Engender blog

3 Steps to Achieving Primary Prevention in Housing

We’ve published the second in our 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 ensuring women’s access to safe, secure and quality housing is essential for advancing women’s equality and preventing VAWG once and for all.

Women’s access to housing is fundamentally shaped by structural gender inequality and other intersectional forms of marginalisation.

In Scotland, women generally experience less favourable outcomes in the housing system than men. This deepens gender inequality not only in the housing system but also in wider society. These factors can create an enabling environment for VAWG in the home as well as in the public realm, as women participate in it less.

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, ensuring women’s access to safe, secure and quality housing is essential for advancing women’s equality and preventing VAWG once and for all.

Without access to safe, secure and affordable housing, women’s living standards, economic and social opportunities - as well as their health and wellbeing are affected - reinforcing gender inequality, which ultimately enables VAWG. The lack of intersectional gender analysis in housing policy undermines women’s safety due to things like lack of affordable housing options, lack of safe housing options, and a lack of gender-sensitive design and planning in housing.

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

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

• Improve women’s pathways and career progression opportunities, particularly for minoritised women, in the housing sector
• Ensure inclusive working environments in the housing 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 and publish intersectional gender-sensitive sexdisaggregated data on women’s experiencing housing,
  including for the Scottish Household Survey and Scottish Housing Condition Survey
• Ensure Equality Impact Assessments are conducted at the outset of new housing policies and that these are
  informed by intersectional gender-sensitive data on housing issues

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

• Increase opportunities for co-designing housing developments with women, especially those with lived experience of VAWG 
• Embed women’s safety considerations into housing planning and design and decisions about the housing system, including on social security, service provision and housing legislation

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, coming soon!

Why we need better data collection to improve women’s representation

We’ve written to the Minister of State for Women and Equalities, Annelise Dodds MP, calling on the UK Government to enact Section 106 of the Equality Act 2010.

Access to robust, intersectional data on the protected characteristics of our elected representatives is vital in ensuring high-quality democracy. Without this information, it’s very difficult to map the causes – or create solutions to – the chronic underrepresentation of women – especially Black & minoritised women, disabled women LBT women, and young women.

Although the legal framework exists to require parties to track the diversity of their candidates and representatives, very little reliable data is publicly available. What information we do have is inconsistent and poorly documented, making it hard to see progress over time or take steps to improve representation.

Section 106, which has never been put into effect, would require political parties to collect and publish basic equality data. Enacting it would give us much better insight into the demographics of our representatives, and help us take the action needed to improve women’s representation at all levels of politics.

Read the full letter here.

16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence

Amplifying Marginalised Perspectives Through Journalism and Storytelling

Migrant Women Press have launched a powerful new initiative dedicated to raising awareness about the specific and often overlooked challenges faced by migrant and ethnically diverse women victims/survivors of gender-based violence.

We are sponsoring this campaign, held within “16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence” from the 25th of November to the 10th of December. The project will amplify voices and stories too often left out of mainstream narratives, aiming to foster greater understanding, empathy, and change.

16 stories will be shared—one each day during the 16 Days of Activism—authored by migrant and ethnically diverse women journalists and authors from diverse backgrounds and countries. Each piece will explore how factors like class, race, gender, immigration status, disability, and nationality intersect to increase these women’s vulnerability to violence. Additionally, stories will highlight prevention strategies and propose solutions for combating gender-based violence.

Vital pieces released so far include:

• East and/or Southeast Asian women survivors remain excluded and unsupported in the UK
• From Newsroom to Exile: The Hidden Costs of Being an Indian Woman Journalist 
• The impact of the UK’s housing crisis on black and minoritised survivors of gender-based violence
• Why Won’t The UK News Media Call Femicide A Public Health Crisis?

Follow along with all posts from Migrant Women Press on their website here.

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/