THE Scottish Human Rights Commission has recently submitted a report to the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), calling for greater government action to protect and fulfil women’s rights in Scotland. This was reported in last Wednesday’s edition of The National and it feels important to try to draw further attention to a particular aspect of it (Scotland urged to better protect women’s rights amid Brexit threat, The National, February 27).
Among the concerns the report raises is that, while LGBT issues are now to be covered in schools to try to stamp out those specific forms of hate-based harassment, Scotland’s national approach to bullying “makes little reference to misogyny or gender-based harassment”; this despite the fact that a recent investigation revealed that “schoolgirls across Scotland are being subjected to alarming levels of sexual harassment on a daily basis”. (These are direct quotes from the SHRC report).
I’m grateful to the authors of the report for highlighting this particular issue. As someone who was at secondary school in the 1970s, I find it both concerning and depressing that not only does the incidence of sexual harassment of female pupils seem to be as bad, if not worse, than then, but that, those in government don’t seem to be giving these girls’ experiences the attention they so clearly merit. Especially as such experiences can be so harmful in the long as well as the short term – indeed, they can be internalised, with lifelong consequences.
It’s vital that pupils in secondary education have learning contexts which specifically focus on these issues; where the sexual harassment of girls and the misogyny behind it can be named, examined and discussed. Ideally there should be both single-sex spaces, where girls might feel more able to share their personal experiences, and mixed classes where male pupils can also contribute to and learn from the discussions. Perhaps such things already exist in some individual schools, but it sounds as if the Scottish Government needs to take a more proactive and systematic approach, if these issues are to be properly addressed.
Misogyny has such a long history and is so deeply embedded in our society and culture. For me, it has been, and continues to be, such a part of being female, having had its most formatively harmful and harmfully formative impact in secondary school. I sincerely hope that the Scottish Government takes serious heed of the SHRC report and takes the necessary actions to ensure that young girls growing up in Scotland now and in the future have a better experience than I and others have had in this respect.
Mo Maclean
Glasgow
WHERE did the Pied Piper abscond to after leading the children astray? When James Cook on The Nine last week, during his report on the Catalan trials in Madrid, told us that Theresa May’s good friend Mariano Rajoy not only is no longer Spanish prime minister but that he has left politics completely, surely it gave us all pause for reflection.
After being the architect of the brutal attacks on the voting public and the incarceration of their elected representatives, he has simply walked away.
There is an obvious parallel here in the aftermath of Brexit if it ever happens, Heaven forbid. With the undeniable self-harm it is going to cause, the UK Government suggests six years as a starter in its latest bribe. Who will be held to account?
The perpetrators who shouted their lies loudest in 2016 can simply retreat to their tax havens or get jobs in banks arranging sub-prime mortgages. Some already have plans in place.
Others who may have been Cabinet members, and almost every Tory MP has had a turn, can retire on £300 a day for life to the House of Lords. While the rest of us can look forward to civil unrest and looting of supermarkets. Leave voters wont indulge in that behaviour, of course, because they knew what they were voting for.
But we need not all follow the Pied Piper. I am reminded of the time of the mad cow disease epidemic when British meat was being shunned worldwide and the Tory minister, John Gummer, fed a hamburger to his daughter. We didn’t follow him then and his stupidity was confirmed by the serious effect on public health at the time. The time to be outspoken is now and there is no shame in trying to put things right if minds have been changed based on fact instead of fiction and lies.
Do not let them get away with it!
Robert Johnston
Airdrie
I AGREE with Gail Ross MSP in her comments (SNP MSP slams Jeremy Clarkson over Scottish visit, The National, Monday 4). But I also feel Clarkson and his team are best ignored or better still called out for what they are, namely, wealthy, ageing white men, pretending to be boy racers. Time this lot were put out to grass.
Terry Keegans
Beith, North Ayrshire
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