“Equally Safe” – Or Ideologically Captive?

A Response to the Scottish Government’s 2024–2026 Delivery Plan

♦

A Nation That No Longer Speaks for Half Its People

The Scottish Government’s new Equally Safe Delivery Plan presents itself as a moral and strategic framework to advance safety, justice, and equality for all. Its language is humane, its purpose apparently self-evident. Yet on closer reading, the plan reveals a troubling asymmetry. It speaks of equality while seeing violence almost entirely through the lens of male culpability and female victimhood.

This is not an incidental bias of language. It is a conceptual choice, one that determines whose suffering counts, whose innocence can be presumed, and whose voice is heard within our institutions. If a public safety strategy begins from the assumption that one sex is inherently suspect, it risks becoming less a plan for equality than an instrument of division.

“Violence Against Women and Girls”: A Singular Framing with Serious Consequences

The plan is built around a single phrase: violence against women and girls (VAWG). The term appears hundreds of times. Nowhere is there reference to violence against men.

Source: Equally Safe Delivery Plan, Introduction & Deliverable 12, pp. 4, 29–30

This framing carries moral force but also moral cost. It excludes recognition of male victims of domestic abuse, sexual violence, and coercive control. It erases the existence of female perpetrators — whose abuse is documented in family courts, educational settings, and same-sex relationships. And it directs the justice system to “hold men to account”, often before due process has run its course.

Such a gendered narrative may seem to clarify the social problem of violence, but it instead distorts it. It transforms statistical generalities into ethical absolutes. If justice is to remain impartial, it cannot rest on the presumption of collective guilt.

Ideology Over Evidence: Redefining Violence to Fit a Narrative

The plan expands the definition of “violence” far beyond physical harm. It now includes “misogyny”, “harmful attitudes”, “pornography”, “unwanted behaviours online”, and even the design of public play spaces.

Source: Equally Safe Delivery Plan, Deliverables 5, 6 & 9, pp. 14–17, 22–23

At first glance, this seems progressive, an attempt to address the cultural roots of aggression. But when moral disapproval becomes indistinguishable from violence, the concept itself loses coherence. If disagreement, satire, or lawful expression can be reclassified as “harm”, we move from protecting citizens to managing their thoughts.

Societies remain free only so long as they resist the temptation to criminalise attitude. A government that claims to know which beliefs are safe and which are dangerous has already begun to mistake ideology for evidence.

Boys in the Firing Line: Re-education Through Schools

Education is the moral centre of any society, and so it is here that ideology finds its most subtle foothold. Under the Equally Safe at School programme, all secondary schools are expected to participate in training that identifies “harmful masculine behaviours” and promotes “gender-based violence awareness”.

Source: Equally Safe Delivery Plan, Deliverables 7 & 8, pp. 18–21

No one doubts the importance of empathy and respect. But when the curriculum itself implies that boys are potential aggressors and girls perpetual victims, we replace moral development with moral conditioning.

Where is the recognition of boys who are bullied, abused, or falsely accused? Where is the protection of intellectual freedom and critical thought? The classroom should cultivate understanding, not ideological conformity. A nation that teaches its sons to apologise for existing cannot long claim to be teaching equality.

No Room for Male Victims: The Institutional Silence

Throughout the plan, one silence is conspicuous. Male victims are not mentioned, not even once.

Statistically, around one in three victims of domestic abuse in Scotland are men. Men suffer sexual violence, especially in prisons and institutional settings. False accusations, though rare, destroy lives and reputations. Yet there is no structure of support for such cases, no acknowledgment that these victims exist.

Silence, here, is not neutral. It communicates whose pain is permitted to matter. A strategy that cannot name half its victims cannot claim moral universality.

A Justice System at Risk of Capture

The Equally Safe framework reaches into the courts themselves. It proposes that criminal and civil law, including child contact and family proceedings, be reshaped through a “gender lens”. Funding is tied to adherence with this ideological framework rather than to measurable fairness or outcomes.

Source: Equally Safe Delivery Plan, Deliverables 11 & 12, pp. 27–30

At first, this seems an attempt to ensure sensitivity to survivors. Yet when “trauma-informed” practice replaces evidence-based inquiry, the principle of impartial justice begins to erode. A legal system that privileges subjective belief over demonstrable fact cannot protect either accuser or accused.

Fairness is not a secondary virtue. It is the condition for all others. To sacrifice it for ideological alignment is to trade justice for comfort.

Equality Must Be for Everyone, Or It’s for No One

Scotland deserves a national strategy that protects every victim, regardless of sex. Compassion does not divide neatly along gender lines, nor does violence. If our institutions forget this, they risk deepening the very injustices they claim to oppose.

The Equally Safe Delivery Plan is an earnest attempt to create a safer world, but its foundations are compromised by ideology. A government cannot correct inequality by refusing to see it wherever it contradicts its narrative.

Equality, like truth, cannot be selectively applied. It must be defended universally — or it ceases to exist at all.

Link to the full document:
Download the Equally Safe Delivery Plan (2024–2026)

Written in collaboration with the Accused.scot Research Team, October 2025.
Contains information © Crown copyright 2024, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
This article reflects the author’s analysis and opinion based on the Scottish Government’s Equally Safe Delivery Plan (2024–2026).