Welcome. I'm Rona Mackay, MSP co-convener of the cross-party group on men's violence against women and girls, and also a member of the criminal justice committee. I'd like to welcome you all to the special online edition of the Festival of Politics 2021 in partnership with the Parliament's Think Tank Scotland's Futures Forum. This afternoon's panel is titled Violence Against Women, and it's held in partnership with Scottish Women's Aid. We're delighted that so many people are able to join us online today, and I look forward to hearing comments and questions from you as we get into our discussion. We're delighted to offer BSL interpretation for today's event, and I look forward to receiving questions and comments. I should also add that there's a helpline on the Festival webpage for this event, should anyone wish to use it. Violence Against Women is one of the most pervasive human rights violations according to the United Nations. It's committed in gender and harmful culture and social norms. It's also recognised as a public health issue adversely affecting women's health. Despite movements like Me Too and Everyday Sexism, it's still normal for women to adapt and restrict their behaviours by swapping safety for freedom to avoid violence and harassment in public. So how do we challenge and who's challenging the men perpetrating the violence? Why does the responsibility for dealing with this public health issue still seem to lie with women? This panel aims to address all of these questions in the next 60 minutes or so, so do stay with us. We're delighted that you're all able to join us and to take part, and I would encourage you to use the event chat function to introduce yourselves, stating your name and your geographical location, and pose any questions you would like the panel to respond to. I'm very pleased to be joined by our panellists. They are Dr Marcia Scott, Chief Executive of Scottish Women's Aid, Davey Thomson, Campaign Director with White Rib and Scotland, and Professor Karen Boyle, Professor of Feminist Media Studies and Program Director of Applied Gender Studies at the University of Strathclyde. She's the author of Hashtag Me Too and Weinstein and Feminism. So, as I said, there'll be an opportunity for our online audience to put questions and views throughout the event. If you'd like to make a contribution, please enter them into the question and answer box. Make sure you state your first name and where you are and we'll get through as many as possible. However, I'd like to begin by asking each of our panellists their reaction to the statement by HM Inspectorate for Constabulary for England and Wales Zoe Billingham, who said in September this year that we are living during a national epidemic of violence against women and girls. She went on to describe it as deep-rooted, pervasive in society, and that we need urgent action to address this. I'd like to ask the panellists if they agree with our statement. I'm going to come first to Dr Marcia Scott, then Professor Karen Boyle, and then to Davey Thomson. Marcia. I have two conflicting responses to that statement. Clearly, I agree about the deep-rooted nature of violence against women and girls and the urgency from our perspective of doing something substantial about it. I guess the part that I would take issue with is the implication that this is a sudden epidemic. Actually, I rather, I suppose maybe too flippantly, call domestic abuse and violence against women the pandemic without a PR company. We have been seeing these kinds of numbers about prevalence of violence against women across the world for centuries. This is not a new problem. The question really is, what are we going to do differently? It's that whole thing if you do what you've always done, you get what you've always got. For me, the biggest and most important questions are, what are the things that will change our structures and our systems in material and dramatic ways? Thank you, Marcia. Can I come now to Professor Karen Boyle, please? Can you hear me? Yes, Karen. Marcia said exactly what I was going to say. The perils are being second. I completely agree with Marcia that the statement is really helpful in pointing to the severity of the issue and the need for urgent action, but I'm also slightly frustrated with that sense that it's new, that it's sudden, that it's not. I'm also slightly cautious of any kind of attempt to get us to take men's violence against women seriously by likening it to something else that we might take seriously, like a pandemic that we're experiencing now or torture. I'm not saying that there are not elements in common that are, but I think that we need to take men's violence against women seriously as men's violence against women, and I understand the temptation to reach for these other ways of talking about it, to make it urgent. I like Marcia's idea of the PR company behind it almost, but it gives me pause. Thank you. Thank you very much, Karen. Davie, would you like to comment? I will not be too surprised to know that I would echo the comments about this not being something new. Clearly, this has been going on for as long as anybody can remember and beyond. I think that what I'd pick up on is the comment about the need for urgent action. I think that what we need to urgently do is start changing the actions that we're taking and putting more commitment into it. It's commitment and persistence. It's going to change things. It's moving things into changes within communities. It's engaging enough of the population and the need to bring about change, but it's getting that commitment to last rather than just being a reaction to something terrible that's happened at one stage. We've seen that over and over again. We refer to Sarah Everard and the incident there and the horrendous crime that that was, but there's been about 80 women murdered since then. That's individual incidents. Something that needs persistence of approach to address it. Thank you, Davie. That leads me on to the next question, which I would like to ask the panellists before opening up to the online questions. If I could go back to Marsha, please. Davie mentioned Sarah Everard and other atrocities such as the sisters Nicole Smallman and Biba Henry murders. Do you think that the debate about misogyny becoming a hate crime, does that mean that we're actually now talking about the sun-spoken epidemic in a serious way that will lead to fundamental change, that has never been achieved before? Do you think we are now at a watershed? I think the only answer to that will come in 10 years. I do think the debate about misogyny as a hate crime signals two things really. It signals that we can say the word misogyny in public now without being pointed at and pelted as feminates, which is a nice change in my life. But I think it's symbolic in that sense. The existing discussions in Scotland around misogyny and hate crime are in a much narrower framework than what we really need, than what we need to do for challenging violence against women. It's much more focused on harassment in public, which is a big gap, I think. But the thing that I would want to say, and it sort of piggybacks on what Davey was saying, which is that we have a reputation now in the world, I know, because I get asked to talk about it all the time for having the world's gold standard domestic abuse law. When people asked me what made that law special, I said it was about the fact that for 20 years now we've known that violence against women and domestic abuse were causes and consequences of women's inequality. Unfortunately, it is only recently that we have started to do something with that analysis and started to realize that a good indicator of our work on violence against women is how we close the pay gap. Women are still disproportionately so much more likely to be poor. Our children are so much more likely to be poor. Are women 50% of our parliament? Not yet. Are they 50% of our local authorities? Not yet. Are they represented in any meaningful way in our top 500 corporations? Not yet. We can pretend to work around the edges and have more help lines and more necessary things like that. None of which will change the prevalence of violence against women. We have to start walking the walk. I agree that it will only be in retrospect if this was a turning point. I would like to say that I hope so, but that might be the triumph of optimism over experience. However, to be optimistic for a minute, I think that over the last four years or so, not exclusively since me too, but certainly that was important, there have been some important cultural shift in the way that we talk about men's violence against women and in a willingness to recognise its severity. Two caveats. One that is certainly not uniform. We are kidding ourselves, sadly, if we think it is. Secondly, I am reminded of something Louise Armstrong wrote about. Louise Armstrong was one of the first feminists in the US to speak publicly about her experiences of incest in the 1970s. She talks about the importance of speaking out, but of doing so in order to build a movement for change. She makes the point that when the media or when public debate got hold of her story and the stories of other incest survivors, noise started to work in the same way as silence. It was almost like talking about it all the time became a way of not doing anything about it, talking replaced the idea of action, talking meant what we need is therapy, what we need is to support the people who are talking, not we need to change the conditions that enable this to happen and we need to challenge the perpetrators. That is my glasses half full and half empty answer. That is really interesting. Davie, would you like to comment? I think that in terms of the debate about misogyny becoming a hate crime, the main part for me that laws play is that they draw a line in the sand and they say that this is not acceptable here, but it does not change things in the way that we can change things by looking at the causes of why we still got misogyny and looking into any quality about men's feeling of entitlement, of men's attitudes to women. Me too has brought a lot of that out because one of the first things that we are always telling men in Bright Ribbon Scotland who we are working with is that we need to be listening to women in our lives. It is important to listen to those messages but we need to be reaching out to the guys that are not necessarily reaching us. They have the discussion about what effect misogyny is having. It is all that kind of backup of effort to address the issues that are leading to the calls for the change in the law. Thanks, Davie. That leads me into a question. It is one that has been posted but I have it here as well that I was going to bring up. The question in the chat is from Maddie Ridge. She said, what do you think about the recent reports of spiking in nightclubs which mostly affects women? Does it seem as if women are being left to deal with this and the onus is still in them changing behaviours rather than dealing with the root cause, which is male behaviour? The spiking drinks and injections that we have just heard about over the last couple of days are horrendous and it is terribly disturbing. Why is the onus left on women and do you think that that is the case? Can I come to Marcia again, please? It is a very familiar dynamic from our perspective. Certainly the world that I work in, which is the world of domestic abuse, every single element of women's experience when they disclose domestic abuse involves some significant danger of being held responsible for the behaviour that is not in their gift. Whether it is their role as mother or whether it is calling the police and having to worry about social work, threatening to take the children away, whatever the mechanisms are. First of all, I just want to do a little bit of a shout out to Police Scotland. I think their response was refreshingly different from what some of the police responses were down south. I think they said it is on us and that was quite refreshing. The reality is we have to see what Police Scotland does about changing the way the organisation and the institution operates and how does it reflect women's equality in the work that they do across all the domains of Police Scotland? I think that, similarly, changing the situation with violence against women and with women's equality is essentially going to require a shift in power. That is the part that the system resists the most strongly. It is exactly like Karen described. If we talk about it endlessly, that gets us off the hook about doing something about it. The reality is that if we make women look like they are responsible for this and say, will you just tell us what to do? We have been telling them what to do. We have been telling them for decades what to do. Quoters around voting. Changing the way we have an economic policy that is not based on a 1940s model of the household. Changing the labour market laws so that women are not disadvantaged. Child care for everybody. None of this is a surprise. The reality for me is you can continue saying to women how much you care and how much you want to see this change. That is on a lot of people's parts. When we start to shift the way power is distributed in our families, in our communities and in our institutions, is when we will begin to take seriously that there are allies in this work that are not blaming women for their own victimhood. Davie, what would you like to comment? I think that in terms of the reports that are coming out of speaking or drugging, let's be clear here. This is drugging in order to facilitate sexual assaults. We quite often, when we are dealing with violence against women, come up with names like spiking that somehow take it away from the real truth of what is happening here. I think that in terms of how we are going to approach it, we need to realise that this is a societal issue right across the board. That this is happening in a world in which men are living. It is not happening and it has nothing to do with us. When we are talking about things that can be precautionary, we have to stop talking about that being all down to the women. The men that are sitting in their company could be taking precautions about all this too. Men can be reacting to what they are hearing before they even get to venues where this has been occurring. If they hear their friends talking about it, if they hear somebody in the toilet talking about it, if they are so-and-so, if they are targeting one way or another, whatever way it is phrased, they can react to that. We need them to realise that this is not going to stop if we just keep turning around and saying to women, have you covered your drinks? It is just not sufficient. Davie, I am going to stay with you. There is a question in the chat from Viv. She says, do you think that there can be unintended consequences of the current focus on toxic masculinity? For example, hardening out of extremist attitudes and more men joining anti-feminist groups such as men's rights, movements and men going their own way? I do not know if you feel able to comment on that. We get hardening out of attitudes no matter which way we work. There is always the, but it is not all men in these kind of comments. At the end of the day, I do not know anybody who is working in addressing violence against women. I do not think that this is all men that are perpetrating this, but that is the immediate reaction that comes back quite often. The reality is that there are just over 2,000 reported rapes every year in Scotland. There are over 60,000 incidents of domestic abuse every year in Scotland and it is not all men. It is clearly an awful lot of men. The idea that we can get away with having those kind of reactions does not work. Can you remind me of the start of the question? It was just that there are unintended consequences of toxic masculinity men joining extremist groups. Phrases like toxic masculinity get jumped on by these groups. The reality is that we do not talk to men about toxic masculinity as if masculinity is toxic. We talk to them about the elements within masculinity that are toxic. That is true of so many things in life. People think that, before you have come up with this phrase, there is a way of describing something that we are applying to everything in that particular category. It is used rather than being a reaction. It is used as a way of biting back. Davie, thank you. I will take a couple of questions and roll them into one. If I could come to Karen, please. It is a question from councillor Julie Bell. She said that there are women in this event who have been fighting for their entire working lives. What else do we need apart from persistence and longevity? The second question is from Beatrice Wishart, MSP. That relates to what you were saying in a way. She said that what are the panellists' views about the way in which the media reports violence against women and girls? What are the public's understanding of the problem and the scale of the problem? Karen, if you could wrap those two together, that would be great. I will come to Marcia. What do we need except persistence and longevity? I would like to hear everyone's thoughts on that. I think that one of the things... I have put an answer to that. It is that we need a movement and we have a movement. That is how we survive it. We need to work collectively and with shared vision because doing this stuff on your own is hard, if not impossible. Together, we have much more chance of effecting change. We also need people to listen. Speaking out is fine, but you can speak out to your heart's content if you are listening. It is not going to change and we need to work out the most effective ways. Keep working out the most effective ways to make that happen. Also, sometimes we need time off just on a really practical level. I think that we have to look after ourselves if you are doing this work all the time. In terms of the media question, I could spend all day answering this, is the media problem? In short, I would say if we think about things like news coverage, but also fictional representations of men's violence against women, we see a lot of recurring problems. Where I have hope is that more and more that is recognised and called out at the same time, organisations sometimes, particularly in Scotland, respond and change headlines or so on. That is the optimistic bit of me. The less optimistic bit of me, in a sense, is a couple of things. One, I think that there is still a tendency to think that dealing with men's violence against women means retelling survivor's stories. I would never minimise the importance of telling survivor's stories. Or how powerful and empowering that can be for some survivors. However, we have a lot of survivor's stories. We know these things already. It should not be incumbent on survivors to keep telling these stories in order for the media to have something to say about men's violence against women. I would like to see news media in particular make much more use of expertise in that area than they do. It does not always have to be calling women's aid or rape crisis Scotland to speak to a survivor. Sometimes getting this bigger picture is really important. I know that Scottish women's aid, rape crisis Scotland and others do really important work with the media, but there is always more that the media can do. It is getting away from telling individual stories as though that is going to, in and of itself, solve the problem. Survivor's stories have already given us our stories. We owe them to do something with it and not endlessly require them to tell us again. Thank you. Marcia, would you like to comment? There are a couple of things. I think it was an interesting question about toxic masculinity, and I just want to say that I think Davey's answer was a good example of finding ways to talk about toxic masculinity with different audiences that help them hear what we are saying, but the reality is that toxic masculinity, the thing that is unacceptable about it, is that it is toxic. You know what I mean? And not talking about it doesn't, it challenges it, it just allows it to go invisible yet again. But I do think that it is critical that we think about who the audiences are. But also how our attitudes formed and how our attitudes related to behaviour and not related to behaviour sometimes. So we have some really interesting research from the Scottish social attitudes survey that asks people, first of all, some questions about their attitudes about gender roles. So do they hold really relatively modern ideas about men and women and gender and our roles in family, community, society? Or do they hold really what we call traditional, I would say old-fashioned ideas about women belonging in the home and blah blah blah. And we also asked them in that questionnaire about who they think is to blame for rape or who they think is responsible for men's violence against women, essentially. And we can see very clearly from that research that there's a correlation between those who hold really traditional notions of what women and men should do and be and a higher tolerance for violence. So we don't have to explain toxic masculinity. What we have to do is have a plan for how are we going to transform people's understandings about gender roles. And there was a question, I think, about schools. That's the key, most important thing that schools can be doing is to integrate from preschool on up, gender-competent curricula and programs. And it's not about telling teenage boys not to be violent. It's about changing people's attitudes about gender roles. And finally, in terms of Julie's question about what does it take to stay in this given that, and you can see from the color of my hair, I've been doing it longer than probably anybody. It not only takes longevity and persistence, it takes sisterhood. And that's, I think, what Karen was saying. And the state of the sisterhood in Scotland right now is kind of fraught with a lot of the online, really difficult and hostile discussions. And I would say, and I said this at the eulogy for Emma Rich, is that our job now is to take care of the sisterhood in Scotland, everything that we need to do to make it a place that allows us to continue to do groundbreaking world changing work. Thanks so much. Can I just stay with you, Marcia, for a moment? There's an interesting question coming from Justina from Edinburgh. I think it was you that you were talking about a shift in power being needed. And Justina is asking if you think the shift in power needed to reach full equality is possible in the current capitalist economic system? Probably not. As somebody who has seen and critiqued the flaws of capitalism for most of my adult life, I think that there are lots of debates to be had about economic systems and what will help social justice. And I'm not going to hijack this conversation by talking about other models than capitalism. But I think your point is absolutely well taken, which are there are certainly elements of capitalism that are ingrained in our economic policies that will have to be challenged if we want to challenge women's inequality. And if we want to end violence against women, we have to challenge women's inequality. Thanks. Thank you, Marcia. I'll go back to Davie now for this question from Valentine Scarlett from Dundee. And she says, clearly not all men are misogynist, but surely education has to take a foothold here. Does the system not need to start addressing the question of respect and equality between people at the earliest age, looking at the nature of violence between the genders? Davie? That's a really short answer, yes. We need to be driving home what the expectations are on boys in relation to how they look at girls and what they think of girls and how they interact with girls. We need to build that up through the education period of their life. I'm always very conscious of the fact that it's really easy if we concentrate entirely on let's change the thinking of children. We miss the fact that adults in their lives are still affecting that. If we're not reaching out to all age groups, then we're not reaching out to the age groups of parents when they're influencing. I can think of times when we have done inputs to young people and we know that they've gone home enthusiastic about what we've been talking about and come in another day and it's been floored because the parent doesn't know enough about the issues that they're now knowing more about and their reaction isn't fantastic to whatever you can or people involved in that or if there's a project getting involved in it. The reaction can be to just say what you're doing that for, what's that to do with you. I really think that it's important that we keep working across all age groups but it's vitally important as well that that means addressing attitudes right across the board from early ages. Thanks, David. Karen, would you like to come in? I think I've been looking at the questions in the chat and there's some other comments and media that I might bring in here because I think that it relates partly to what Marcia and David were saying as well. Susan had commented that some of the media outlets condemning violence against women are the same outlets who objectify them in their coverage and don't seem to see there's a link to which I absolutely agree and want to go back to and thank Marcia for insisting on the point that that kind of example really does show that we'll never end men's violence against women until we end gender inequality we need to be seeing all the different points of interconnection so even just to think about a newspaper we're not going to end men's violence against women just by changing their reporting on crimes committed by men's violence against women we need to be looking at where are the women editors we need to be looking at how are women of colour represented in Scottish News an area I've been working on with past the mic and Scottish News has a long, long way to go in that respect we need to be trying to join the dots and actually the other thing that I think is quite important and this relates again Marcia made me think of this by talking about the online environment in particular is we need to think about what it means challenge ourselves and our own communities and to be angry because there is a space and a time and women have been told for time immemorial that our anger has no place and that our anger is unattractive that our anger is shrill hysterical not justified and working towards change but we also need to think about the links between anger and aggression and particularly online I think one thing I find really depressing really is how often I'll see exactly the same people sometimes people I agree with and sometimes people I don't on Twitter saying be nice one day hashtag and the next day using language towards another someone they disagree with that's really vile derogatory and I think basically what I'm saying is we need to think about the level and standard of our public debate and we're all implicated in that so rather than saying we're all implicated let me say that differently let me say we can all help with that we've all got a positive role to play in changing the nature of public debate it's not easy and we will all make mistakes and we have to own them when we do Thank you, thanks Karen Can I just interject with a wee question here it's a really wide question and I don't know I'm not expecting a crystal clear answer from anybody really but in England apparently the scale of sexual violence ranging from sexual assault, rape and unwanted sexual comments funds listed explicit content sent to phones of school aged girls actually triggered an offset inquiry and girl guiding also found that 70% of girls have experienced sexual harassment at school from another student there's nothing to say that the scale of the issue is any no less in Scotland so the question is how did this come to pass that school aged girls are on the receiving end of this abuse as I say it's a very very open-ended question but Marsha would you like to tackle it? I think that we do have evidence that the situation is exactly the same in Scotland and I don't think that we got to this place I think we've been in this place a long time Rona when people talk about changing the curriculum so that we have respect and healthy relationships and all that stuff they really ignore the fact that that might be well and good when the students leave the classroom they walk into an environment that's toxically sexist and has been in every school any of us attended to I suspect and the problem is that it's so normalized and accepted in our cultures that it's invisible so when we would ask in schools has been working with young women and young men to ask them what kinds of things are acceptable and again it becomes we see hate crime, we see racism we see homophobia, we see these things and those are readily identifiable to the young people but the sexism is invisible to them and they can recount horrific stories and it's an acceptable part of their existence an unnamed part of their existence it doesn't even get broadcast in any way and the actions of it the schools I think are really complicit because they fail to engage not just in curriculum but in training with teachers and in holding teachers responsible for ensuring the sexism that happens every day the sexual assaults that children experience from other students, from staff none of it is new there's some reason to be optimistic in the sense that we're talking about it now and young people are courageously saying this is what's happening in my school and you need to do something about it you're so right talking of young people we've got a question from Annam Elise and Lily from Wood Farm High School they're 16-year-old girls they'd like to know your views on boys calling younger girls feminists as an insult we also feel that the curriculum lacks in education on violence against women can I come to Karen for that please thank you for your question I think you're absolutely right that the curriculum's a really key place where this can be addressed I think particularly when we're thinking about younger age groups sometimes it can be quite difficult to address violence and actually what we need to be doing all the way through is addressing gender inequality and that relates to the first part of your question which is that feminist becomes an insult so we need to create a space where that's not the case I'm also really glad you asked the question the way you did, you know what can we do about boys calling girls feminists and it made me reflect on the previous question how did it come to pass that school age girls are on the receiving end of this and I think we need to flip that round and ask how did it come to pass that school age boys are perpetrating this and then the other part of that question about school age girls that gives me slight pause is I think sometimes if we focus on schools as though what's happening in schools is not also what's happening in cases or in groups of adults there's a danger that we focus on children as uniquely vulnerable and also that we lose the gendered analysis and I say that because of the work I did looking at the Jimmy Savill case where one of the things I've noticed increasingly is that as time has gone on and as Savill is now routinely referred to as a pedophile it's as though gender had nothing to do with what he did and he did abuse both boys and girls but we need to understand what he did as gender-based violence he did it from a particular position of power and we can't take gender out of the equation of understanding that but it's almost like the label pedophile becomes a way of then stopping talking about gender so if we can see children over here and women over here you know they're separate issues so it's really important we think of schools that schools are uniquely problematic spaces you know some of the same approaches we need to take in schools we need to take in workplaces you know all kinds of workplaces not just education settings thank you thank you Karen there's a question from Elisa in Glasgow that I'd like to ask Marsha please because I think it's relevant to the work that Marsha does day to day and she asks how do we achieve a more nuanced and sensitive policy framework that responds to the needs of marginalised women that's a piece of work some of us have been engaged in for most of our lives too and it's quite a complex piece of work because if we take intersectionality which is the buzzword of the day seriously then we really have to avoid the temptation to think of marginalised women to think for instance I had a conversation with some folks in Australia about this today to think about gender and race as two separate things or to think about gender and disability as two separate things and part of the difficulty we have in Scotland and to talk about our policy landscape is that about 15 years ago one of the previous Scottish governments made a choice to move away from having gender equality as a separate piece of work and through all the equality in the equality salad and that has had a really dire effect on some of the thinking and understanding about gender and it has made women it treats women as a minority group so the policy processes so if you look at equality impact assessments which are the bane of my existence I have to say what you'll see is you'll see some public sector body going well this is the impact on women and this is the impact on BMA people and this is the impact on people with disabilities disabled people but what they haven't thought about is how all those inequalities respond or work together and I think the biggest thing that we could do to change the way we both minoritise women and make black women and disabled women with lots of different identities and challenges and discrimination that they experience more visible in the system is to stop separating them out and wiping out their gender so the way I would really like to see our policy arranged so it was gender and disability and gender and race and disability this salad approach has really been problematic and I see it in conversations with public officials all the time that they treat women as if they're a minority and then they treat minority populations as if they have no gender and it's really difficult to hold them accountable for doing the right thing when they don't even understand what the right thing is David, would you like to respond to a comment from Julie Bell when 8-year-old boys have access to porn on smartphones generational learn behaviours are seen as okay so do you think technology and today's what young people today are surrounded by is that making it worse? I think it brings home an aspect of modern life that has changed things which is just accessibility to whatever it may be that people are obsessing on and if that provides accessibility to porn for young people and if that's their education in terms of how men and women interact then clearly that's going to create problems it feeds into a lot of the comments and discussions that are on the go just now about social media and how it should be moderated and how it should be controlled and problems of anonymity and all that kind of angles on it because it exaggerates the access to these attitudes but we know about this in terms of some of the work that we've done in the past and I think we have a piece of work that we did linking with Aberlour some years ago now but we were talking about violence against women in general we were talking about violent attitudes amongst young men and a member of the group had asked to speak to one of the workers afterwards and his point he was trying to raise was my girlfriend objects to the amount of porn I'm watching on my phone and his problem was her raising it rather than the amount of porn he's written on his phone and after a discussion he came round to the idea that my choice here is to continue doing what I'm doing or I'm going to lose my girlfriend and at least then he started to catch on the change here that was needed was for him to make if he wanted to keep his relationship and so when the conversations opened up the door to him thinking differently then there is room for change the problem is just the sheer volume of it and the effect it's having across the board Thanks very much Davey Marcia you want to come in on this? Yeah I really would which is I of course agree with everything that Davey said but I think it's really important for us that technology and the internet is a convenient scapegoat for the exposure of young people to pornography and it really masks what the core problem is which is that the pornography industry globally can compete with the arms industry globally in terms of how much money it makes and there are significant power issues involved here in controlling access to pornography and that the very making of pornography is the making of victims of violence against women and girls and those are the issues that are really core to the porn question because the porn is a public health problem and I think it's been put in the woe is me this technology has so much to be blamed for box rather than in the why do we allow porn on our airways in our in boxes etc and part of the difficulty is this is a reserved issue but part of the difficulty is also that we have been willing to treat it as a public health issue but we are willing to talk about it as a public health emergency just think about how many more tools we'd have to deal with than this notion that somehow young people were misguided because they were accessing these horrible images online but actually it's the industry that's the problem Sure, yeah Thank you. Karen can I ask you to respond to a question from Hannah from Glasgow or are we prepared to deal with the impact of lockdown and violence against women, not just in relation to domestic abuse but also the impact on young people with the closure of schools along with the radicalisation of online communities such as in-cell groups Thanks, the question Are we ready for it? No Will it pose problems? Yes I think that the challenges will be both similar and new and I think that about internet pornography as well and I agree with everything Marcia said at the same time the ready availability of pornography on the internet does do something specific to ideas about what is happening in the internet something specific to ideas about instant gratification entitlement to something right now and because so much more of our lives have moved online through lockdown I think that that will have many long-term implications in this field and not just pornography I mean men's vans against women generally and one of the reasons we are not prepared is that when I say we have got to be careful I don't just make myself sound technologically illiterate here but part of the issue is that most of us don't have the skills to deal with this digital world because it was kind of over the last 18 months a lot of it has been foisted on us so a lot of the newer forms that violence against women might be taking men's violence against women in this context yes they echo old forms of violence but also there is a different kind of vulnerability because we are less familiar with the tools and so in some ways it goes back to the same argument that we need gender equality in every sphere we need gender equality in IT and in tech and we need gender equality at the table platforms are being designed we need input at all levels thanks Karen we've got time to squeeze in a couple of other questions and I'll manage to read out maybe a couple of questions comments but without an actual question the one I'd like to ask all three of you starting with Marcia question from Simon Burke in Toronto Canada any of the panel members have a suggestion for new statutes or any specific statutory regulatory amendments to make women and girls safer well if you're from Toronto Canada then I recommend that you look at our domestic abuse law which I've spoken about in Toronto so I know there's some folks there who are looking at it and our Children's Scotland Act which I think has really expanded the possibilities of honouring children's human rights in the context of discussing domestic abuse and other forms of violence against women I think that the discussions that we're having in Scotland right now about a misogyny offence and a law against misogyny at the cutting edge of what how law can help and we all know, I think from what Davey was saying I agree, law is just one part of the messages that a society gives to people about what's culturally and legally acceptable I think that there are no good laws on misogyny that have worked that I know about and I'm hoping that Scotland can begin to try and craft an approach both in legislation and implementation of those existing laws that will broaden the notion that we can hold men responsible not for what they think but for what they do and that creating an offensive misogyny is not clear to me how we will do that or whether we would ever get the law the usual folks who would oppose it in Scottish society to come on board but what I do think is that the statutory regulation some of them we look at to enforce something that actually has to be changed in other ways so for instance, the evidence that engender gathered for us when we were looking at using an aggravator for hate crime adding a gender aggravator made it really clear that the evidence that is available says that it's never used appropriately because our systems don't recognize misogyny when they see it so it's different from a hate crime that happens to people because they're different from us misogyny happens in our own families in our own relationships in our own communities and we need a different way of responding to it and just changing the name on the attend so to speak around some existing statutory regulations isn't going to do that but what we need to do is change ports so that they see misogyny when it's operating rather than doing victim blaming and all of the other institutions Thanks Marsha, could I come to Karen and David, could I ask you to be quite to think please because we're fast running out of time and I want to do a rewind up at the end so Karen, your thoughts on that? It's important to use law and regulatory amendments, it's not the whole answer and how women and girls will be safer is when men and boys stop hurting and killing us and how that will be achieved is something we can all play a part in and it doesn't just need to be lawmakers Thank you, Davey, judge comment I'll just add a brief comment The issue in respect of new laws is partly highlighted just by the fact that it's Simon from Canada that's asked the question I think it's important that we look at what's working elsewhere as well as broadcasting what's working here and trying to get laws that are effective in every sphere and just one other comment in terms of often laws in Scotland have sections designed in them that are just to be informative about an aspect of things such as within the sexual offences act there's definitions of what demonstrates that consent's not present I'm not sure we make enough use of those kind of sections that aren't actually framing the law as in unitive sections of it but is trying to get messages across Thanks, Davey We're running out of time I just want to read out those two good questions and I'm afraid we don't have time to get answers to them but I just want to read them anyway Once from Alexis Campbell and she's asking about female representation in politics She works at COSLA and she's at a barriers to elected office It's really depressing hearing stories of sexism, sexual harassment and dinosaur-like attitudes in council chambers and another link question from Jen from Glasgow says He and my mind as we're heading to local government elections next year is that online abuse is putting many women off going forward for public office We need a robust conversation about civility in public life as it will impact in future policymaking and we need diverse voices in our chambers to challenge Those are very good points but unfortunately we are running out of time but I would like to thank everyone for their contributions to the event I'm sorry if we didn't get to your question and tried to get in as many as we could Before we close I'd like to give each of our panellists one minute to sum up the issues raised in discussion If I can start with Marcia and then move to Davey and Karen Thank you In one minute all I can say is that we have to be bold and ambitious I have to be because I don't have that much time left to do this work but also I think that that whole thing about if not now when and if not here where and I think there is no better place given the decades of the women's movement and the allies who have joined us and and the increasing representation of women in government and Parliament that it is time now for us to make a sea change in Scotland and to gladly take up the task of leading on this Well, aim into that brilliant Davey I would just say that it's important for people to understand that we're going to address this we need to be talking about inequality we need to be talking about men being silent about it about power control men in who are not perpetrators who are actually still saying things and doing things which can donate in the eyes of the perpetrators and make them feel more comfortable in their society they should feel really uncomfortable in their society and big part of that's taken away entitlement I mean to work at that but we do that by involving the non perpetrating men and getting them to play their part I think that's a key word entitlement Davey, thank you and Karen In three words smash the patriarchy in slightly more than three words smashing the patriarchy isn't one person with a big hammer it's all of us chipping away at it and I think that's a really important minder that this is something in which we are all invested and which we can all help or make a difference or try Thank you, Karen Thanks so much I'm afraid we have to end tonight's discussion there and I'd like to thank the panellists for their really super interesting and informed answers and I'd like to thank everyone who joined in online and again apologies if we weren't able to take your question you just made a great contribution to the panel and this was brought to you in partnership with Scottish Women's Aid as I said earlier so can I remind you there's a helpline number on the festival webpage for this event and thank you too to our BSL interpretation team of Jill Wood and Helen Dunney Pace may I take this opportunity to remind you that over the next few days we'll discuss everything from radical solutions to poverty to fast fashion diversity in politics and climate action and many events so I do hope you can join in these discussions and thank you and good night