 Good morning, and welcome to the ninth meeting of the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. This morning, we will be talking about domestic abuse and violence against women and girls. As a former front-line women's aid worker, this is an area close to my heart, and I know what we will hear today will be very difficult but very necessary in our roles. Yesterday, the committee met informally with the Lord Advocate, the National Procurator Fiscal for Domestic Abuse, which provided valuable background to this morning's meeting. Apologies have been received from Natalie Donne, and our colleague Stephanie Callahan is attending today in her substitute. Welcome along, Stephanie. Our first item of business today is a decision to take item 3 in private. Are we all agreed? Agreed. Thank you very much. I would like to welcome our first panel this morning, who are all joining us remotely, as are my colleagues Faisal Chawjay and Rene McNair. I would like to welcome Dr Marshall Scott, who is the chief executive officer of Scottish Women's Aid, Ailey Dixon, policy and parliamentary manager from Endender, Davie Thompson, who is the campaign director of White Ribbon Scotland, Laura Thompson, co-director of Zero Tolerance. A few housekeeping things to note before we get started. Those that are remote, please, if you want to contribute, please type R in the chat box. I will be keeping my eye on that here this morning. Colleagues, when you are directing your questions, can you please direct them to a particular panel member to get us started? We only have a short time this morning, round about an hour for this first panel and then the second panel. Panel members, please add new and salient points. If it is something that has gone over, please just make sure that we get as much information from you as possible, but that it is new information. Anything that we need to hear afterwards, please submit it in writing, and I am sure that we might have some follow-up questions ourselves. We have a number of themes that we are going to explore with ourselves today. The first theme is round about background and context. Our second theme is round about prevention work. Our third theme is round about front-line support and funding. To kick us off this morning, I am going to hand over to my colleague Pam Duncan-Glancy, who is going to come in on theme 1. I am going to bring in Jeremy after that. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to the panel. Thank you for the submissions that you have sent in and also just to put on records my thanks to the work that you have done in all the years that you have been doing the work that you do, but also in particular during the pandemic. I know that it has been a particularly hard year, especially for women and for your organisations. I have a couple of questions in this particular theme. First, I am keen to talk about the impact of the pandemic. I note that Laura, in zero-tolerance submission, highlighted the failure to address equality and human rights in terms of reference for the Covid inquiry, indicating that there is some way to go to mainstream equality and human rights. Can you, Laura, Ailey and Marsha, if that is okay, tell us a bit about the information on the effects of the pandemic on women and, in particular, on domestic abuse? Are you seeing the fears about the effect of lockdown on violence against women and girls realised? What can we do to improve the work of the inquiry in this regard? Zero-tolerance does not provide a service. I will let Marsha speak about the direct impact of the pandemic on women, but we do know that it has increased their experiences of violence. For us, the Covid inquiry, not having that incorporated throughout and specified very specifically, is very similar to the beginning of the pandemic in which women were affected by violence at higher levels before different conditions were put in place for women affected by domestic violence. As I said, we focus on prevention. For us, it is about that holistic approach. I am sure that gender can speak to that. We need to see that mainstreaming of gender equality throughout all Government policy, and it needs to be at the forefront of people's minds when policy is put together. Could you remind me what you had a few different questions? Thank you, Laura. It was about the realisation of the fears at the early stages of the pandemic and throughout that lockdown, which would have a significant impact on the violence against women and the violence that they experience. As I said, it is more appropriate for those who provide services. From a prevention perspective, our worry is also that the knock-on effects of the pandemic are going to exacerbate gender inequality long-term. That is going to require some significant thought and some significant investment to lessen that impact and ensure that we do not see a massive backsliding in inequality from here on in. Again, that is why it should be running through the Covid inquiry. Who was your director at 2 seconds? Perhaps Aileen Marshall. I want to come in. Thank you, Glancy, and thank you, convener, for inviting in gender to be part of this discussion today. I imagine that we will hear a lot over the next couple of hours. The maxim from Equally Safe that vows against women is a consequence of women's inequality. Gender works across the full spectrum of Scottish public policy in order to make visible the impacts of misogyny and sexism on women's lives and the way in which that impacts our access to safety, to resources, to rights and to decision making. What we have seen throughout the pandemic is exactly as Laura mentioned, the failure of the mainstreaming obligations that Scottish Government, as all public bodies are required under the Equality Act to pursue. We have really seen, in most instances—and there are some exceptions, I will come to—a complete deprioritisation of mainstreaming, which is the process of thinking about how women and men will experience a policy differently and how policy and practice can be targeted or addressed or focused to realise the different needs of different groups. What we saw was some very welcome increased funding for vows against women services, but the further upstream issues were completely disregarded through all the decision making surrounding the pandemic. For example, when schools were shut, we saw a huge increase in domestic work and childcare and care for adults and older people, which was offset from the state back to the household. Largely, it was women who picked that up. Women told us, and we saw through data, but also through our own Covid Women's Scot programme, that what happened in the household was that it was women who were picking that work up, not men. Men were doing more housework in childcare than they had ever done before, but it was still women, and that was coming at the expense of their access to the paid labour market. The pandemic has had a huge impact, as Laura mentioned, and UN Women has warned that we could see a rollback of women's equality worth 25 years globally. Scotland would be no exception to that unless significant remedial measures are taken and a prioritisation of mainstreaming. That is why it is still disappointing that the Covid inquiry makes no reference to equality or the needs of minoritised and marginalised communities in Scotland. What it does do is mention the European Convention on Human Rights Act, which is welcome, but it references that the human rights act and the convention are only to be taken into account as far as the chair dreams are appropriate or necessary. As you may know, the way that convention works is that there is a right to equality and non-discrimination under article 14, but that has to be taken in conjunction with one of the other rights within the convention, which are largely focused on civil and political rights. There is a huge risk and a huge gap, and that this omission is completely contrary to Scottish Government's stated ambitions around progressing human rights protection and equality in Scotland. It is deeply concerning that the Scottish Government went through such a widespread consultation process about the needs for that inquiry and the focus of that inquiry. We have ended up with the terms of reference that we have that make no reference to women, that make no reference to minoritised communities, which make no reference to social care, which make no reference to violence against women—all of the issues that we know were significantly disproportionately experienced by women. I will probably leave that there, but there is plenty more on that omission in the terms of reference. I will likewise leave it to Marta maybe to talk specifically about the fears of the impacts of lockdown for services, but it is worth acknowledging the fears that we all outlined at the very start of the pandemic. In gender rotor briefing, it was on 23 March 2020, which outlined our concerns about the pandemic based on experiences from similar outbreaks such as Ebola and Zika viruses in the past couple of decades. Every single concern that we outlined in that paper has, to some extent, some greater than others, but has, to some extent, been seen throughout the past couple of years. Access to violence against women services has sadly not been an outlier in that. We know that women have been trapped at home. We know that women have had limited opportunities to access the services that they might otherwise seek support from. We know that there have been pipeline issues in terms of women getting access to refuge accommodation and then getting access to other forms of accommodation down the line, which is obviously creating a backlog and access to even things like getting the workers within the services key person status. That has all been exacerbated by the impact in the home of the increased work that has to be done within the home. Access for service workers who now have children at home predicated on key worker status. If their partner did not have key worker status, sometimes they were not given the childcare, but if their partner refused to do it or said that they could not do it, that led to real issues in maintaining a sustainable service. As I said, there is plenty more that I can say, but I think that that covers the majority of the concerns that we have. I will try really hard to speak to the things that have not been spoken to, but I will start out by saying what they said. In terms of domestic abuse specifically, there was a very welcome focus on domestic abuse during especially the second lockdown, but also the first lockdown in terms of media. I have to say a big thank you to officials in the equality unit and to ministers who were involved in that during Covid for an extraordinarily unusual, we have to say, but rapid and flexible response in getting up to emergency funding for our network. I have never been so happily surprised in my life. Unfortunately, there is not much evidence that the changes in operation that we saw during both lockdowns have been contributed to real diminishment of bureaucracy and changes in speeding up decision making for the services at the front line, but I will talk about that more later. In terms of what we were worried about in Covid and lockdown and domestic abuse, as you all know, certainly we saw that Covid did not cause domestic abuse, but what Covid did was give abusers additional tools for controlling and abusing both children and women in a variety of settings, and we do not have enough time here for me to describe it, but it reduced women's access to services and it reduced services' ability to access women and children. Part of the difficulty with the approach of having crisis funding is that we already had services that were many of them, to some degree, really unstable and insecure because of the current funding situation for structures and system in Scotland. A fast infusion of cash that had to be spent very quickly was really welcome, but I would say that it contributed to destabilising the system even further, so I really have to underscore the importance of the review of funding for front line services, both domestic abuse and sexual assault, and other services that are finally moving forward, which has been in the equally safe delivery plan now for four or five years. I am really welcoming that, but we really have to get some momentum on that because by the time we fix that we may have lost significant parts of our network because of problems at the local level with local authority defunding and competitive tendering. One of the things that we did see during Covid was that we saw some really good practice from some local authorities like East Ayrshire and a number of others that extended contracts that worked with local services to figure out how to rehouse women when the refugees were full and a blink and there was no rehousing happening through housing and homelessness. I wish I could say that that was the pattern over most of this. This minute was not. We also had local authorities, one in particular North Lanarkshire, that chose to put out for tender services in North Lanarkshire in the middle of a global pandemic, defunded three services and gave the funding to a UK-based national organisation, which is not a specialist organisation. We have a real big dysfunctional problem at the system level, and we absolutely know how to fix that. It's not rocket science, but there needs to be political wealth to do that. The other impacts and Ailey referred to these is that women's inequality is a cause and consequence of violence against women. That's been Scottish policy for 20 years. We have cross-party consensus on addressing violence against women in a wonderful, hard fought for dynamic in the Parliament, not accidental, but unusual in both the UK Parliament but wider. What we don't seem to have is any contamination from that cross-party consensus on violence against women services and policy into the other areas as both Ailey and our other colleagues in the women's sector have mentioned into the areas of policy that actually make a significant difference. We have the national strategy for economic transformation in which the changes that need to be made to our economy in order to deliver less poverty for women and children are invisible, actually completely missing, and a whole variety of other policy mechanisms like the Covid recovery that clearly show no evidence that women and children living with domestic abuse are of concern to anybody outside justice and equalities. We know that Covid made already vulnerable services more unstable. We also know that women who were already experiencing difficulties from abusive partners had their access to income reduced. We know that their ability to remove their partner is still a difficulty because the regulations in the domestic abuse protection order bill have not been implemented. We still have huge housing and homelessness problems for women and children living with domestic abuse all exacerbated by Covid because of the lack of the freezing of the housing system. Finally, I will just say that the court delays. We have over 40,000 cases in the backlog and for summary courts at the moment. We are already seeing and I imagine the Lord Advocate mentioned it yesterday increased victim attrition and witness attrition from domestic abuse cases because they are looking very realistically at years before their cases come to court. The failure to do a quality impact assessment on court responses under the and Covid still boggles my mind. I believe that there was an official who said to me, I'm not going to apologize for not doing an equality impact assessment because we're in a crisis here as if equality is just for Christmas. I do think I've kind of touched on the major things and I will just also say that issues around no recourse to public funds were demonstrated for us in a public health crisis. How we could actually in Scotland find a way to support women and children living with domestic abuse who have no recourse to public funds in a much more humane and human rights way, human rights-based way, and yet we are very quickly returning the original racist and difficult situation where we have a whole segment of society who are second class citizens and are not allowed to access the human rights that they are owed under our international obligations. I'll leave it there. I've got lots more for you but I'll wait for the other question. Thanks very much, Marcia. I know that Pam has another question and we then also have still on theme one questions from Jeremy Feusel and Emma. If I could ask panellists, I know that it's really difficult because we all want to hear what you have to say and you all want to get everything out but if we can chime and keep answers to sync that would be helpful. I'll hand back over to Pam and then on to Jeremy. Thank you convener and thank you for that information. It's grim but I appreciate you sharing with us today. Very specifically on social security and possibly to Ailey, if that's okay. Social security is often one of the reasons and the way that it's designed is one of the reasons that women's inequality persists. Can you tell us what we need to look out for in Scotland in terms of our devolved benefits and specifically if there's anything that we need to be doing differently so that we don't replicate the existing problems? As quickly as possible, I think that the first thing is the delivery of the commitment to implement the separate payments of universal credit. Universal credit is a household payment that is in theory designed to mirror the world of work for social security applicants. That is not true. There is no workplace that would pay your household salary to one partner. There is a significant difference between people paying their own income into a joint bank account and the state mandating that one person is the recipient of social security. That would be my first point. We know that universal credit and the household payment is a significant concern for women. As Marcia said before around Covid, it won't create domestic abuse or financial abuse specifically but it will facilitate that. It will make it much more difficult for women to leave so that women cannot make a claim if women are currently on universal credit until after they have left their partner, and then they are subject to the five-week wait. They are also subject to the benefit cap and the two-child limit. Whether they are on social security before they leave their partner or after they leave their partner places women at a precarious point of having to choose between remaining in the household with an abuser or facing destitution for herself and her children. It is, quite frankly, contrary to all human rights, basic human dignity and abhorrent, particularly the rape clause, which demands that women have to expose their trauma just in order to be able to feed their children. The single household payment that the Scottish Government has made commitments on, the Parliament has supported the implementation of the separate payment system, that is something that we need to see realised as soon as possible. We are also working with child poverty action group and Scottish Women's Aid to look at how social security could better support women who are in that difficult period between leaving an abusive partner and the first payment of their first universal credit instalment. We know that the five-week wait is significantly disadvantageous for those women, but if they take an advance it puts them into further debt, which gives them money off of future universal credit payments. We are looking at ways in which we can look at the tools that we have in Scotland to support women at that difficult and dangerous time. We know that the Scottish welfare fund does, in theory, create opportunities to offer flexible and discretionary support to women, but looking at the data around how that fund has been used, which is not collected, I have to say, on the basis of women who say that they need access to that fund because of domestic abuse, but looking at the numbers that receive a crisis payment because all family breakdown, or relationship breakdown, is one of the options, we are looking at really tiny numbers. It is very difficult to say how well that is working, but evidence gathered from Scottish Women's Aid and the Child Poverty Action Group shows qualitatively that women accessing the Scottish welfare fund because they are experiencing domestic abuse or having left an abusive partner really do face barriers in having that fund taken seriously because, I think, of the way that it is distributed by fund managers in quite a discretionary way, it is up to the local authority how to deliver that. I am not sure how many of them have access to gender competent training and domestic abuse training, so I think that those would be the two critical things, but the main ask would be that social security starts collecting the data, using the data, and doing the impact assessments that would allow us to not make the same mistakes. With the Scottish child payment, for example, the decision to pay that as a top-up to universal credit was done on the basis that it was the quickest, easiest way to facilitate that, but it does mean that you have to be in receipt of universal credit and we know that women who face domestic abuse are having difficulty with their universal credit payment access within the household and then when they leave, so it is another way in which women are encountering a barrier that could have been avoided if a different mechanism had been picked. I am not saying that the Scottish child payment, we welcome it, we support it, it is a really great thing, but I do not think that the impact assessment was really there in order to make the decision that that was the best route forward, certainly for women, and what mitigations we might have been able to put in place if it was more important, based on the evidence, to do it as quickly as possible through the top-up powers, rather than creating a new benefit, for example, which would have been more time-consuming and required legislation. I think that that is probably as much as I can squeeze it. Thank you very much for that, Ailey. I think that that was a very powerful testimony and has given us a really strong steer. Marta, I think that you want to come in briefly on that before I bring in Jeremy. Thanks. About what we are calling a leaving fund, the Scottish Government's own working group on improving housing outcomes for women and children living with domestic abuse has made a recommendation to the Government that this fund be set up essentially to deliver short-term recurring payments to women leaving an abusive partner and to bridge the gap between leaving and universal credit. As Ailey said, the Government accepted that recommendation, but like a number of other recommendations that we were really pleased to see accepted, there does not seem to be any momentum or delivery at the moment on that recommendation. Thank you very much for that, Marta. Over to you, Jeremy. Thank you and good morning to the panel. Thank you very much for giving us your time. I've got a couple of questions and again, if maybe one of you wants to answer them, anybody else wants to follow top, that would be really helpful. One of the things that I find of all the submissions really quite shocking was the figure that 90 per cent of women with learning disabilities have been subject to sexual abuse or some other form of abuse, which is really just a horrendous figure. And suppose my question out of that is, what can we do to strengthen the voice of women who have been abused and who are disabled? Are we in any way able to give them extra support, identify them quicker, and how do we tackle this issue? Maybe start again with Ailey. I don't know if you have any information or not. If you don't, then maybe you could pass it on to one of your colleagues. Thank you. This is a really difficult question to answer primarily because the data that we rely on in Scotland around disabled women and learning disabled women's experiences of domestic abuse is quite out of date. It's quite a small study, and we're looking mostly at international studies. The first thing that we need to do is collect better data in order to be able to understand the problems. We published a report in 2018 called Our Bodies, Our Rights, which was focused on disabled women's access to sexual and reproductive rights, and it looks specifically at gender-based violence as one of the themes within that. I think that the critical learning for us was that it was all connected. That women who were talking to us about their experiences of reproductive healthcare were reporting a really infantilising or presumptuous treatment from medical professionals and education settings, which either assumed that they were not sexually active or not interested in a relationship or would never be looking to enter into a romantic relationship with a partner, or that they were in some way hypersexualised and that their sexuality needed to be managed externally, that their carer would quite often be spoken to rather than them about access to sexual healthcare and rights, that they were quite often not given the same or appropriate information in sexual education classes. The recommendations that we produced in that report are a useful starting point and demonstrate the interconnected nature of all the different themes in terms specifically of violence against women. I think that the data is a really important support for the working group that is convened by people first and the Scottish Commission on Learning Disability in partnership with the Scottish Government, which is looking at gender-based violence and learning abuse as part of that work. It is still creating an action plan and it brings in a lot of key stakeholders, including COSLA and the NHS, to look at how we can improve women's experiences and access to different forms of support. Working with the health settings, for example, implementing routine inquiry, working with women's aid centres to develop their experience and competence in training and awareness of accessible communications and delivering appropriate services for disabled women and girls. I can follow up more in writing on that perhaps with a summary of our report if that would be helpful. If you would, that would be really helpful, thank you very much. My second question, and maybe either Marcia or Laura, I could answer this. This question we could spend the next three hours discussing, so perhaps if you could limit the question. As the convener said at the start, we had a very helpful meeting yesterday with the Lord Advocate on the whole issue around the criminal justice system. Obviously, there are massive issues there and Marcia has already raised some of them. Could you give me, and I know that that is very simplistic, but if you could make one change to the system at the moment, which would make it more accessible and more accountable, what would that one change be? I know that that is very hard, but if you could maybe start with that. Maybe I could start with Laura and then maybe Marcia and if others have other views, you could maybe like to us about that as well. I think that in terms of one change that is within our gift at the moment, because there are obviously some wider issues around reserved and devolved powers, but I would say that one change that would make an absolutely massive difference quickly would be making sure that children and women living with domestic abuse and other forms of violence against women and girls had access to free gender-competent legal services. It is probably the hugest, other than funding and stability, it is the issue that our local services raised for us and have been consistently for the last 10 years. It is the single biggest gap in women's experiences and children's experiences that children are completely invisible when you take a rights-based approach or put a rights-based lens around access to legal services in Scotland. That is the basket that I would put my eggs in. Now, on reflection, Jeremy, I might change my mind, but we can design that and do that relatively quickly if there were political will. If there is any other comments that people would like to make of your other thoughts that you have, then please do put them right into us, but I am conscious that time has taken. Thanks very much, Jeremy. Thanks for your answers so far. We have only gotten through a couple of questions, and we are 35 minutes nearly into a session. We only have 25 minutes left, so if we can keep that in mind, I am going to bring my colleague Faisal Choudry, who is joining us remotely, to ask his question, which will then be followed by Emma Roddick, who is in the room. Faisal. Thank you very much, convener. Good morning, panel. I will make my question very short. I have heard examples from BME people that feel uncomfortable going into dedicated organisations like BME organisations, because they feel that the community is so small and that the world can be out socially and culturally. They feel very uncomfortable. What is your view on that? I think that Marsha did say that there has got to be more investment needed to be done, but do you think that that should be done on language? How can that effect be mitigated against? Do you think that that should be involved in wider service, rather than referring them to a BME organisation? I think that I will bring Marsha in, and then, if David could come in, perhaps afterwards, to give us a perspective on working with BME men in that area as well. Marsha, first, please. First of all, I think that it is a great question. I think that it is not an either or. Our system tends to deliver inappropriate binaries to us, but it is actually about redesigning and actually really completely transforming our system so that it is based on need rather than historical practice. BME people experiencing violence against women and girls need, just like everybody else, set of choices that they can make about where and how they access services, and they are not, as you will well know, a homogenous group. We know, for instance, that we have specialist BMEs, domestic abuse services in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, and yet we also know that the majority of BME women and children in our services are served in our other services, not necessarily because women are choosing a non-BME service, but because, for whatever reason, that was their choice. I think that in rural communities, there are significant issues for BME women and all women, really, about being identified when you walk into a particular service. The first thing is that we need to establish, by asking BME women and children what they would like and need, but it is not either or, as I said, it is about creating, and this will come to the funding question later, it is about creating a system based on need rather than the convenience or history of the way things have been funded in the past. We need lots of things, we need interpretation, we need gender competence, but mostly we need a system that understands its responsibilities on obligations under international law to understand about equalities and to do robust, effective equality impact assessment before they design a policy, before they design a service, before they do anything, and then making sure that they review the impact of those things on anybody with a protected character. I am just trying to keep a great brief, but we very much take the attitude that we have in Scotland that everybody who is a part of our society has a part to play in ending violence against women in that society. Whenever we are starting off with projects in local communities and such like, we encourage them to be as diverse as possible in their approaches. In terms of successes involving the AMA communities, we are working with a group called Maryhill who works to help asylum seekers to integrate into the society. We are going to be working with their men's group. In the past, projects like that have had spin-offs from the point of view of the men creating their own videos to reach out to other men to support and addressing violence against women. One of the benefits of that is that they then produce the videos within their own set-up and within the organisations that they can reach out to, partly by reproducing the videos with different languages. Therefore, they reach groups that we cannot directly reach in the same way. We are trying to expand on that this year. In the way that we run our white ribbon status projects, we are an organisation that can be in white ribbon status by working to involve men in their area in addressing violence against women. We are going to be doing that again with Maryhill integration network. It is a new body of men and they will be trained in the same way as anybody else through our training and encouraged to come up with their own ideas about how they can reach out. I think that it is very much about including people and trying to get them to then expand that and reach out to others in the way that they can do it better than they can. Thank you very much for that, Davie. I am going to now move on to our last question in the theme from my colleague in the room, Emma Roddick. Then we will go on to theme 2 and we will bring Marie McNair in, who is remote Emma. Thank you, convener. I was initially going to ask this question to Ailey, but you have covered it a little bit already. I will direct it to Marcia and see if Ailey wants to come in. I have noted in the statistics within the papers that disabled women were almost twice as likely in that time period to have experienced sexual assault compared to non-disabled women and globally 90 per cent of women with learning disabilities have been subjected to sexual abuse. The committee has also heard in previous evidence sessions how much more likely refugees and asylum seekers, particularly those with no recourse to public funds, are to experience sexual assault and violence. What, in your view, is lacking in support or in policy aimed at preventing or reducing the high levels of sexual assault experienced by women with intersecting characteristics? To be honest, I think there is a huge gap in understanding on the part of a large swath of Scottish Government and officials and local authority public sector officials about understanding what intersectionality really means and what we see as a consequence of that. We have a welcome discussion about intersectionality, but what we do not see is understanding that actually changes the experiences of disabled women, of black disabled women, of BME disabled children. It is about understanding how those intersecting identities not only affect the experience of victims, but also of the enabling abusers. I am a broken record on this, and I am really sorry. One of the really critical things is that Scottish Government needs to take and local bodies need to take mainstreaming seriously. At the moment, like I said before, it is just for Christmas. Do you know what I mean? Who is around the table? Have we made sure that there are women with disabilities and BME women who understand the operations of gender and can help improve the system? Clearly, when we have things like a national economic policy that they are invisible in, the answer to that is no. Sadly, there is no quick fix on this, but I do think that at the moment where we are is that we are treating disabled women as if they are a homogenous population. Instead of actually sitting down and working through how would our systems work better so that they responded to the needs of all women in all of their identities. The first place to start with that for me would be making sure that there was an accountability system for equality impact assessment. I know that this is probably another completely different meeting, but the reform of the public sector equality duty is absolutely critical and has to go forward in some robust way. Otherwise, disabled women, BME women, we will continue to be an add-on rather than at the heart of how we redesign our service. Thank you very much for that, Martyn. I think that we have really clearly got the message about mainstreaming loud and clear this morning. Ailee, I think that you want to come in very briefly on that before I bring my colleague Marie McNair in with her question. I just wanted to come in and say that when we did Our Bodies Are Rights what we found was a complete invisibility across all relevant policy frameworks of disabled women's needs. There was a lack of research, but critically there was also just in Equally Safe for example there were kind of token references or I guess a kind of awareness of the needs of minoritised groups and marginalised groups, but that has not necessarily been seen through the implementation or the follow-up into the practice from Scottish Government and other public bodies. The first thing that we would need to do is mainstreaming, but not just mainstreaming within the obvious settings, but across the board so that we understand that treating disabled women as a kind of a homogeneous group, but a group that we're kind of saying we need to do, we need to pay attention to their needs without actually understanding what their needs are because we don't have the data, we don't have the practice, the implementation and follow-up analysis to actually make the changes we need to see, but as I said before I'm very happy to send a copy of the report and the recommendations to the committee for interest. Thank you very much for that, Ellie. I'm going to bring Marie McNair, who joins us remotely in on theme 2, which is prevention. We've already touched quite a bit on it and then I'll bring in my colleague Stephanie Callahan in the room and then Jeremy as well. So, Marie, over to you. Thank you, convener, and good morning panel. Thank you for your contributions so far, they've been really helpful to the city committee. To Laura Thomson of Zero Tolerance in relation to prevention, your written submission highlights the need to foster positive personal identities and challenge gender stereotypes and roles. This makes complete sense. You highlight for us any good examples of that approach and any evidence that supports it has been effective. Thanks, Laura. So, there is evidence out there of the effectiveness of prevention programmes that look at attitudes, but it is limited. The reasons it's limited are firstly because prevention is usually not funded long-term and changing hundreds of years' worth of sexist attitudes doesn't happen in a year or three years. We have found it personally at zero tolerance, very difficult to really effectively evaluate what we're doing. We know that what we're doing can change attitudes. We do training for youth workers, we do work with the media, we do work with early years professionals, for example, and we know that we've seen attitudes change. That's reasonably easy to measure, but it's not that easy to measure what happens next. There isn't good evidence to show that attitudinal change always leads to behavioural change, and it's that behavioural change that we want to see. As we said in our submission, with longer-term funding, we can do really effective evaluation where we track people's attitudinal change in behaviour over time, rather than over one training session, for example. I suppose that my first point would be that there is evidence. There are a variety of programmes that have some evidence that they are promising, so be probably aware of the Scottish Government's what works report from a couple of years ago that showed that, for example, programmes in schools are promising or can be moderately effective. There's very little longitude on data, and that report does recommend that more longitudinal data is gathered on primary prevention when we would love to see that happen. However, as I say, it's very difficult to do in a short funding cycle. For example, we work with the media in Scotland to try to change some of the harmful reporting on violence against women, for example, blaming women for the violence that happens to them, but looking from that change to a change on the general populations attitudes is really difficult work, really interesting, really useful, but at the moment, in short-term funding periods, that longitudinal work isn't going to happen. That's the first thing I would say. The other thing I would say is that a lot of reasonably well-evaluated work is based in schools or it's centered around young people. I think that's good and that we do need to do work in schools and with young people, but it becomes a cycle where we only have that evidence. More and more work is done with children and young people because that's the only evidence that we have, because we have a captured population that is easier to evaluate work with children and young people in schools. I would say that that work is essential, but we need to broaden out and we need to put the investment into evaluating other forms of work because we can't put all the responsibility on children and young people to change attitudes to violence against women in Scotland. It's really important that we look at other areas of society where attitudes are perpetuated. There is no tolerance at the moment of focusing on attitudes, but I would also bring in all the work on structural change that's happening and emphasise that it's really important that lots of work is happening to move us towards equality, to put power in the hands of women, and that, again, is very difficult to evaluate in terms of its impact on violence against women. Sorry if that doesn't answer your question directly, but my strong feeling is that we just need to see more investment put in evaluating what we're doing so that we know what to do in the future. Thanks very much for that, Laura. I can see that Marcia would like to come in and comment briefly on that as well. Just really quickly, I really just to support what Laura said. I think that the work in schools is absolutely needed, but if we think that's primary prevention, we're not listening to our own policy in our own causal story. In Scotland, we say that violence against women and girls is a cause and consequence of women's inequality, so primary prevention would be reducing the pay gap, wouldn't be making sure that children's poverty is eliminated because we've eliminated single mothers poverty. It would be making sure that half of the people in every elected assembly are women. These are the nettles that we need to grasp, and we can talk to 16-year-olds until the cows come home about how they shouldn't be abusive and how they hold stereotypical attitudes, but until they walk out of that classroom into a community where women are perceived and treated by the system as equals, they will continue to hold those attitudes, which reflect their own lives. The Scottish social attitudes survey has a violence against women module, which has demonstrated that those people who hold really traditional gender stereotypical attitudes have a higher tolerance for violence against women and girls. We have to intervene in those attitudes, but if we want behaviour change, we can't just, as Laura pointed out, the evidence base about attitude change turning into behaviour change is dodgy at best. What we really need to do is change Scotland so that those attitudes can't flourish. Laura, do you want to come back in on that? Yes, I just very briefly want to agree with Marsha that gender equality work is essential. I would just point out that, at the same time, countries with high gender equality indexes that score highly still have high levels of violence against women. From my perspective, and I don't think I'm disagreeing with Marsha here, you have to do that structural work. You have to have those young people walking out into the world and being treated equally, but attitudes don't always catch up quickly. What you do often find is that when something changed quickly, when women are handed power, there's often a backlash from men who feel that their privileges are being taken away. I view them as complementary. We have to do the attitude and work. We certainly can't rely on attitude and work to change things on its own, but it has to go alongside that structural work. Thank you very much for that, Laura. Marie, do you need to come back in or is everything being answered for you? I have another question to David Thompson about working with men, but he seems to have covered that, so I'll leave it there. Thank you. I want to ask a little bit about early years as well. I know that Laura spoke about the fact that there's quite a bit of information being collected on young people as well, because you've got that captive audience. I'm quite interested in what we're doing with the youngest children as well, and perhaps nursery and early years education there. There are things like the Pants Rule, for example, from the NSPCC that talks about privacy and consent and speaking up at a really, really young age there, and that both girls and boys are so much so core to prevention as well. I'm just wondering what kind of work is going on around early years stuff just now about helping children speak up, about challenging language and things like that as well, and maybe doing role play and practice as well. Treating, I suppose, gender-based violence has been unacceptable in the same way as racism is, but going back a few steps and going even the language and stuff that underlies that from very early years. I'm not quite sure exactly who to direct that one to. I'm happy for anyone to come in on it, thanks. Ailey, maybe, or Laura? I think Laura would be better placed to speak about this than me. We don't work with children and young people. Laura? Hi, thanks. We've been working with nurseries for a few years and with other childcare settings. Our focus is not on the children themselves. It's about the settings that they're in and the professionals that work with them. While we agree that work directly with children and young people is important, we know that it's the context that they are raised in that really influences their values. We have been working with nurseries, so professionals working with children, on how they can make the nursery environment, the childcare environment, more gender equal. For us, it's been about not perpetuating the stereotypes that are about the boys will be outside being rough and the girls will be inside doing crafts and how to disrupt that and challenge that. That's the work that we've been doing and this is the work where we found that childcare work is very receptive and quite excited by this. We did a very small piece of work that was about looking at the books in nurseries and separating out the books that have equal numbers of male and female characters versus the ones that don't have any female characters at all. The work is found to be quite shocking and enlightening because these are the kinds of stereotypes that surround us that people don't always notice. It's just part of the background and it's just the way things are and I don't think that most people realise just that one detail of how few female characters are portrayed in children's stories. That's the work that we've been doing but we've been doing this for a while and we've produced resources and we've done this of training and we've done some policy work around this but we need to see this embedded. We need to see, and not just in the early years but in secondary environments and in youth work too, we've been doing a lot of this work for a long time and we're a very small organisation like a lot of other organisations trying to deliver this work. What we really need is the Scottish Government to be committed to embedding this and making sure that anyone who works with children and young people has an understanding of gender inequality, how to promote equality and how to challenge violence before they even start working with children and young people. I think that that's an uphill battle. This is something that we are working on at the moment and I don't think it's going to be easy but I think that on the face of it it shouldn't be that challenging to say that anyone working with children and young people particularly when we have all this evidence in schools of the violence that's happening within schools to girls and yet we allow teachers to start working with young people without really having any basis in how to challenge that or any real understanding of gender equality. That's something that we would like to work towards. We don't think it's going to be easy and we think that it will be an uphill battle. I realise that I'm going a little bit off-topic from children and young people. We are also supporting a gender-friendly nursery scheme that is doing some research into the work that they've been doing with nursery so we should have more evaluation data soon. Thanks very much for that, Laura. I can see that Davie would like to come in as well. Thank you. Just to make a quick comment, I agree with everything Laura was saying there. We obviously, in our main aim, invite them in Scotland to reach out to men but part of that is to make them aware of things like this, make them aware of subjects like early years' involvement in avoiding stereo typing but it's also throughout school so that the idea is to make them more aware of the fact that they have a role to play in this that they can encourage children when they are coming back with some of the ideas that they've been given through their early years or particularly through school time and not to be discouraging of it. Even if they just open up their thinking enough to understand that there could be benefits from this, then it opens up the door for them to make a difference. I think that it's important that work gets done in early years and work gets done in schools and we've been very supportive of gender-friendly nurseries but it's also important that, at parent level, people are learning as well about the effects of that and why they should be encouraging it. That's really helpful and it kind of leads me into my next question as well, which was for yourself there too. Is there any explicit work that you do around neurodiversity? There's been a huge increase in autism, etc. We're looking at in schools 30 per cent of our children have an additional support needs, which is a wider section there as well, but quite often as well with autism, you find that the kind of subtleties of sex education, etc. relationship education don't actually get through and you actually need to be very explicit and very direct and that can be an issue for boys with autism too, their understanding. Is there anything specific that's been done to tackle that? Is there anything that's been looked at, whether it's effective if there's stuff happening just now, whether there's a bit of a gap there that we should be looking at? I think it's quite possible that that could be seen as a gap. With ourselves, we're a very small organisation and we haven't concentrated in that particular aspect but what we're trying to do is be open to all types of communities coming in to discuss with us about projects that we could support. And hopefully that opens up the door for everybody to get the general ideas of avoiding gender stereotyping and the ideas of equality and what men can be doing, what boys can be doing to make a difference, and that can then be applied by the people who have got the specialisms to address them. Thanks very much for that, Davie. I know that Laura would like to come in on that point, so before I hand over to Miles Briggs with his questions, can I bring you in, Laura? Thanks, just very briefly. I don't know of any work that's been done specifically with non-neuro-typical people. I just wanted to point out that, as others have already said, there are lots of groups of people who are impacted by violence against women that there hasn't been any specific work with or we have very limited information about. And one of our strategic objectives at the moment is to focus on what we are calling neglected and emerging forms of violence against women, and within that we mean new expressions of violence, but also those groups of women who haven't been necessarily well served by prevention work because we are focusing on prevention. So we will be doing some work this year with disabled women and likely with trans women, but I agree that there are lots of other groups of women and men that could probably benefit from specific work. Thanks, Laura. So now we're going to move on to our final thing. We can run over a tiny bit, and we've heard a lot about it already this morning in terms of front-line services and funding, but I'm going to hand over to Miles to kick us off there. Thank you, Camila. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for joining us. I'll try to merge my questions into one just in the interest of time, because I know that we've seen some progress, for example the Domestic Abuse Protection Act 2021 being incorporated into the updated Scottish social housing charter, and some of the submissions to the committee specifically pointed towards the need for funding around different prevention models. So I just wondered from your experience, and this is maybe globally as well, what different models do you think Scotland should be looking at, which the committee should be aware of? I'll maybe start with Marsha, and if anyone else wants to come in, can you put an hour in the chat? Thanks. So can I just clarify different models for funding? Both funding and beyond that, one of the things that I've been specifically looking at is the family co-op model, for example, in Australia. I know that that's more within the criminal justice side of what we might look at, but I just wondered in terms of experiences and learning from around the world on this topic what we should be looking at as well. Quite tough to be brief about this, but I'll do my best. So the first thing is I've been doing actually quite a lot of work in Australia right now because they are very interested in our world's gold standard legislation and criminalising course of control. Actually, I don't have time to talk too much about this, but you don't have time for me to. I think that they are seeing the same issues in their family courts, and they are discussing whether adversarial models of justice are delivering justice, and I think those are really big questions for us also in Scotland. In terms of the family law issues, there is a whole session, so I'll be happy to write about that. The other thing in terms of funding is that since the task for reviewing the funding for front-line services in Scotland was put in the equally safe delivery plan, which was, as I said, four or five years ago now, we have been taking a look at the global picture and trying to figure out how dysfunctional our current system is. We can spend a lot of time documenting the problem, but we are pretty clear about what the problem is. What is the solution? I will say that there are lots of different ways of funding services across the world. None of them, however, are something that we can point to and say that this would work for us or that this is going to deliver system change. What we are arguing for is for Scotland to develop first in the world again, I would hope, I think, from what we can see. A needs-led human rights-based approach to funding services is about defining a need, defining a minimum level of service for our front-line services that are framed in a human rights approach, and funding that in whatever way makes sense, whether it is through primary legislation or whatever. At the moment, our system is a conglomeration of historical accidents and funding. Quite a bit like laying out, we are going to spend £100 million on violence against women. How do you think we should spend it? I do not think that is the question. The question is, what is the need for spending on violence against women and girls? How do we identify that and how do we deliver it? That is a longer-term project that can happen in the next few months, but that needs to be the direction of travel, or we will continue to patch a dysfunctional, harmful system for decades. I totally realise that. That is a huge topic that I have just put on the table. I would appreciate it if you could write to the committee with any further information, or the panel would be really appreciated. Back to you. That would be fantastic. Anybody from the panel that wants to write on it, any of the issues raised this morning, that would be particularly helpful. Pam, do you want to come in with questions on this theme? Yes, I will be brief. I know that we are quite short of time. We know—I spoke to Glasgow Women's Aid, for example, and they spoke about problems with people with no recourse to public funds, access and support. What could we do to address that? Do you think that women's aid organisations would be able to use the satisfied immediate need for protection of wellbeing case that has been used in the Scottish Welfare Fund during the pandemic to get funding for refuge places where someone does not have access to housing benefit that would otherwise be used to pay for them? I think that the difficulty is where is the risk in this system. As I mentioned before, what we saw was under the public health emergency, we saw women and children being housed by local authorities that they were not able to be before or housed by women's aid but being paid for by—although our refuge accommodation was full on a blank. The problem of no recourse is that we have been talking about the cross-party group on violence against women and girls for a decade and seeking a workaround, if you will, of the fact that the UK Government has put in what we consider essentially a racist policy. The difficulty is if we need a workaround. We have a workaround for the bedroom tax, if you recall, and that is where the Welfare Fund came from. Can we not find a workaround for this? What we have seen is that there are some ways of unpicking parts of the problem, if we had a leaving fund, could we make sure that that was set up in a way that made it accessible to women with no recourse to universal credit? Are there other mechanisms? I will be honest with you and say that I do not see an easy answer on this. Part of that is because I know from a previous minister that the Home Office is poised to challenge in court any possible violation of the Scotland Act in terms of no recourse. Existing programmes that are coming out of the UK Government on no recourse are small and time-limited and not human rights-based. Thank you for that, Martyn. For my own experience, in my own women's aid group in North Ayrshire, we had an issue with two women with no recourse to public funds, and our women's aid group took the decision to take them into refuge, but we had no income for nearly a year in that situation. That is not a sustainable situation for women's aid groups across the country. Can I say that women's aid groups across the country do that when they can, but increasingly they cannot? No, absolutely not. I will bring in Emma with a final question for this panel. We have run over it, but I think that it was important that we did hear that last bit of information as well. Thank you, convener, and this is for Marsha again. I am interested in the approach of front-line services to advising survivors on access to justice. My personal experience is that very often organisations have to give the advice that you need to be very careful about coming forward because of how common further traumatic experiences are. The alternative seems to be often feeling as though you are using survivors as battering rams against barriers in justice. So, where does the balance need to be in terms of funding one-to-one support services and funding projects aimed at prevention or evidence gathering for policy changes, and what needs to change in order for specialist services to feel more confident when their service users do want to take the legal route? Emma, do you mean the legal route in terms of disclosure and criminal justice, or civil justice, or the legal route in terms of influencing policy by sharing their stories? In terms of initially coming forward and reporting. I think that the difficulty we have is that a system blames women for not disclosing, and they know that. It is getting slowly better but not fast enough and not in enough places. What women experience often when they disclose, and the women with dependent children are even more at risk, is that it is a system that says, why did not you just leave? They do not see all of the constraints around women because they do not understand how gender operates in our families, in our communities. That means that child living is complicated by the fact that she might be destitute if she leaves. She certainly will be at increased danger being her children and herself being abused and murdered, and she might be homeless, she might have to make herself and her children homeless, so there are a million reasons not to report. Our system is not very much better at responding, and it still blames her. If she has children, it also blames her for not protecting her children from the abuser and for not controlling his behaviour in some way. How do we manage that? In terms of legal services, what we really need is, as I said before, we need women to be able to access when they need it and when they need it, legal advice and services. We are testing a model for that, where we have hosted two solicitors in Edinburgh Women's Aid. It is a bit of a stop-shop, so the women are being supported in one-to-one support at the same time that they are being offered legal advice and services. We think that that is an early intervention, it reduces harm, it reduces court burden, it produces lawyers who are competent on domestic abuse, it supports children in ways that we have never before, and it will save money. However, we need the best interest in our legal system to not be the loudest voices in the room when we talk about a different model. Thanks very much for that answer, Marta. I do see that Foisal has put his question in the chat, so if anybody can have a look at that and answer him, that would be fantastic. One thing that we didn't touch upon specifically with questions, but it is mentioned several times, is equally safe strategy. I would be interested if people can submit some answers to the question about what we achieved in the last five years with equally safe strategy, where we not hit the mark on what needs to change with this refresh that we are undergoing. I think that there are a lot of things that we have already heard this morning, but specifically if you could all write in with regards to that, that would be most helpful. Marta, was that your hand up, or were you just saying, yes, I will do that? Yes, she will do that. Both. I mean, I am happy to speak to it, but I am also happy just to write because I know we are out of time. Also, the question in the chat, I know that the coming panel will have Maryam, who is on our board, from Amana, and a staff member from Jack D, who can talk about the interest of trauma and language and other BME-related services. That is fantastic. We will make sure that we pick that question up with the next panel. Thank you so much this morning for your time and for your evidence to ourselves. I am going to suspend briefly for five minutes to give everybody a comfort break and to swap over panels. Thank you. That says back after a short break. Thanks, everybody. We are now going to continue to take evidence on domestic abuse and violence against women and girls. The format of this session will be the same as the previous panel. I ask members to direct their questions to a specific panel member and panel members if you can add new information, if you are going to come in on a point. Please remember that we can take additional evidence from ourselves in writing afterwards if you feel there is something that needs to be covered. I welcome our new panel. I know that we are having difficulties technically with Alison Davis, who is the chief executive officer of Sahalia. I hope that I have said that right, but we will keep an eye and see if she is able to join us. I would like to introduce Caroline Fox-McHai, who is the head of operations at Carlyguide in Scotland. We have also got Maria Mamed, who is the chief executive officer at Amina, the Muslim Women's Resource Centre, and Toomey Forster, who is the outreach service team leader at Shack 2 Women's Aid. I hope that you all had a chance to listen to the previous session. You have an idea of the issues that we have already been highlighting. Obviously, we are keen to hear your perspective on them. I am going to bring my colleagues in. We have three themes that we are looking at this morning. We have background and context to the whole situation around violence against women and girls. We have a theme around prevention, and we have a theme on front-line services and funding. To kick us off, I am going to bring in my colleague Pam Duncan-Glancy to start on theme 1. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. Thank you also for the submissions that you have sent us in advance. They have been really, really helpful and also just to put on record again my support, and thanks for the work that your organisations have done, not just in this year, which has been particularly difficult, but in all the years that you have been working with the people and the women that you work with. The first question that I have is about the context of the pandemic. Zero tolerance said in their information that they sent to us that there was a failure to address the quality in human rights in the terms of reference for the Covid inquiry, and that that indicates that there is some way to go to manage human equality in human rights. I wonder if you could talk a bit about the information on whether or not there is enough information available on the effects of the pandemic on domestic abuse and violence against women, and in particular against Black minority ethnic women and disabled women. Are you seeing some of the fears expressed about the effect lockdown could have on violence against women and girls realised? What could we do to encourage the Covid inquiry to look at that as well? I am going to start by saying that, unfortunately, in Scotland we do not even have a national picture of the experiences of being marginalised in minoritised women when it comes to domestic abuse, so we are already starting off in a situation that is not ideal. We have absolutely no analysis of a national analysis by the Scottish Government of what are the experiences of BME women in minoritised women when it comes to domestic abuse, gender-based violence, forced marriage, honour-based abuse and FGM. We do not have that lived experience picture, so we have been looking to try and do a national survey, but when it comes to the pandemic, certainly for Amina, and I am sure that Shagty would be the same, we saw a three-fold increase when it came to calls for women being in crisis. For us to support that, we have our data, but we are all working in silos, so what I would say is that other BME specialist organisations will have their data, and we would have our data, but there is no national picture before Covid, and there is no national picture after Covid about what are the experiences of BME women, and I think that research is really needed, Pam. I have wanted to do that research for a while, but I think that in Scotland we need that research to actually say that this is the experiences of BME women when it comes to domestic abuse, gender-based violence, and this is how many women have experienced it, but unfortunately right now when it comes to writing funding applications, we are usually relying on English data because when it comes to national pictures, they are unfortunately doing better than us in gathering that data. I hope that answers your question, Pam. It does, it's really helpful. Thank you. I think that we could hear from Tewi Isbell. Hi, Pam. Unfortunately, I'm going to be mirroring the same concerns in that respect. I think that what we witnessed in Shack to Women's Aid figures the national statistics from Scotland about BME service users, specific abuse, all of that, unfortunately, is pretty much non-existent. We often find ourselves having to report our own data to statutory organisations. They would very often come and ask us, but as you would appreciate, we are a small organisation. You know, we try to do as much as we can, but the statistics that we have would be quite limited, would actually literally be the tip of the iceberg. In terms of actual statistics, in general, it is very limited. The statistics around Covid, I would say, pretty much non-existent for us. We have some statistics against ourselves from the Covid period in terms of the number of domestic abuse, owner-based abuse cases, forced marriage cases, whether it was reduced or increased. We have that data, and we try to share that with statutory organisations just so that people can actually predict and understand what may happen in terms of, say, for example, forced marriages. For example, during Covid, this has actually gone down for some marriage cases, and the reason for that is not because this problem has been resolved, but it's because, as you know, all of these international flights were cancelled, foreign travel was not possible. We actually saw within that period about 44% decrease. When we say that to a lot of people, they say, oh, actually, that's quite encouraging if it's gone down. We say, actually, no, because statistics will tell you, as soon as these flights are enabled, you can expect a good increase of at least 44%, and if not more. Now, statistics like this, if they're missing from what we know, then we just lose this very valuable opportunity to prevent, to stop these things from happening. So if we don't actually have that very valuable data in hand, then we cannot even start talking about prevention, because you cannot prevent something that you have no idea of what it is, and, unfortunately, obviously, statistics is very, very valuable for us. Like we said, unfortunately, we do find ourselves having to use a lot of English data. Why is that? Because there is nothing really in Scotland. So I think that's one part of your question, and in terms of the impact of Covid in the services, I'm just quickly going to touch on that. During the restrictions, the lockdown, what we witnessed from the BME service users, as you will be aware, they are already quite shy in terms of approaching statutory organisations. This is obviously something maybe from previous experiences, from the concerns that they find themselves quite often, being their concerns being minimised, they find themselves often probably not going to be believed. So it actually takes a lot of courage for BME women, BME service users, to come forward and actually seek help from statutory organisations. Now, unfortunately, during Covid, whether some services were just not there, all together not there, or some were quite restricted, and women tried, they picked up that courage and they tried, and they couldn't access it. So, unfortunately, that confidence in the statutory service is gone during Covid. So what we need to do, we need to build up that confidence ourselves. Obviously, we try to reflect this observation, our observation, in all of our training sessions, in all of our meetings with statutory groups. So this is what we need to do. We need to build this confidence again by the BME users towards the statutory services. It's just to make them understand that the services are there, the services are there to help them, but it's somewhat, all of that progress that was made, unfortunately, during lockdown, it's just gone back quite a few steps. So this is what we need to work on, all together, as a partnership to build that confidence of the BME service user towards the statutory organisations. Actually, third party groups were still very much working really hard. And although, for example, a good example is mental health and counselling services, mental health and counselling was non-existent for the domestic abuse survivors, for the BME service users. And so we found ourselves as a third party organisation actually trying to bridge that gap, which is obvious that we are not qualified to do this kind of work because we are the domestic abuse practical support. So we really rely on the NHS mental health assessment, the NHS support services and counselling, but, unfortunately, during the lockdown, during the restrictions, this was severely impacted. Thank you very much for that to me. Pam, do you want to come back in? No, that's great. Thank you. That's it. Thanks very much. I'm going to bring in Jeremy Balfour, who's in the room, and then after Jeremy, it'll be Foisal Toudry, who is remote Jeremy. Thank you, and good morning to the panel. Thank you for coming. I suppose that if I can ask one question of my mission, and maybe with a quick follow-up, that is in regard to the criminal justice system and the experience that you've had with the ladies and women that you're dealing with. What needs to change to make it more accessible and to make it more accountable? What would make a difference to you? And maybe start with Mariam, if that's okay? Thank you. So the criminal justice system, in general, when it comes to women, is inaccessible. Before Covid, we had a lot of women. They were going to court, sitting in court all day. Child care was not built in. You're not allowed to bring your children to court, obviously. So I think, in general, women who were experiencing or going through the criminal justice system were feeling increasingly frustrated by the delays in their court systems, court hearings, but also childcare. You're now a single parent. None of that is built into the court system. If you've actually just sat there in Glasgowshire of court the whole day, it's absolutely demoralising. At the end of the day, you're told that your case is going to be delayed, and you've maybe tried to arrange childcare that day. But, going forward, as Marcia had previously said, there's quite a lot of backlogs within the cases at the moment, so I think that that does not help women at all in having confidence in the criminal justice system. A lot of them have maybe felt like, you know what, reporting this case was just not worth it because of the way I'm getting treated now through the criminal justice system, so I think that we need to have better responses in that way also. But also, I think that if you're looking at women, BME women specifically, there is a lot of under-reporting within our communities. What we find is that a lot of women will come to specialist services, they might leave the perpetrator, but when it actually comes to reporting the domestic abuse to police, it's still quite low, and that was pre-pandemic, and after the pandemic I think it's probably got worse. So that with women who are actually reporting having long delays within the court system, I think that it makes a lot of women think, you know what, that this whole process is not worth it, but we want women to know that they can have that confidence within the criminal justice system. I do want to say this to everyone at the panel today. In our criminal justice system and within our domestic abuse definition, we have partners who are intimate partners recognised in the definition of domestic abuse. However, we still, in our definition, do not recognise extended family abuse. When you look at BME women, 50 per cent of BME victims who have experienced abuse are more likely to experience abuse from multiple perpetrators, so already within our criminal justice system, we are not looking at women or mother-in-laws or father-in-laws if they have all been part of that abuse and criminalising them also, and that's simply due to our domestic abuse definition. So there isn't also an issue there. Looking at stats in general, has the pandemic actually impacted BME women? We do know that in 2019 there was about 156 cases of honour-based abuse being recorded, and in 2021 only 118, so that's kind of a significant drop, and I would say already pre-pandemic, we were kind of under estimating the figures, so there's still a lot to be done. Women in general in criminal justice, there's a lot to be done, but BME women in general, I think there really needs to be that focused attention on the criminal justice system having a better response to women, but also how do we have confidence with BME women actually reporting cases and having a better experience? Can I follow up with a question? This is a really hard question, so it may not be an either or it might be both, but for the women that you're dealing with going through the judicial system, is it the conviction that is the most important thing, or is it the sentence that the person gets afterwards, or are both equally as important as each other? So when you're dealing with people, are they saying, I hope if he's found guilty he's going to get x, or is it, I just want that person to be found guilty, or is it both? Being found guilty is an absolute validation for women about somebody recognising what their experiences are. What I would say is that I have supported, and Anna, we've supported a lot of women through the criminal justice system, and it's maybe taken about two years for her to see justice, but then maybe the perpetrator has only been given like 30 hours community service in a charity shop, so that can at times really feel quite demoralising that I've just gone through the system for two years, all for him to be now working in a charity shop dirty hours, right? So there is that thing about the sentencing, but absolutely I think both hand in hand it is really each case on an individual basis. Some women who have men who are put in jail, which I would say is usually quite rare, do feel that kind of safety, that safety aspect, that, okay, we know that he's behind bars, so I can actually feel a bit safe and rebuild my life, but I do think both go in hand in hand. Thanks very much for that. I'm now going to bring in Faisal Turdi with his question, and Faisal joins us remotely. Thank you, convener, and good morning panel. I think Amna has touched on this, and I'm going to be directing this question to you again. I've heard examples of people in BME communities being reluctant to visit specialized services for that community due to the community being so close, that will inevitably get out one way or another, and there may be a progression for them socially. How can that effect be mitigated against? Is there an argument for wider service being more prepared for dealing with cases for BME communities? I was going to ask that question to Mariam. I think that Mariam, you've already touched that already. One thing you said that the result could come back on victim as well, so if you want to touch on that as well, then how that can be more stronger. I'll touch on a lot of the casework. I used to be a domestic abuse caseworker, so I was right in there. I know that a lot of times a lot of women would say, well, I don't want to go to a Mariam and who is a Mariam, and do I know her family or whatever, and there was a real reluctance there. I really do believe in always giving women the choice. It doesn't mean that where a BME specialist services, that's where they go. However, that being said, a lot of women who come to BME special services feel that we recognise their needs a lot more. We understand the barriers that they are going through, but they don't have to explain as much about what they are going through, because we can get it. When it comes to honour based abuse, forced marriage and no recourse to public funds, I would argue to say that we are better set up to deal with those things. We know when we have a woman who has multiple barriers, that we know that this is the typical case that we are getting. However, another organisation will be all right with that one or two cases that we have had, but for us it could be nearly all our case load. I always come down to two things, funding, but also BME services assuring women that we have the same high standards of confidentiality, and they are absolutely right within our community. Women should be worried, because we all know each other, and it can be quite off-putting. However, that is why, at Aminah, we try to create a separate number, a separate room, and make sure that women don't need to come to our main office. We are giving women that space that they can feel comfortable without feeling judged, but also confidentiality is a big thing within our community. If we know somebody who is Miriam, I know her family or whatever, but it is giving women confidence that confidentiality is the absolute key. However, I would still emphasise that specialist BME services are needed to help to support women and be the voice for BME women and their experiences. Thank you very much, and I know that Timmy Wants to come in as well. Yes, I understand the worries about this whole concept, about people feeling or service users feeling uncomfortable because of smaller communities and support workers, maybe from the same community. However, like we just said, the concept of informed choice comes into play here. You actually give them the choice for the service user, whether they want to use a BME-specific service or mainstream general women's aid, for example. However, if we touch this subject we can also question the use of interpreters because, for me, that falls under the same category. Why do we insist on interpreters or organisations using official independent unbiased interpreters? For me, it is the same thing. Everyone who works in the BME organisation works in that independent official capacity, unbiased capacity. The service users, from the first moment, take a step into the organisation. They are assured that the whole organisation is independent and whatever they discuss is going to remain in that confidential space, in that safe space. I see that on a part of that, we are using an official independent interpreter. Let's face it, if a woman cannot speak English, or her English is not that great, and she goes to, for example, Edinburgh Women's Aid, where her language is not going to be spoken, at the end of the day an interpreter will be called to make that communication happen. At that point, the same concerns are therefore the woman, again, is the interpreter from the same community as I am. The concern is a general concern of that woman, and like I said earlier on, because they find it difficult, because trust, let's face it, trust is the issue for any domestic abuse victim. They find it difficult to trust anyone anyway, so whether they trust a support worker from a BME organisation or whether they trust a BME interpreter, who is an official independent, that comes down to their choice. Thank you very much. I know that Faisal, you have a second question, so back to yourself. Thank you very much, convener. The next question will be for Maryam and to me, as well. Is there sufficient funding within the system to allow for language-trained staff who are also trained in dealing with trauma? If not, what would it take for this situation to be improved? I think that we can go to Maryam first. Thank you. To make that really clear, there is just not enough funding. When it comes to staff in being trauma-informed, it is absolutely important, but really, to be honest, this is something that I have always said. When you are supporting women who are facing multiple barriers and disadvantages, it takes a lot longer to support them. Just to give you an example, if you have somebody who has no recourse to public funds but who is experiencing honour-based abuse and is domestic abuse, there is a lot going on in that case, and they do not have any language skills. Think about trying to deal with that one woman and how resource intensive that is going to be. Organisations such as Amina and Shakti are supporting those organisations, but we are probably getting the same funding, if not less, than other organisations. We are dealing with women who have more barriers to support, multiple disadvantages but less funding. When it comes to having more staff, although Amina receives funding from delivering equally safe, when it comes to direct case work, we are having to find funding elsewhere to get case workers to cover and support the volume of domestic abuse calls that are coming through on our helpline. Our hardship fund, we are having to pay for hotels or whatever, so when it comes to being trauma-informed, that is something that we are wanting, but we just do not have enough staff. I think that just dealing with it feels almost like at times we are putting out fires, and that is what we are doing with firefighting all the time, rather than doing prevention work, which we are doing, but at the moment the crisis is still so high that we are still not getting round to actually solving that. Thank you very much for that, and you have just given us a segue into our next theme, which is prevention. I think that we will move on to that at the moment, and I am going to bring in my colleague in the room at Emma Roddick to come in. Oh, actually, did you want to say on that theme? Yes, on your go. Do you want to ask the other? Yes, do you want to ask the other? On your go, we will go with Emma Roddick, and then I will bring in Marie McNeurin after that. I am going to direct this one to Mariam. We heard a lot from the previous panel on intersectionality around beam women and disabled women being more at risk, and we know that those who are parents or transgender may also be more likely to experience sexual assault. How important is intersectionality as a consideration in addressing misogyny and sexual crimes, and how closely linked are misogyny and other prejudices? Thank you for that question. Emma, when it comes to misogyny within BME communities, I have always said that, while we are impacted completely differently, when it comes to misogyny, even from when we were born, a lot of BME women within our communities or you have just had another girl, oh my god, give you a boy, next. We are already dealing with that level of misogyny within our community. We have very rigid gender roles, a real patriarchal society. When you are thinking about the experiences that we are having with misogyny, I still do not think that in Scotland it has really been unpicked when it comes to our experiences of misogyny, forced marriage, honour-based abuse, just about the fact that the boys can do whatever they want, the way they are raised. However, women are seen as pure as the honour of the family. There are barriers to being women, and we are limited to our careers at times. I would say that I am born in Scotland. I have a family that empowers me. However, there are so many women that I know even my cousins and my friends in my community that we still have those attitudes coming in from older generations to say, oh, but if you work full-time, can you support your children or whatever, it is just that misogyny is everywhere within that community, but it has not been unpicked, it has not been researched. It is kind of going back to what I am saying about when it comes to just data in general, there is just no data when it comes to our lived experiences of domestic abuse, misogyny, gender abuse. We do not have any lived experiences of that. When it comes to answering that, this is what we need. We need women to speak up and say, well, this is what our experiences have been of misogyny, of forced marriage and about being women. I hope that that answers your question a little. Yes, thank you so much, Mary. That was great. I will move on to prevention now. This one is aimed at Carolyn. In the girl guiding written response, 37 per cent of girls aged 13 to 25 said that they knew another girl their age who had experienced rape or sexual assault. To me, that is already unacceptably high, but it still seems low in terms of how large we know the issue to be. I think that whether knowingly or not, everyone probably knows someone who has experienced this, so I wanted to ask if you felt awareness of what constitutes sexual assault or constitutes consent, as well as willingness to call rape and sexual assault what it is, is still suppressing that figure and playing a part in making the number seem smaller, particularly for those of a young age who are pressured to engage in sexual relationships. How important is overcoming that in terms of prevention work? I totally agree with what you are saying. The girl feels artificial from what we know. Girls are taught from a very young age that they are not valid. We have seen and heard from our young women that they raise concerns at school and that they raise family that they are very much minimised, which then invalidates their feeling of having experienced sexual harassment or knowing someone who has done so. I think that until we can really get to the bottom of those issues, a lot of which we touched on earlier, but there is zero tolerance around teacher training. The experiences of sexual harassment are validated and are taken extremely seriously at school. That also goes into how we teach consent and the importance that we place on it and what age that starts from. We have improved our teaching of consent in Scotland, but we still have a really long way to go. We are not just talking about explicit sexual experiences, but about consent. From the start of our relationship, we have seen from our research that girls do not have a strong understanding of what constitutes a healthy relationship. One in 10 girls believes that it is acceptable for their partner to dictate who they can and can't see. At that level of misunderstanding with our young people and until we put some effort into changing that, it plays a part in whether we are going to see a change in the race of domestic abuse in Scotland. Thank you for that, Caroline. I will now bring in Marie McNair, who joins us remotely, who will be followed by Stephanie Callaghan in the room. Thank you. Good morning, panel. Back to Caroline from Gilroyguide, Scotland. In your submission, you flag up the importance of education, setting and challenging attitudes as part of prevention. I agree. In fact, later today, when you mentioned that in the debate at the Mart International Women's Day in the chamber, I will make that very point. Are you able to highlight to the committee any best practice you are aware of in education settings? That is not something that we particularly have data on. I would probably have to go back to my colleagues at Zero Tolerance for more best practice research. Realistically, a lot of what we have is anecdotal best practice, and that is very much around validating feelings at times of reporting. I have probably got a lot more data on the opposite, on terrible practice than I do on best practice, unfortunately. That is no problem. For another question to Maryam, your round of submission argues that it is key to prevention of community-based work, such as peer groups and awareness raising. Can you advise the committee how you are taking that approach forward and any evidence that proves it to be effective? Thank you, Mary. At the moment, we have just started what we are calling intergenerational workshops. It is called Mother, Daughter or Women. We are looking at the relationship between a mother and a daughter, a mother-in-law and the relationship of women in general, what we are really trying to do with these intergenerational workshops. This is the first for Amna, and for what we are in partnership with Glasgow Women's Library, is working with communities to think about what the role is of women, what are the expectations of women in our community, and when they see abuse, do we speak up for it? Do we judge women? Do we believe and validate their stories? What we are trying to do is capture women's stories and their experiences, because, again, it is going back to a lot of BME communities and stories that are just not being heard anywhere. We are trying to capture their experiences, but we are also trying to unpick those rigid gender roles by saying, is that really right? We know that inequality is what leads to gender-based violence in domestic abuse, but it has been fascinating so far for us to hear about how women are responding to these intergenerational workshops, and we are covering trauma, but also the trauma of being a woman but expecting all the roles that you are having to play. When it comes to evidence, what I would say is that, again, if there is not even enough evidence when it comes to the experiences of BME women, there is not enough evidence in prevention only what we know nationally when it comes to evidence. We are still working with men also when it comes to being positive male role models. I think that that is the best that we can do. We know that it is going around women's groups and women's workshops and just unpicking what it is that they are experiencing in trying to capture that and display that somewhere. I hope that answers your question. Thank you. That is all that I have on this one. That is great, but I know that Tumie wants to come in, so if we hand over to Tumie before I bring Stephanie in. Hello, Moray. In response, because you may already know Shaq 2 Women's Day, they are actually quite active in terms of providing training and preparing materials for the prevention of violence against women and young girls. As part of our equally safe work, we have partnered with Rape Crisis and we have actually created some videos for all that this is made available for all the schools that have been on the equally safe platform. Some videos about BME-specific abuse and just so that in the schools that even actually the education professionals as well as the students, they can recognise the sign of BME-specific abuse and as well as the videos, we have actually created booklets which talks about the sexual violence prevention and how to recognise healthy relationships and hoping that this will help in terms of the prevention. Obviously, we try to use social media because as a Women's Aid organisation, we are not in a position to go out in some of the community groups where they be male perpetrators, which we may or may not know, so for many reasons such as safety, we are not able to take part in those community groups. Obviously, these are the things that we can do to hope to prevent the violence, but in terms of actually getting data, we rely on maybe the schools on the guidance teachers to come back to us with numbers, but apart from that, it's difficult for us. We can run our own women's groups, but again, it's a very small limited number of women. On that part, again, we come back to the question of how do you collect data, how do you collect statistics? To use as evidence, we really need the help of statutory organisations there. Thank you very much for that too many. It reminds me of my own outreach worker days and running women's lunch clubs and groups and going into schools and delivering training. As that third sector women's aid worker, it always feels as if the statutory group part is sometimes missing and gathering that data, so thank you very much for drawing our attention to that. I'm going to bring in Stephanie Callahan to finish up on this theme and then we'll go to Miles Briggs after that to take us into theme 3. Stephanie. Thanks very much, convener. If I could direct my question to Carolyn. First of all, we're done to Girlguiding Scotland for actually doing the survey. 500 young women between 7 and 21 years, it's really good to have that information there and certainly it seems to really shine a light on school, harassment, violence etc. What I'm wondering is, I'm wondering if you could share some of the thoughts that you had with us today, what actually stood out to yourself and your colleagues when you were having a look at the results of that survey and also could you tell us a little bit more about the negative factors that you mentioned earlier on when Marie had asked you the question about positive work that was being done, just what it is that you've found that you're coming up against, thanks. Of course, thank you for the question. I think what stood out to us particularly were around, first of all, how little girls tell us that they feel they're learning about sexual harassment, about consent and that's been on-going in all of the surveys that we have undertaken and is really consistent. 84 per cent of girls are saying that they learn little to nothing about sexual harassment or abuse at schools. That area in itself really stuck out to us. The other area that we found striking was around girls and how they feel safe or unsafe as it happens outside, so out with schools in streets and also online. We know that that's a huge area that impacts girls in many ways, particularly mental health. Those two key areas where girls say that they feel unsafe were striking to us and again have been really consistent across all of the data that we've collected. To your other question around not great practice, we've seen recently in the news and this is very much reflected in what girls tell us that when they are bringing forward instances where they have felt unsafe at school they aren't being listened to, that behaviour is being diminished as it's just bullying, boys would be boys, why don't you wear something different and it might not happen tomorrow. We've heard that repeatedly from the young women that we work with and therefore we're not getting a true picture of what sexual harassment in schools or for girls and young women looks like because they constantly feel that those experiences are not serious enough to be taken seriously. Really, that's what I was trying to get at with my earlier answer. Until we are able to educate our teachers and other school staff in what experience of sexual harassment might look like and what they should be listening out for when people come to them, we're not going to get a clear picture of that at all. Thanks very much. That feeling of the experiences might be being invalidated that they're not believed and they're not being respected certainly comes through and it should be quite a shock in a devastating quote from one of your young people talking about a 16-year-old talking about how normal it is in schools and how accepted it is. Just moving on from that, I know certainly something that you've called on the Scottish Government to do is to ensure that all schools have a legal duty to prevent and tackle sexual harassment, so I'm just wondering if you could tell us a wee bit more about why you think that that is so important and what difference it could make. Thanks, Carolyn. Of course, so I think at the moment when we're asking schools to report these instances of sexual harassment, there is a worry and we've heard this from headteachers as well that there's a concern that they will be an expert page story, but if there's a different way to report that, I think they can take a different box when they're reporting it, that essentially looks better. So I think we really need to put a little bit of pressure on our educational establishment to report that, to report the true picture in schools so that we can do something about it. I think that that also then really validates the experiences of our girls and young women that the Scottish Government are willing to take it seriously, but they do want to know about the experiences of the school, and that it's not just another instance of bullying and that it'll be hidden under that umbrella. Sorry, did you remind me of the second part of your question? No, that's fine, actually. You've covered it there, so thank you very much indeed. That was really, really helpful. Thanks very much, Stephanie. Thanks, Carolyn. It would have been remiss of me not to bring my colleague Jeremy Balfour back in before we moved on to Miles, so Jeremy, bringing you back in. Thank you. I think it's just following up a question again with Caroline, if that's okay. Clearly, what we're hearing, and as a male, we have to hold our hands up and say the issue is our issue, it's not women's issue, and as a father of two girls who actually are girl guides, I find what is happening in schools and in other settings for young girls growing up really disturbing. Interestingly, just talking to colleagues on this table before the meeting started, there does seem to be different experiences depending where you are in Scotland in regard to education and in regard to teaching on this. Would you, from an across Scotland perspective, like to see a more uniform approach happening across all 32 local authorities, so that if you're a girl in Ayrshire or you're a girl in Inverness or a girl in Edinburgh, you'll get the same type of information, the same type of empowerment? Is that done best through the schools or are there other ways that we can do that? Yes, absolutely. Thank you for the question. I would agree that we need all girls in Scotland and in fact all young people in Scotland receiving the same level of relationship education. It shouldn't matter what school, what type of school that they go to, they should be able to receive the same good standard of education covering the same topics, otherwise we will continue to see these pockets of good practice and larger pockets of bad practice. I think that schools provide that kind of universal access, but there are other organisations, youth work in particular, who are well-pleased to have discussions with young people around the same issues. I would suggest that young people are getting scouts in other uniformed youth organisations, very well-pleased to do that, along with the rest of the youth work sector. Should that happen in primary schools or even earlier, or at what stage? Obviously not just once, and should it be happening more than once? Should it be happening every year in school? Is it one of those things that should be built into the curriculum that every year there is some teaching and some guidance given, not just to girls but actually to boys as well? Absolutely. I think that girls and boys should have education. I think that we have often seen in schools that boys and girls are separated for parts of that curriculum. I do think that we need to begin the relationship education as early as possible. I think that we can teach, even from a nursery age, about what having ownership of your own body and consent means. I would say that that is a good suggestion. Thank you very much for that. It was a very good question. It is evidence that we absolutely needed to hear. Miles, over to you now. Thank you, convener. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for joining us this morning. I wanted to cross the two things that we have already had today. I wanted to ask what the barriers of leaving abusive relationships you feel are specifically in Scotland? Are there cultural barriers that we have not really looked at? Or is there more that we need to consider? I know from my work here in Edinburgh, in a couple of cases, I have supported constituents. It is being able to take their animals away because their pets are being abused at the same time. One of the key questions is what additional services need to be put in place. That leads me on to my second question. I do not know if you want to answer that at the same time. It is with regard to what funding gaps there are in specialist services, in your opinion. I will maybe hand that back to Caroline. If anyone else wants to come in, please do. I am not sure that we are the right organisation to start with. I pass on to one of the other panellists. You have mentioned pets being a barrier. When it comes to, as a BME woman, who has worked in the BME specialist service for over 15 years, I really wish I could say for the women that we support, that the pets were the barrier. What has been the barrier is just having no equal to public funds. I cannot even get a human being housed, let alone their pets. That shows the level of gap in services there. We have other projects saying that pets are a barrier, but we are saying that the barrier is women having the wrong stamp on their passport. That has been the issue for us dealing with no recourse to public funds. Marcia touched on it earlier. We have still not figured it out. We have figured it out. During the pandemic, women were automatically housed. That goes to show that that could have happened even before. However, the story that people might not be telling you is that, although women were automatically housed during the pandemic in hotels, what conditions were they in? A hotel sounds quite nice, but in reality, there were no cooking facilities, there were no clothes given, there was just no hot food for over a year. It was absolutely horrific conditions. A lot of those hotels had shared toilets with strangers. If you have a woman who is experiencing domestic abuse, you have experienced rape and sexual abuse, and now you are sharing a toilet at night with strangers, it is absolutely a horrible and horrific experience for many. When it comes to additional services—I will always say that BME services are absolutely stretched and fighting fires—so many barriers that we are trying to support with the same amount of funding. We are not giving that additional help, we are not giving that additional funding. We cannot even look at mental health properly, because we are too busy looking at the immigration and just trying to get women housed. The trauma work in the mental health work almost becomes a low-list of priorities because we are just trying to get them the basic needs. I would say that looking at that level and how much resource and time intensive it is to support BME women, but that is not backed up with the funding. I hope that answers your question. Thanks very much. I know that Tumay wants to come in as well, please. In terms of the barriers for BME women, I do not know where to start. I will start with language barriers, first and foremost. Language remains to be a big barrier still, and we are still missing the independent, unbiased interpreters. Although some interpreting agencies exist, however, not all the languages are still there, and sometimes you would get interpreters who are not officially trained and that would further the risk, as opposed to helping the women. Language remains one of the biggest barriers to this day. Obviously, no recourse to public funds, no recourse is no safety. We know that that is a huge barrier. A lot of women will just much rather stay with the perpetrator than leave because it is just that unsafe and not knowing for themselves and for the children. That is a huge barrier, but I am not going to talk about that because we already mentioned that. Another huge barrier is the support services, not understanding the BME issues. This is a big problem for us. We say that statistics suggest that for a BME women, it usually takes about 17 agencies before they find a service that really understands their need. That is a huge number. No one has the time to go and visit 17 agencies. That is further risk, further problems. Another huge one is the lack of BME targeted assessments against statutory services, one of which I will give the example of NHS mental health assessments. If you go to NHS just now, you will find that there is no BME specific NHS mental health assessment. If that assessment from a mental health perspective does not exist, how can we then identify? We talk about the women who come from recently. We see an influx of women coming from Eastern Europe. I will give an example of Roma travellers. A lot of them, due to the early year lack of education, suffer from cognitive dysfunction. This is a well-known fact by all statutory and third sector organisations, but we cannot assess it because there is no BME specific mental health assessment from NHS. Suitable accommodation for BME women, unfortunately that does not exist. It is a huge hindrance and women will not risk poverty or extreme hardship for themselves and their children because there is no suitable accommodation. Existing risk assessments, the risk assessments to be used, both as social work will use the same risk assessments. We would use that. Even the police, the domestic abuse investigations units, will use that. The risk assessments cannot assess the role of honour-based abuse, forced marriage, all these BME-specific risks that are existing. They cannot assess that accurately. If you cannot assess the risk, you cannot create a proper safety planning. Obviously, again, that is just furthering the risk. The last one that I am going to mention is, unfortunately, that structural unconscious bias towards BME women, unfortunately, still exists. Women are very much aware of that. A lot of women report to us that, whenever they approach a statutory organisation, they will feel that racial profiling. Sadly, they still feel that their concerns are minimised. They still feel that they are not believed. It is almost like the very same safeguarding processes that we need to help those women. It is harming their mental health in a way, because women feel that unconscious bias. Unfortunately, that is something that we all have to deal with—a sort of antinamian partnership work, both statutory and third party. I hope that answers the question. It certainly did. It is very helpful. There is a lot of information in there. I do not know if you could provide the committee separately with any information that you have, for example, with access to interpreters or lack of access and what that looks like. I certainly know that Glasgow City Council has over 100 interpreters for different languages, but in different parts of the country it will be very, very different. If there is any information that you can provide beyond that, that would be really helpful. That is great. That brings us to the end of the questions that we have this morning. I think that we have ended on a part that, hopefully, when we look at the outputs from the strategic funding review of national and local services that is to be undertaken in the course of this year, that written branch reform, looking at where that is needed, your organisations will be able to feed into that and assist us as we look at that going forward. I think that the funding of front-line services and all the different issues that have been raised this morning are hugely important. I thank you so much for your contributions this morning. Again, follow-up and writing with anything that you think we need to know, and specifically on Miles's point at the end there, with regard to interpreters. That concludes this morning's public part of the meeting. At next week's meeting, we will hear from the Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work, Chloe Smith and MP. We are now going to move into private session to consider our remaining agenda item. Members joining us online should leave the meeting and join their link to teams in their calendar. Thank you very much.