Engender produces a range of publications including reports about specific subjects, parliamentary briefings, responses to consultations, and our annual reports. These are all available online, and we can also send printed copies of selected reports. Contact us to arrange this.
In 2017 Engender launched the Gender Matters Roadmap, which sets out the steps needed to move closer to women's equality in Scotland by 2030.
Engender welcomes this opportunity to mark International Women’s Day 2022 with this briefing and the Parliament’s debate. This year’s theme - #BreakTheBias – aims to highlight conscious and unconscious discrimination against women in all walks of life. Preventing and eradicating violence requires serious action to secure women’s social, economic and cultural equality and the rights of women and girls. UN Women has estimated that the impact of Covid-19 for women’s equality could mean the loss of 25 years’ worth of progress, and Scotland is not immune. Measures to respond to the pandemic have disproportionately affected women’s access to paid work - especially younger women and women of colour - and the volume of care that women provide.
Breaking the structural bias that leaves women poorer, further from power and opportunities and more vulnerable to violence, abuse and harm demands urgent attention and action.
Date of publication: March 2022.
Engender is grateful for this opportunity to submit our views to the Misogyny and Criminal Justice in Scotland Working Group. These comments represent a summary of our existing work on hate crime and challenging misogyny, all of which is publicly available.
Engender, alongside other national women’s organisations, has practical concerns about including gender-based violence against women in the model of hate crime. The Scottish hate crime model protects women who experience crimes motivated by hatred towards them because of their membership of a minority group, including lesbian and bisexual women, disabled women, trans women, and Black and minoritised women. Violence against women is a human rights violation and a cause and consequence of women’s inequality. It occurs at endemic levels in both public and private settings. Misogynistic behaviour, harassment and abuse is a constraint on choice and freedom at significant scale, which demands a credible and appropriate criminal justice response. Simply put, women cannot live a good life while harassment rooted in sexism and misogyny is allowed to inflect our daily reality. Yet gender and ‘hate crime’ is substantially under-theorised and there are limited examples to learn from, including overcoming barriers to effective utilisation of the law to respond.
Date of publication: September 2021
Filename: Engender-Misogyny-and-Criminal-Justice-Group-September-2021.pdf | File size: 457KB | Tags: misogyny, hate crimeTo join our email list, simply enter your email address below.