Bill Wilson MSP

A letter to the Scottish Government from Dr Bill Wilson MSP has elicited reassuring information about the support and treatment offered to sexual abuse survivors in Scotland.

Dr Wilson said, “I have been following the blog of Angela Bayley, the pseudonym of a sexual abuse survivor.  She is suing Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC) for the abuse she suffered from paedophiles when in NCC’s care as a child.  She was recently sectioned for three weeks following NCC’s accusation that she was ‘mentally unstable’.  The apparently insensitive and inappropriate treatment she suffered while detained, as reported in her blog, prompted me to write to the Scottish Government to seek reassurance that abuse survivors could not suffer similarly in this country.

“Ms Bayley wrote that far from being consulted about her care and ongoing detention, she was consistently silenced and ignored, to the extent that a meeting was arranged to discuss her case to suit everyone but her – she had to cancel a scheduled operation as the judge did not let her speak. She has a lot more to say about the inadequacy of her treatment, and I refer people to her blog.

Dr Bill Wilson MSP (West of Scotland, SNP) has written to the Scottish Government’s Cabinet Secretary for Justice seeking reassurance that the alleged traumatic experience of an English sexual abuse survivor at the hands of the justice and healthcare services in England could not be replicated in Scotland.

Dr Wilson said, “I have been following the horrific experiences of Angela Bayley, as described in her blog, at the hands of the NHS and justice services in Nottinghamshire.  Ms Bayley, whom I have met and who claims she was repeatedly sexually abused as a child, writes that her current experiences reflect what happened to her previously, when she was sidelined by adults who refused to believe accounts of the abuse she suffered from a family friend, from a school teacher, from a care home worker and from her foster father.

This week’s approval of the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Bill by the Scottish Parliament marked the closure of a loophole that allowed organisations convicted of criminal offences to falsely plead poverty and so avoid meaningful fines.

Dr Bill Wilson MSP (West of Scotland, SNP) explained:  “Included in the new Act was an amendment that had its roots in the original version of my Criminal Sentencing (Equity Fines) (Scotland) Bill. This amendment plugs a glaring gap in our justice system, one that quite possibly contributed to the high rate of deaths and injuries in the workplace – an annual work-related death toll in excess of 1,600, according to Louise Adamson of Families Against Corporate Killers.

Dr Bill Wilson MSP, in an ongoing exchange of letters with the Crown Office about potential prosecutions over the invasion of Iraq, has challenged the Solicitor General to explain why the crime of aggression does not currently form part of Scots law and why the declaratory power of the High Court could not be used to make it part of Scots law, as claimed by the Crown Office.

Dr Wilson said, “I was earlier told that the Crown Office could not answer my query because ‘prosecution decisions are not usually made publicly available by the prosecution service in Scotland […] because of the long-standing convention that it is not in the public interest to subject to public debate the alleged criminal conduct of individuals, without any of the usual legal protections afforded by criminal procedure being available to them’.