network (https://www.gov.scot/publications/scotstat-register-guidance/)

Crimes involving the alleged use of an air weapon 2009-10 to 2021-22

Public Inquiries which are established under the Inquiries Act 2005 are independent of the Scottish Government. Public Inquiries relevant costs under the Inquiries Act 2005 are funded via the sponsoring Ministerial portfolio within the Scottish Government, but publication in relation to costs is undertaken independently by each inquiry.

The cost of a public inquiry varies and is very much determined by the complexity of the issue to be investigated, the number of witnesses, and the amount of technical expertise that may be required. There is a statutory duty placed on Chairs of independent inquiries, set out at section 17 of the Inquiries Act 2005, the they "must act with fairness and with regard also to the need to avoid any unnecessary cost".

All Inquiries are encouraged to engage with sponsor teams to communicate likely budget requirements in order to inform development of the Scottish Government budget each year, and to advise sponsor teams if expected requirements change or evolve.

Public inquiries established under the Inquiries Act 2005 are not designated as Scottish public authorities for the purposes of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA). As the member may be aware, information held by other authorities about the work of a public inquiry may be exempt from disclosure. In particular, under section 37 of FOISA information is exempt if it has been created by a person conducting an inquiry for the purposes of that inquiry. These are absolute exemptions under the Act. These arrangements are in place to protect the integrity and independence of public inquiries.

The Scottish Government understands that key information about the costs of the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry are published on the Inquiry website. It also understands that the Inquiry provided further detailed information about its costs in its Chair’s letter dated 22 May, to the Finance and Public Administration Committee. The Scottish Government would be happy to consider whether it holds any further relevant information in the event of any request for such, and would consider any such request in full compliance with its own obligations as a Scottish public authority under FOISA.