Equally Safe strategy: draft EQIA

draft Equality Impact Assessment: Equally Safe

Equality Impact Assessment Record

Screening

Policy Aim

Equally Safe is Scotland's strategy for preventing and eradicating violence against women and girls. Our aim is to work collaboratively with key partners across all sectors to prevent and eradicate all forms of violence against women and girls.

It contributes to the following National Outcomes:

• We live our lives free from crime, disorder and danger
• We have tackled the significant inequalities in Scottish society
• We have strong resilient and supportive communities where people take responsibility for their own actions and how they affect others
• Our children have the best start in life and are ready to succeed
• We have improved the life chances for children, young people and families at risk
• Our public services are high quality, continually improving, efficient and responsive to people's needs
• We realise our full economic potential with more and better employment opportunities for our people
• We live longer healthier lives

Who will it affect?

The actions listed in the Equally Safe delivery plan, a 4 year plan that sets out how we wish to achieve a Scotland where everyone lives equally safe from gender-based violence, will impact on everyone in Scotland.

The policy will mostly benefit women and girls as they are the majority of victims of gender-based violence. However, the actions to achieve gender equality, greater knowledge of consent, positive gender role models and healthy relationships, and the actions to support victims and deal with perpetrators, will benefit everyone.

Honour-based violence is one of the areas of violence we wish to eradicate, and the actions taken to do this will impact positively on minority ethnic communities where so-called honour-based violence such as forced marriage and female genital mutilation still take place.

Our work to raise the profile of gender based violence and to raise awareness of what constitutes consent, healthy relationships and positive gender roles

will affect people across Scotland. The greatest affected will be children and young people through initiatives to review Personal and Social Education in schools, the Rape Crisis Scotland Sexual Prevention Programme and the Mentors in Violence Prevention Programme. There are also a number of actions designed to help children and young people experiencing domestic abuse within their families.

LGBTI communities will be affected by the strategy as one of the actions requires that all funded services providing front line support to people experiencing gender based violence include an LGBTI action plan, designed to improve service provision to these communities.

The strategy recognises the unique challenges and vulnerabilities faced by disabled women and girls, and those in care or of advanced age.

The strategy is focussed on preventing and eradicating violence against women and girls. The definition adopted explicitly includes children of all genders but excludes men. While the strategy recognises that gender-based violence can be experienced by anyone, there are not specific actions designed to improve the situation of men alone, although some actions will benefit Scottish society as a whole including men.

What might prevent the desired outcomes being achieved?

Factors that might prevent Equally Safe's outcomes from being achieved:

• Reductions in national and local authority funding leading to reductions in frontline services
• Lack of shift in social attitudes or a regression
• Insufficient uptake of RSHP/PSE/Consent and healthy relationships education
• The hidden nature of practices such as Honour Based Violence, Forced Marriage and Female Genital Mutilation.
• Underreporting of domestic abuse, sexual assault and other forms of gender based violence