The Story Scottish Media Will Not Tell

If you are a man in Scotland, or you have a son, a brother, a father or a friend who is, this concerns you directly. Every year thousands of men in this country are accused of rape or sexual assault. The majority of those accusations do not end in conviction. Many never reach trial at all. The process itself, the investigation, the waiting, the publicity, the destruction of reputation and relationships, can last years. And it has been happening inside a legal framework that the UK Supreme Court ruled unlawful four months ago.

The court found, in plain terms, that Scotland has been conducting sexual offence trials in a manner incompatible with the right to a fair trial for over a decade. A five-judge bench concluded that Scottish courts had been systematically excluding categories of defence evidence in ways that breached Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Law Society of Scotland and the Faculty of Advocates intervened in the case, warning that the issue went to the very core of what a fair trial means. Senior advocate Aidan O'Neill KC described the judgment as greater in significance even than Cadder, the ruling that previously forced Scotland to overhaul its entire approach to police interview procedures.

You would not know any of this from reading Scottish media coverage of sexual violence.

A recent article in Glasgow Live shows how that coverage tends to work. Published alongside the launch of the Scottish Rape Crisis Alliance, it declares that Scotland faces an "emergency" of violence against women, draws heavily on statements from rape crisis charities, and presents rising recorded crime figures as straightforward evidence of a worsening crisis. The men on the other side of these accusations, the accused, their families and anyone concerned with what is happening to them inside a justice system the Supreme Court has just declared structurally unfair, are entirely absent from the piece.

This is not an isolated editorial decision by one outlet. It is the routine shape of Scottish media coverage on this subject. And it matters, because what goes unreported shapes what the public believes, and what the public believes shapes what politicians feel safe doing.

What the statistics show when you look at all of them

The Scottish Government's own recorded crime bulletin confirms that reported rapes and attempted rapes rose 15% last year, from 2,522 to 2,897, and by 60% over the past decade. Those are real figures and nobody is disputing them. But the same bulletin contains a caveat that campaign groups and the journalists who rely on them routinely omit. The Scottish Government explicitly states that "a number of legislative and procedural changes should be kept in mind when reviewing trends in Sexual crimes over the longer term." It notes that 25% of sex crimes recorded in 2024-25 occurred at least a year before they were reported, and that hundreds of recorded rapes relate to offences committed before the Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2009 even came into force. Expanded definitions, reporting campaigns and changes to how crimes are categorised have all contributed to the upward trend in the numbers. None of this appears in the Glasgow Live piece.

Then there is what happens after a report is made, which is the part of the picture that matters most to the men accused and which Scottish media almost never discusses. Scottish Government analysis published in 2024 found that in cases where rape or attempted rape was the single charge on the indictment, the five-year average conviction rate between 2018 and 2023 was just 24%. In 2020-21, there were 2,176 recorded rapes but only 78 convictions. The acquittal rate for rape is the highest of any crime type in Scotland, against an average acquittal rate across all crimes of 6%. These figures are drawn from the Scottish Government's own published data and from Rape Crisis Scotland's own statistics page. They are not disputed. They are simply not reported.

What they tell us is not that the justice system is failing victims, although that is one possible interpretation. They tell us that an enormous number of men are accused of rape in Scotland each year, that the overwhelming majority of those accusations either do not proceed to trial or do not result in conviction, and that this reality exists within a legal framework the Supreme Court has just found to be structurally biased against the accused. That is a story about men and what is happening to them inside the Scottish justice system. It does not appear to be a story Scottish media is interested in telling.

The ruling Scottish media has chosen to ignore

On 12 November 2025, the UK Supreme Court handed down its judgment in Daly and Keir v HM Advocate [2025] UKSC 38. Both individual appeals were dismissed, but the court's wider findings were extraordinary. A five-judge bench found that since around 2013, Scottish courts had been treating categories of defence evidence as inadmissible on common law grounds, effectively bypassing the statutory framework under sections 274 and 275 of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995 that Parliament had designed to balance the protection of complainers with the rights of the accused. The court found that approach unlawful and incompatible with Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Law Society of Scotland and the Faculty of Advocates took the unusual step of intervening in the case, led by Roddy Dunlop KC and Claire Mitchell KC, citing widespread professional concern that accused persons were being denied the right to put relevant evidence before a jury. Senior advocate Aidan O'Neill KC described the significance of the ruling as even greater than the landmark Cadder decision, finding a systemic imbalance against the accused that had been operating in Scottish courts for over a decade.

What this means in plain terms is that men have been standing trial for rape in Scotland under rules that the country's highest court has now found to be legally defective. The implications for the integrity of past convictions, and for what reform is now urgently required, are serious and unresolved. Scottish media has reported almost nothing of this.

Who gets to speak, and who does not

The Glasgow Live piece is built almost entirely around statements from rape crisis charities. This is not unusual. Across Scottish media coverage of sexual violence, rape crisis organisations function as the default analytical authority. Their framing sets the terms of the story, their statistics define the problem, and their policy goals shape what solutions are discussed.

There is nothing wrong with rape crisis organisations speaking publicly. That is precisely their role. But they are campaign groups, not neutral observers, and their institutional purpose is to argue that the issue they work on demands more resources, stronger laws and greater weight given to complainers within the justice system. The accused, by definition, is not their concern.

The effect of treating these organisations as the primary lens through which sexual violence is reported is that one side of the justice process is routinely humanised and the other is routinely invisible. Victims are discussed. The accused are not. The experiences of complainers are explored. The experiences of men who are acquitted, or who are never charged despite years of their lives being upended by investigation, are not. The question of what a false or mistaken allegation does to the person it is made against is almost never raised, despite the fact that the majority of men who face rape charges in Scotland do not end up convicted.

This is not balance. It is a sustained editorial choice to cover one half of the justice system while ignoring the other, and to do so in the name of a "gender emergency" framing that makes any alternative perspective almost impossible to voice without being accused of minimising harm.

Why this matters beyond one article

The consequences of this kind of journalism are not abstract. When the public receives only one version of events, that version shapes what politicians believe they can safely do. In Scotland, the legislative response to pressure from advocacy groups has included attempts to remove the corroboration requirement for sexual offences, lower evidential thresholds, and restrict the rights of the defence in court. Some of those changes went ahead. Others were paused. The Supreme Court ruling in Daly and Keir suggests that the direction of travel has already gone too far.

A journalism that cannot ask whether the rights of the accused are being adequately protected, because the editorial climate treats that question as evidence of bad faith towards victims, is not serving the public. It is serving a particular political interest, and it is doing so while men face a justice system that the highest court in the land has found to be structurally unfair to them.

Sexual violence is a serious crime and those who experience it deserve thorough investigation and proper support. That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether Scotland's media is capable of covering this subject honestly, in a way that acknowledges the full complexity of what is happening inside the justice system, including what is happening to the men who pass through it. On the evidence of how the Daly and Keir judgment has been reported, or rather not reported, the answer to that question is not encouraging.