Scotland cannot claim to protect women while licensing strip clubs

Another insists sexual entertainment venues (SEVs), as the policy makers and lawyers describe them, affect all women, not just those working there.

And a third describes how the very existence of Glasgow’s three strip clubs affects women’s safety. She says: ”The areas round these clubs are scary to go through. It's not just about the violence that often seems to take place in the area. The existence of these clubs affects all women. It affects how women are seen”.

The three women are just some of the respondents in a survey carried out recently by UK-wide feminist organisation FiLiA into the impact of Glasgow’s strip clubs on women in the city. The report, ‘Glasgow’s shame: Not just behind closed doors’, is due to be published next month - another element in the growing campaign to end the licensing of sexual entertainment venues across Scotland. Tomorrow, FiLiA will host a women-only online event to discuss Stirling Council’s recent, and surprising, decision to hold a public consultation on whether the council should license strip clubs and, if so, how many. The city currently has none.

Aberdeen has the dubious honour of hosting the largest number of clubs of any Scottish city – there are currently five – but last month, the council’s Licensing Committee agreed to gradually phase them out, while continuing to allow the existing venues to reapply for a licence when it falls due. Aberdeen’s new policy appears to be one of gradual reduction through closure rather than an immediate ban, perhaps cognisant of Edinburgh’s legal tangle when it tried to close down the Capital’s clubs.

In 2024, a judge ruled that the council’s Labour administration's attempt to introduce a ‘nil cap’ on strip clubs, which would have forced the city’s three venues to close, was based on shaky legal advice. In light of the ruling, opposition councillors on the licensing committee voted to allow the clubs to continue to ply their trade. “We are not here to make moral judgements,” argued SNP councillor Martha Mattos Coelho at the time. But the council leader, Councillor Jane Meagher, seems determined to pursue the matter.

Towards the end of November, during the ‘16 Days of Activism’ – the annual global campaign on violence against women and girls – Councillor Meagher will host a roundtable with city MP Tracy Gilbert which will “explore options for the future of the city’s approach”. Gilbert, who earlier this week was appointed chair of Westminster’s all-party group on commercial sexual exploitation, insists that strip clubs cannot be treated as a “niche licensing issue”. She says they must “form part of the conversation about women's safety, equality and the kind of city we want Edinburgh to be." And she made clear that she wants the future of SEVs to be “firmly on the agenda” ahead of future licensing decisions, and crucially next May’s council elections.

In recent months, it would seem that tackling male violence against women and its root causes has become a personal crusade for First Minister John Swinney. He has described the rates of violence and abuse that women suffer as a “national emergency” and his government has set out an extensive legislative agenda in a bid to tackle the rising number of incidents, including a Misogyny Bill, a bill to improve legal protection for survivors of violence and plans for a new national Sexual Offences Court. And he has pledged his “personal leadership” to tackle the culture that has allowed violence and abuse to flourish.

He has, rightly, highlighted the online cesspit of easily accessible pornography as being responsible for warping the attitudes of men and boys in “disturbing and profoundly harmful ways”. And he has promised to tackle the cultural causes of gender-based violence.

In a landmark speech to parliament in September, he declared that he is committed to shifting the cultural context in an effort to prevent violence from occurring in the first place.

Brave, ambitious words, First Minister. So perhaps it is now time that you recognised that the harmful effects of the “living pornography” found in strip clubs have no place in our society either. Your government’s own Equally Safe strategy explicitly defines lap dancing and stripping as a form of violence against women, yet SNP councillors argue that it is not their job to make “moral judgements” about the safety of women in their city.

And despite John Swinney’s self-avowed crusade, there is no sign that the Scottish government has plans to change the national framework that allows each council to make licensing decisions. How the First Minister can reconcile councils sanctioning venues whose sole business model is the sexual exploitation of women with his commitment to “shift the cultural context” on violence against women is for him alone to answer.

But the electorate also has a voice. The council elections next May will be fought on many issues, from the housing emergency that affects so many parts of Scotland to the potholes that scar our streets. We will be voting for people we trust to protect our local neighbourhoods, and for a growing number of women, that means choosing councillors who will do everything in their power to end the commercial sexual exploitation of women.

Neither government ministers nor local councils can continue to champion women's equality while approving strip clubs. As a respondent to the Glasgow Shame report says: “Strip clubs make all women in the vicinity feel unsafe. All the street lighting in the world won't change that.”