Engender blog

Guest Post: Protection from harassment in the civil courts

Guest post by Jennifer Dalziel, solicitor for the Scottish Women's Rights Centre.

Roosh V, and how we respond to hatred towards women

This has been a good week for self-promoting controversialists who boast about the rapes they have perpetrated. It’s been an exciting week for the million plus followers of their grooming how-to sites, who have found themselves the focus of the global and Scottish media. It’s been less of a good week for the women with experience of the rape, sexual harassment, and everyday sexism that flow from their toxic notions of women’s place in the world.

Guest Post: Why Reclaim the Night Still Matters, and Why You Should Come

Guest post from Anna Ritchie Allan, Chair of Glasgow Rape Crisis Board of Directors. This post first appeared on the Rape Crisis Glasgow blog as is published here with their permission.

Next year marks the 40^th anniversary of Glasgow Rape Crisis Centre. Perhaps the women who came together in 1976 thought that this would all be sorted by now. That women and girls would be living their lives, free from sexual violence.

And yet here we are, still living with the everyday threat, or reality, of rape and sexual assault. Still fighting a culture which blames women for being raped, and which normalises violence against women. Still challenging the notion of ‘stranger danger’, when the vast majority of women are raped or sexually assaulted by someone they know. Still trying to change a criminal justice system that is failing to provide justice to survivors.

Guest blog: Indyref and violence against women (Indyref Thursday #4)

By Marsha Scott

In the run-up to our event on 'gender equality, the referendum and beyond', we'll be publishing a weekly blog to correspond with our 'Scotland's futures' briefing papers series.This week, guest blogger Marsha Scott considers implications in terms of violence against women.

Violence against women (VAW) is one of the feminist “Big 3”, alongside women’s poverty and women’s power deficit in public life. The policy context for VAW is perhaps the most devolved, the most significant exception being the no-recourse-to-public-funds rule, which prohibits provision of public assistance for women with uncertain immigration status. It is hard to imagine a post-referendum government in London in the near future that will either change this rule or allow Scotland to make its own rules about eligibility for public benefit. Scottish administrations have demonstrated some political interest in redressing the no-recourse problem in the face of constraints under the Scotland Act, and one could argue that attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy are likely to support an improved prospect should Scotland vote yes in the referendum.