Seòmar agus comataidhean

Thank you for the opportunity to meet the committee today. I will take a few minutes to outline what I will refer to as the self-harm amendment, which has triggered the requirement for a legislative consent motion, and explain why the Scottish Government is recommending consent.

The committee has previously considered an LCM on the Online Safety Bill. The self-harm amendment creates an offence of communicating material that could encourage another person to engage in serious self-harm. The proposed penalties on summary conviction are imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or a fine, or both. On indictment conviction, the proposed penalties are imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years or a fine, or both.

As members are aware, self-harm is a complex and sensitive issue. For many people, it is a response to emotional distress. It is often hidden and, although the data is quite poor, there is evidence that it is increasing, particularly among young people. Although we know that self-harm can be a way of managing distress, it also has the potential to cause serious physical and psychological damage. Furthermore, we know that self-harm can be a predictor for future suicide risk.

The Scottish Government is already taking strong action to improve support and care for people who have self-harmed. For example, we are investing in specialist support and working in partnership with people with lived experience to develop a new self-harm strategy and action plan, which will be published later this year.

We recognise that some really helpful information and support are available online. However, people could also encounter significant risks when they are looking for help online. That can expose people who are already vulnerable to harmful and malicious content and result in more serious injury—and perhaps even suicide.

Since late 2022, the Scottish Government has engaged extensively with a range of organisations, and directly with people with their own experience of self-harm, on the potential implications of the proposed offence. There is consensus that the offence will bolster online protections and help to prevent the risk of serious self-harm and potential suicide deaths.

Some stakeholders have questioned whether the offence could criminalise vulnerable people who communicate about their experiences of self-harm with peers online as a way of providing or receiving support. The UK Government’s position, with which I agree, is that the offence should capture only the most serious encouragement of self-harm. To that end, the amendment seeks to define the scope of the offence narrowly, with a high threshold to prosecute acts only if they could result in serious harm and where there is a deliberate intention to encourage or assist that harm.

With that in mind, it is the Scottish Government’s view that the new offence will ensure that strong action can be taken to prosecute people who share material that is intended to encourage others to self-harm. It will act as a deterrent to people communicating harmful or malicious messages in the first place. Extending the offence to Scotland will therefore strengthen protections for people online and ensure that the internet is a safer place for anybody, and in particular for people who are seeking mental health or self-harm support.

In closing, I will make three points in support of the proposed amendment. First, the Scottish Government recognises the need to balance creating a safe environment for people who are at risk of self-harm with facilitating non-stigmatising, compassionate and effective support, which might include online support. We consider that the amendment sits comfortably with those dual aims and that it aligns very well with our ambitious approach to self-harm.

Secondly, on balance, we consider that there is significant value in clarifying the legal framework for prosecuting and deterring communications that encourage acts of self-harm in a consistent way across the UK by extending the offence to Scotland.

Thirdly, we consider that extending the offence to Scotland will act as a deterrent and provide a robust means of prosecuting deliberate acts of communicating material that is intended to encourage self-harm.

I hope that the committee supports our view that the legislative consent motion is necessary. I would be happy to deal with any questions.

That is definitely an important area to acknowledge. We live in a gender-stereotyped world where girls and women are expected to look and behave in a certain way and to conform to certain roles. There is no doubt at all that, as children grow up and reach puberty, they experiment and find out who their tribe is, and they test out and explore the world that they live in. Part of that can absolutely involve thinking that women’s bodies are pass-comment-able. That is the term that I use; I hope that it is okay to use it here. We face that all the time. Each and every female in this room will have had times when people have passed comment on their appearance.

It is particularly difficult for teenage girls. I hear all the time that boys’ comments are a barrier to their participation. Education can help to tackle that, but we have to recognise that—as with other societal challenges such as racism—the existence of sexism and misogyny in sport reflects society. We live in a world where those things are a reality, so some of that will be reflected in sport.

However, I firmly believe that sport can lead the way on changing that culture. I believe that there are some positives that sport can lead on in shifting the culture. It is important that we harness sport’s power to tackle some of those societal ills. As well as looking at education in schools, we can look at role models in sport and at grass-roots projects that might tackle some of those issues. That is a really important part of the work.

Yes, absolutely. There are many barriers to participation in sport, including the need for kit and equipment. As, I think, the committee heard, not all sports are equal. For example, I looked at the evidence that you were given in an earlier meeting by that young female cricketer, who said that because of the equipment that is required for cricket, it tends to attract people who are from a wealthier socioeconomic background. There are many barriers to getting involved and we, as a Government, want to bust as many of them as we can.

One of the great programmes—there are so many brilliant programmes—involved Scottish Sports Futures collaborating with Sweaty Betty, which is a luxury brand of sportswear. It provided hundreds and hundreds of bras so that young women who might have been prevented from getting involved in sport and physical activity had the right equipment. A sports bra is a really expensive acquisition—it can cost £30 to £60 to buy one decent sports bra. That is an absolute barrier for many young people in relation to getting involved in sport, so that collaboration is really phenomenal. I love the fact that that particular group of young women were getting the most luxurious brand that you could imagine. They came up and met me in Inverness and we did some sport and exercise together; it is a fantastic way to open the conversation about the possible barriers.

The need for specialist kit is not the only barrier to participating in sport. As you have heard from witnesses throughout this inquiry, those young women spoke to me about the challenges of being involved with sport while they are menstruating and the challenges of the general societal pressure to look and to behave a certain way. Women’s bodies, including young women’s bodies, are pretty pass-comment-able—that is the phrase that I would use—so they face a lot of commentary when they do get involved in sport.

Having money for kit is not the only barrier, but it is certainly a significant one and just now, in a cost of living crisis, it can absolutely make the difference when it comes to some women being able to exercise and some women not being able to.

We are doing quite a lot of work in that space already. Andy Sinclair will probably want to come in and tell you a bit more about the work that sportscotland is doing with local authority colleagues on the sporting estate nationally, to try to take a strategic view about where investment will have the most impact. We are working very closely with our local authority colleagues on that. I absolutely empathise with how tough a situation they are in. We are in a tough situation too, and difficult decisions are being made. It is a really difficult time to be in politics.

We have very open and candid channels of communication and support available. What we do not have is a limitless pot of money to help out in such situations. That is challenging for all of us. There are no easy short-term solutions in the situation that we face. In the longer term, we can certainly work to get the estate on to a better footing.

There has been a great deal of progress over the years. I am very pleased that recent data from the Scottish health survey shows a significant four percentage points increase in women meeting the UK chief medical officer’s recommended levels of activity: the level has gone up from 61 to 65 per cent and the gap between levels of participation by men and women is closing. However, although we are delighted that things are headed in the right direction, I do not think that any of us would want to be complacent. We have to continue to work to improve that situation.

There have been some brilliant leadership successes, particularly with younger women taking up opportunities for leadership in sport. Again, I am delighted to see that progress but we cannot be complacent. Although we are seeing more female athletes participating in sport, when it comes to sports governing bodies and the organisation of sport in general, we are not seeing that participation reflected in the boardroom, nor are we seeing the level of participation that we would like to see in the governance of sport, in terms of officials and things like that. So we have more work to do, but we have some good things to report.

You will be aware that, between the pandemic and the challenges that we faced in balancing the budget last year, some tough decisions were made and we did not progress with some work that we had intended to do. It is still our aim to hold a media summit and to challenge some of the reporting around female participation in sport. There are challenges. Football is our national game and everybody loves it, but it probably gets more coverage than almost all the other sports put together. I think that you heard about some of that in your evidence.

The fact that women are playing football, and playing it successfully, means that they are now gaining some coverage, but that does not help to celebrate the successes of other sports. An athlete who is involved in judo gave evidence to you, but the football coverage does not help to give her sport the profile that it deserves. Let me tell you that we are very successful at judo in Scotland and we have some fantastic female athletes participating in that sport.

There are real challenges, although I think that there is a cultural change afoot. There has been some change, particularly with broadcast media—I must credit BBC Alba for its work bringing women’s sport to television. That is phenomenally important. Every year, we have a women and girls in sport week, and every time we are told just how important it is for people to see the roles that they want to be in:

“If you can’t see it, you can’t be it”.

That is vital. I am absolutely passionate about sport. I have not found a sport yet that I do not like. I would like to see coverage of a more diverse range of sports and, absolutely, a celebration of those female athletes who are challenging some of the stereotypes in society.

I am a passionate rugby fan. When I see some of the social media films that are brought out about the Scottish women’s rugby team, where they are lifting weights and are shown as really strong physical role models, that busts the myth about women in general. It is really important that more people see those things.

There is no doubt that what you have highlighted are challenges to women’s participation in sport. Safety—and safe transport to and from sporting venues—is an issue, particularly during the long, dark winters that we have in Scotland, when not everyone feels comfortable being out and about at night. Frankly, some of our environments are not safe for women. Again, that is something that every woman makes decisions about every day. It is the reality of our lives: we make decisions about how much risk we are willing to take and make compromises as a result.

Designing communities with good active transport links to sporting hubs is therefore important. A couple of weeks ago, I opened the phenomenal West Lothian Cycle Circuit, which is linked to active transport routes, is well lit and has been beautifully made so that you can cycle to the track from many parts of the surrounding community.

It is important that we think about those sorts of things, including public transport. In my part of the country, and where I live now, public transport barely exists at all; indeed, where I used to live in the east of the Highlands, public transport tended to stop at a certain time of night. These are undoubtedly challenges and barriers for women, and we need to think about them by designing public transport systems that are accessible to and safe for women and by ensuring that communities are well lit and well designed.

I saw the evidence from one of the committee’s earlier witnesses about the fact that women feel more comfortable and safer walking in overlooked places—say, where there are lots of windows looking out onto a path. It is not always obvious what makes the difference, but we need to do more research and ensure that our communities are safe for women.

Childcare and caring in general are really important issues, too. I have been encouraging many sports to think about opportunities to link up. Given that women do a lot of children’s activities and organise a lot of aspects of children’s lives, we need to provide opportunities for women to participate in sport while their children are doing the same. I remember very well what the first captain of the Orkney Rugby Football Club ladies said about her journey into rugby. She was a rugby mum who had to hang about while her wee boy was at training and just thought, “How about we start training ourselves?” Within two or three years, that women’s team was picking up silverware—they were pretty phenomenal at rugby. Giving women opportunities to train while their children are training is important.

Jogscotland does a lot of that. I participated in a jogscotland group when my kids were really tiny; I could drop my children off at nursery and go for a jog with an inspirational group that was mixed gender, but mainly women, as it was during the day. There were some outstanding older women in that group who gave me, as a young mum feeling very out of condition, a lot of inspiration about the potential for lifelong participation.

There are some real opportunities for collaboration to provide—in that first postnatal year, for example—yoga and exercises that are focused on pelvic health. That would be a win-win. Encouraging more of that, with babies coming along, too, would be a really important way of encouraging women to exercise.

As for the school estate, we have, again, lots of policies in place to enable its use, and it is seeing lots of use. More could happen and we could go further, but we have made a great deal of progress in the past years. We have had a challenging few years with the pandemic, with safety and prevention of infectious diseases at the forefront of people’s minds. Trying to limit the number of people who access the school estate in a day has been challenging, and that situation has been slow to recover, post pandemic, but we are making progress.

You are absolutely right to raise the issue. There is already general concern about each of those groups and the women and girls who fall into those individual categories. Undoubtedly, the barriers are greater for those who are in more than one group.

A group that particularly challenges me is people with disabilities, and I would love to see more participation from—and more opportunities for—that group across the board. When I went to a disability sport festival in Dingwall, I was so impressed by the work that was going on to target inclusion. That was probably over a year ago, so it was at a time when we were still feeling pretty cautious about the pandemic. Many of that group of participants had spent a lot of the pandemic being very isolated and very vulnerable, and it was really joyous to see them participating in sport, sometimes with siblings, as they might never get a chance to play those games or do that sport together in the way that other siblings do.

Some really important work is going on, and it is bearing some fruit, but we could do more. Last year, sportscotland’s young people’s sports panel ran a very powerful course that challenged us all to reflect on what adaptations we could make to encourage the participation of people with disabilities. When I speak to people participating in sport who have disabilities, almost all of them talk about how challenging it was to get involved in school; they were told to sit at the side in PE classes. As those education sessions amply demonstrated, it is really easy to make adaptations that enable everybody to be included, and my plea is for every possible opportunity to encourage inclusion and participation to be taken.

I can highlight some great examples. Recently, I went to a badminton club run by a coach called Rajani Tyagi, who had won a prize as sportscotland community coach of the year—or something like that; I have probably got the title of the award wrong, so apologies to Rajani if I have. She had done some fabulous work on encouraging participation by the black, Asian and minority ethnic community. It was just the basic things that you would expect, and what she was doing was spread by word of mouth. She targeted people; she made sure that they had a safe environment to come along to; and she held sessions at times that suited people. They were at 8 o’clock at night, which would have been quite late for me to be running around playing badminton, but it worked, because many of the people involved had caring responsibilities and it was a time of night when they were freed from those responsibilities and could participate.

It is just basic: you ask the community that you are targeting what would work for them, then you do it and you reach out. Rajani had a thriving badminton club, and she had done quite a lot of work on cricket as a way of targeting BAME participation. Some really powerful work was going on.

As for the LGBTQ+ community and homophobia in sport, I think that the committee has heard from earlier commentators that women’s sport has traditionally been quite a safe space; it has been inclusive and welcoming to everyone. We really need to be proud of and hang on to that as we go forward. Clearly, there is a debate to be had about trans participation in sport, and some challenging conversations are taking place on that issue, but I again make the plea that we focus on inclusion where possible, recognising just how important the benefits that everyone gets from participating in sport are.

Each of the communities that we have talked about will face marginalisation and challenging health outcomes, and sport can be part of the answer. We therefore really need to make sure that we consider inclusion, where possible. As I have said, women’s sport has had a relatively healthy attitude to earlier discussions in previous times, and we need to hang on to that.

Individual sports governing bodies are looking at that question to varying degrees. They want more participation, so it is absolutely in their interests to ask those questions and to pursue the answers. I do not think that the answer will be the same for every sport. It is also difficult to generalise about different ethnicities. Rajani Tyagi, the badminton coach whom I mentioned earlier, initially was largely targeting Muslim women’s participation, but a whole variety of people of different ethnicities were coming along. What she had done was create a safe space for people of different ethnicities to participate in sport.

There are all sorts of barriers—for example, certain religions might have rules around modesty or clothing, but not all of them do. Therefore, once you get the data, you need to ask in a sensitive way what the barriers are for people and try to take them away. As I said, participation is key; we are dead keen to improve participation and all the sports governing bodies will be trying to do that.

You are absolutely correct, James. That drop-off around puberty is well recognised and it is a long-established pattern. It is a challenging situation to shift. For children, we see a difference in participation that becomes statistically significant only between the ages of 13 and 15. Although boys participate more than girls, that does not become statistically significant until puberty. We see that difference continue throughout life. The reduction in participation is not permanent. Girls’ physical activity drops off at puberty, as does boys’ physical activity, but they re-engage at future points.

For women and girls, there will be expectations around caring roles from a very early age. There are challenges when girls hit puberty, because of the changes in their bodies. On my daily mile this morning, I was reflecting on the difference in my body confidence at age 50 compared with age 15, and I think that everyone would recognise such differences.

There are challenges for girls as they come of age in a gendered society such as the one that we live in at the moment. There are expectations with regard to body conformation and there is discomfort about menstruation. On the radio this morning, I heard a triathlete, Emma Pallant-Browne, talking about a photograph that she had posted of herself running with a bloodstained swimsuit. Menstruation is still taboo and body hair is still taboo. There are all sorts of reasons why girls stop exercising as we hit puberty.

It is a challenging issue to get into, but I think that we are in a healthier space than we have ever been in with regard to the debate that is occurring. There are particular programmes and other things that will help, including women and girls-only spaces. With regard to communal changing spaces, I note that women tend to have a preference for privacy, so changing the changing rooms so that it is possible for women and girls to change privately rather than in a communal space will help.

However, there is massive societal pressure and it will take time. We must not underestimate the societal pressure on women and girls to look a certain way, which we feel most strongly at the stage of life between the ages of 11 and 15.