A LAW to protect women and girls from gender-based violence must be brought forward by the Scottish Government quicker, the Greens have insisted.
Amid the UN’s 16 Days of Activism campaign – which seeks to end violence against women – Green MSP Maggie Chapman has called on the SNP Government to speed up the bill to tackle misogyny which it has previously pledged to introduce before the end of the parliamentary term in 2026.
Earlier this year, former first minister Humza Yousaf said that the bill would be proceeding with "urgency and pace" due to the number of women who had "raised concerns" over sex not being covered within the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 that was introduced on April 1.
The Scottish Greens have said the 16 Days campaign has highlighted how much the country needs tighter laws if it is to end domestic violence and sexual abuse, and have pushed for more urgency.
Chapman told The National: “We urgently need stricter laws that tackle misogyny and gender-based violence to protect the women and girls at risk of being victims.
“Bringing forward a bill criminalising misogynistic behaviour would see reports of harassment and assault based on gender being taken seriously.”
In Scotland, one in five female students in higher education experiences sexual harassment and one in four experience sexual assault, the Greens said.
“Women teachers in schools experience violence six times as much as their male counterparts, and this is leading to our young citizens growing up in a world where violence against women and girls is normalised everywhere they look – at school, at home, on television and social media.”
According to this year’s Girlguiding Attitudes Survey, 75% of girls aged 11 to 16 have experienced or seen sexism, and this rises to 97% in groups aged 17 to 25.
Chapman claimed domestic violence, sexual assault, rape and femicide were all increasing because of the lack of legal repercussions.
“The onus is on women and girls to keep themselves ‘safe’ from the dangers of extreme misogyny,” she said.
“What we need instead is prevention – more focus on education for men or boys on how to avoid being radicalised by misogynists, and more focus on cultural change across society.
“If misogynistic threats go unpunished, they become misogynistic actions. If this is seen as par for the course of the female life experience, where boys and men are allowed to threaten or act dangerously towards women and girls with no real consequences, then it breeds the idea that it is socially acceptable.”
A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “Violence against women and girls is abhorrent and, to see change, we need to challenge outdated stereotypes and attitudes that allow abuse and violence to persist.
“To see a society free from violence, abuse and misogyny we must prioritise addressing the root causes of that violence, gender inequality which is why our Equally Safe strategy sets out a vision to prevent violence from occurring in the first place.”
A misogyny act was recommended to the Scottish Government in 2022 by human rights lawyer Helena Kennedy KC.
Set up in February 2021 to consider the creation of a standalone offence of misogynist hate crime, Kennedy’s working group returned an report that that recommended naming explicitly the daily abuses that “absolutely degrade women’s lives”.
The proposed Misogyny and Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill would create a new statutory misogyny aggravation operating outside of current hate crime legislation, as well as new offences of stirring up hatred against women and girls.
