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The Scottish government has said it will no longer be moving forward with a policy that would criminalise misogyny. Instead, it will be amending existing hate crime legislation.
A bill that was poised to reinforce and improve protection for woman and girls in Scotland has been scrapped ahead of next year’s elections.
Ministers say that there isn’t enough time to craft a new law that reflects the recent Supreme Court judgement on how a woman is defined. It comes just days after the FA announced it was banning transgender women from professional football.
Instead, existing hate crime legislation will be updated to provide further protections on the basis of sex. An additional promise to end conversion therapy has also been dropped, with ministers explaining that they will seek a UK-wide solution.
In 2022, an expert group led by Baroness Helena Kennedy said that separate legislation was needed to adequately protect women from misogyny. At the time, Kennedy told the Scottish criminal justice committee that she was ‘shocked’ by the severity and level of discrimination toward women.
Her team argued that new policies specifically around misogyny were needed as women were not a minority or marginalised group. A ‘more fundamental set of responses’ were needed to address what was described as a ‘deep rooted’ problem.
In an initial response to this inquiry, the Scottish government had said that it would create five new offences, including inciting hatred against women and misogynistic harassment.
Tougher sentencing for some crimes could also have been a possibility had this new bill been introduced.
With its scrapping of these plans, the government said it remained committed to ensuring people were protected, but that it was a ‘complex area of policy and law.’ It says it needs to re-asses where changes would apply, and this includes the recent Supreme Court ruling.
Discrimination toward women in Scotland has been an issue of high importance for some time. In January of this year the public took to the streets in Edinburgh to highlight a rise in misogyny over the past few years.
