Mr Stewart has pre-empted the next part of my speech, so I thank him for that intervention.

Earlier this month, I met members of the equally safe joint strategic board to discuss our next steps. We recognise that it is only through all our collective endeavours, and by working together across the system, that violence against women can be eradicated. We discussed a range of issues relating to the aims and delivery of the strategy, and we talked about the importance of taking an intersectional approach that recognises that many women, including disabled women and minority ethnic women, face intersecting marginalisation. Although there has been real progress, we acknowledge that there is still much work to do and that we need to be transparent and inclusive in relation to that work.

Our equally safe strategy has a focus on prevention. We continue to take forward a range of actions in schools to address gender-based violence and sexual harassment, and Rape Crisis Scotland provides a national sexual violence prevention programme for local authority secondary schools across Scotland. Through our delivering equally safe fund, Engender has been funded to explore primary prevention policy approaches and to create a toolkit that enables policy makers to embed primary prevention in policy making. We will continue to work with those stakeholders to further develop our approach in that area through the next phase of the equally safe strategy. If Mr Stewart is keen to hear more about that work, I would be happy to discuss it with him, because I think that that will address what he said in his intervention.

Our mentors in violence prevention programme is working to tackle gender stereotypes and attitudes that condone violence against women and girls. Although educating children and young people by challenging outdated stereotypes is important, perhaps the even bigger challenge is delivering a societal shift towards women being truly equal, because we recognise that violence against women and girls is both a cause and a consequence of systemic and deep-rooted gender inequality. We need to make progress in advancing women’s equality.