Engender blog

3 Steps to Achieving Primary Prevention in Public Transport

We’ve launched our new series of mini-briefings shining a spotlight on how to achieve a primary prevention approach in different areas of public policy with this new briefing highlighting why safe and accessible public transport is key to gender equality and preventing violence against women.

Public transport isn’t just a matter of convenience; for many women, it’s a lifeline that opens doors to education, employment, and essential services, all of which impact gender equality.

However, Scotland’s public transport system fails to serve women’s distinct travel needs, limiting their access to these opportunities and reinforcing gender inequality. Without changes, these limitations keep women from fully participating in society, impacting everything from their financial independence to safety and personal well-being.

When we talk about primary prevention of VAWG, we’re talking about preventing this violence from happening in the first place. Evidence shows the best way to do this is to tackle the root cause of this violence: gender inequality.  Therefore, creating a safe, sustainable and accessible public transport system for everyone is essential for advancing women’s equality and preventing VAWG once and for all.

Without safe and accessible transport options, women’s access to critical economic and social opportunities is limited, reinforcing gender inequality, which ultimately enables VAWG. Women’s safety on public transport remains a significant concern and barrier to women’s mobility, due to things like lack of regular and reliable services, design of vehicles and transit points, and insufficient staffing levels.

Our new briefing highlights Three Steps Towards Achieving a Primary Prevention Approach in transport Policy

1. Women are equally and fairly represented in policy-making roles

• Improve pathways for women, particularly minoritised women, into the transport sector and career progression opportunities
• Ensure inclusive working environments in the transport sector by implementing flexible working procedures, anti-discrimination and harassment policies and women’s leadership initiatives

2. Policymakers consistently apply intersectional gender analysis in their work

• Collect intersectional gender-sensitive sex-disaggregated data on women’s travel patterns, safety and satisfaction
• Conduct Equality Impact Assessments at the outset of transport policy development to ensure this informs policy and planning decisions at all stages

3. Policymakers mainstream primary prevention in all areas of their work

• Increase opportunities for co-designing transport strategies with women, especially those with lived experience of VAWG on public transport
• Embed women’s safety considerations into transport planning, including in decisions on service provision, the design of infrastructure and staffing levels

Find out more in our new briefing here and follow us on social media to get the latest news on other briefings in the series on housing and planning, coming soon!

GUEST POST: The Repeal of the Concealment of Birth Act is Urgently Needed

Earlier this year, we launched our campaign calling for modernised abortion law in Scotland that works for women’s human rights and prevents unnecessary prosecutions. You can read our report here.

Part of the outdated patchwork of laws that restrict women’s reproductive rights is the little-known Concealment of Birth Act. In this blog, expert Dr Emma Milne explores how the Act criminalises vulnerable women and why we need action to create a system that puts women’s needs first.

The little-known offence of concealment of birth poses dangerous restrictions on the rights of pregnant women and must be repealed as a matter of urgency.

What is concealment of birth?

Concealment of birth is a criminal offence under the Concealment of Birth (Scotland) Act 1809. This statute makes it a crime if a woman:

• does not reveal her pregnancy to other people; and,
• does not call for or make use of help during the birth of the child; and,
• the child dies.

The pregnancy must have developed sufficiently such that there is a reasonable chance that the baby will be born alive. Consequently, women who experience miscarriages (before 24 weeks) and have not told anyone they are pregnant prior to the miscarriage will not have committed the crime.

A woman convicted of concealment of birth can be imprisoned for up to 2 years.

Where did the offence come from?

During the seventeenth century, across the British Isles, there was a preoccupation with unmarried women who were believed to be purposefully concealing their pregnancies to allow them to secretly kill the child to prevent it being discovered that she had become pregnant outside of marriage. Consider that this was a time when pre-marital sex was considered sinful, and women who engaged in it were deemed immoral and “ruined”.

Popular and political concern about such women resulted in a new law being enacted in Scotland in 1690. If a woman concealed her pregnancy, did not call for help during labour and delivery, and the child died, then she was considered to have murdered the child (regardless of whether there was any proof she had actually harmed the baby). The penalty for murder was death.

For understandable reasons, such a harsh approach to women who hid their pregnancy and laboured alone was later repealed. However, the basis of the law – criminalising a woman who do not reveal they are pregnant, call for help during labour, and whose baby dies during or shortly after birth, remains; encapsulated in the Concealment of Birth (Scotland) Act 1809.

Impact of the law

Concealment of birth criminalises vulnerable women who experience crisis pregnancy but also has a chilling effect on all women’s rights during pregnancy. There is a presumption written into the law that but for the concealment of the pregnancy and the woman not seeking assistance with the birth, the child would have survived.

Most women who conceal a pregnancy and labour alone are incredibly vulnerable. These include women living in situations of violence and abuse, in poverty and dealing with issues surrounding substance misuse. The pregnancy causes them a crisis. Imagine a young woman who is terrified to tell her parents or partner she is pregnant because she is fearful of their reaction. In such a situation, the woman may conceal or deny her pregnancy from herself and the people around her. Her denial could result in her body not exhibiting the usual symptoms of pregnancy, such as morning sickness and a growing “baby bump”.

Because of the crisis the pregnancy causes the woman, she does not prepare for the birth. Consequently, when she goes into labour, she is not expecting to deliver a child. Sadly, some of the babies born in such a situation do not survive.

Considering the vulnerability of such women and the crisis that they have found themselves in, is it right they are criminalised for not disclosing they are pregnant and not seeking help to give birth? The injustice of criminalising them is even greater, considering that some of these women may have experienced clinical denial* of pregnancy – meaning they would have been unaware they were pregnant and therefore not capable of telling another person.

But the law also has a chilling effect on women’s rights during pregnancy more broadly. Some women choose not to tell people they are pregnant – it is information about their bodies and lives that they simply do not want others to know. Those women may then choose to give birth without medical care, popularly known as “free birthing”. In England, such behaviour is not a crime. It is incredibly alarming that in Scotland, the same behaviour becomes a crime if the child dies around the time of the birth. In Scotland, concealment of birth essentially mandates that women declare they are pregnant and seek medical care during labour and delivery – an unwarranted invasion into women’s private lives in the twenty-first century.

To protect vulnerable women who experience crisis pregnancies and the rights of all women to make decisions about their own bodies while pregnant, concealment of birth must be repealed.

Dr Emma Milne is Associate Professor in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at Durham University, UK. She is a feminist socio-legal scholar whose research focuses on criminal law and criminal justice responses to infant killing and foetal harm. Emma is author of Criminal Justice Responses to Maternal Filicide: Judging the Failed Mother (2021).

Guest posts do not necessarily reflect the views of Engender, and all language used is the author’s own. Bloggers may have received some editorial support from Engender, and may have received a fee from our commissioning pot. We aim for our blog to reflect a range of feminist viewpoints, and offer a commissioning pot to ensure that women do not have to offer their time or words for free.

Interested in writing for the Engender blog? Find out more here.

*A definition of ‘Clinical Denial can be found here, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3128877/

Invitation to Tender, Development of Engender’s Strategic Plan 2025-2030

We are seeking a consultant(s) to work with us to deliver a strategic review and planning process that will result in the development of Engender’s next Strategic Plan 2025-2030. This process will help us focus our efforts and resources on securing the most impactful change for women in Scotland.  To do this, we must engage with a diversity of women and identify priorities that work for the most marginalised. Undertaking this process now will help us ensure that our organisation is in a strong position to respond to future challenges.  

The review process will help us identify our key strengths, impacts, emerging opportunities, and areas for development. The findings will inform and shape a new Strategic Plan for Engender for 2025-2030.  

Please find all the details and how to apply, here.

Broken and biased: new report shows impact of housing emergency on women

A new report published today by Shelter Scotland and Engender shines a light on the disproportionate impact of the housing emergency on women, and the additional barriers they face in accessing safe, secure, affordable, housing.

The report, released on Challenge Poverty Week’s Housing Day, shows that the higher rates of poverty among women and their greater reliance on social security benefits restricts their access to housing, with barriers being particularly pronounced for minoritised women.

It also sets out that homelessness services in Scotland are often unequipped to respond to women’s specific needs, particularly those fleeing domestic abuse. Women’s caring responsibilities and concerns over safety also create additional requirements for the type of temporary homeless accommodation that they need to access, which local services too often fail to meet.

Calling for action to address the housing emergency from a gendered perspective, the report makes a series of recommendations, including:

• Improve women’s access to safe, secure, and affordable homes by increasing the supply of social housing.
• Changes to social security to tackle women’s economic inequality, including the establishment of a ‘fund to leave’ for women experiencing domestic abuse.
• Adopting a gendered approach to the allocation and supply of temporary accommodation, taking particular account of women’s needs with regards to gender-based violence and childcare responsibilities.
• Investment in research and improved data collection to ensure women’s homelessness, including those with no recourse to public funds, is better understood and not ‘hidden’ from official monitoring.

The report argues that decades of underinvestment in social homes combined with years of austerity has created a housing system which is not only broken but biased as well.

Shelter Scotland Director, Alison Watson, said:

“This report sets out in the clearest terms the specific and disproportionate harm done to women by the housing emergency.

“Following on from the devastating homelessness figures published recently, the report is a timely reminder that Scotland’s housing system is not only utterly broken, but also biased as well.

“We know that when it comes to housing councils are breaking the law on an industrial scale, denying support to those who need it and are entitled to it; for a woman fleeing domestic violence the consequences of being turned away could be utterly catastrophic.

“Childcaring responsibilities are also far more likely to fall to women, so growing child homelessness will of course have a hugely disproportionate impact on women in Scotland.

“Scotland’s housing emergency is devastating the lives of women every day; every level of government has a responsibility to act and to heed the recommendations in this report.”

Engender’s Executive Director, Catherine Murphy, said:

“Our report with Shelter Scotland demonstrates the multiple barriers that our current housing system stacks in front of women, and the shocking ways it ignores their specific needs, pushing women into cycles of poverty and instability.

“The situation is even worse for women dealing with multiple layers of inequality. BME, disabled, and refugee women, lone parents, and those with caring responsibilities, often face relentless difficulty in securing stable housing.

“The official homelessness statistics tell us only a fraction of the story, as they fail to capture the complexity of women’s experiences, leaving them ‘hidden’ from our understanding of the problem.

“The recent pilot fund for women experiencing domestic abuse is a positive step, but it barely scratches the surface of what’s needed to address the housing emergency women face.

“Any serious response to Scotland’s housing crisis must start with acknowledging the deep gender bias in the system and taking targeted action to improve women’s access to safe, secure, and affordable homes.”

You can read the full report here, and come along to our joint webinar on 31st October to find out more about the action required to address the housing emergency from a gendered perspective. Book your free place here.