There has been a lot of domestic abuse in the news over the last few days, not that the subject is ever absent for long. I’ve interviewed many women in the last two decades who have been victims of horrific domestic violence. It is obvious to me, but it might not be too all, that in an abusive relationship rape is always involved.
A few weeks ago, I interviewed a brave survivor who had helped put her pathetic and scrawny abuser, Stefan Scott, away. Katie Mackinnon waived her right to anonymity and her interview with me appeared in the Record.
She told me, having already told the High Court, that when Scott raped her, he was often choking her at the same time, and that on two occasions she passed out and thought she was going to die. Every sexual act in a relationship like that is rape or assault. In an abusive relationship the idea of consent is nonsense.
A woman who lives with a man who is beating her every day does not go to bed at night wanting to have sex with him. If she doesn’t fight and kick and scream, it’s because she needs to survive.
Scott was convicted of beating six women he lived with, but of raping only three. He claimed they all consented to sex. The courts allow that nonsense and juries often accept it.
Gil Paterson MSP has recently championed a new bill to impose a time limit on defence lawyers seeking a second post-mortem on the bodies of murder victims because it distresses families and delays funerals. He has worked alongside constituent Pamela Munro, mother of murdered Paige Doherty, for three years and it is not yet law, so new laws take time and effort.
This issue, which doubtless affects thousands of women in Scotland each day, needs a champion at Holyrood. It might be something that has to be arrived at in stages, but the outcome needs to be that in a domestic situation where abuse is the norm and brutal physical violence is a daily occurrence, charges of rape must be part of the package.
Some of the men accused admit the beatings because often there are witnesses to those, and medical evidence backs them up, but the sexual abuse happens in private and abusers always claim sex was consensual. When it works, they get two or three years, not seven or eight.
We need to make sure that when women who have been abused get justice, they get it in full, and we need to make brutal cowards pay in full.
Some of my articles that made it to the front page
