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The new Sexual Offences Bill should see the end of legislation that discrimates against lesbians and gay men. Amanda Kendal reports
Goodbye to all that
You could be forgiven for wondering what ever happened to the promised
repeal of Section 28.
Last November, in the wake of the Queen’s speech, UNISON was among
the organisations that were asking exactly that after its omission from
the government’s legislative programme.
Despite a specific election manifesto commitment to repeal, there was no sign of it. As the union’s national lesbian and gay officer, Carola Towle, explained last autumn, “Section 28 was introduced by the Conservatives to ‘outlaw intentional promotion of homosexuality’, but has proved a legal nonsense.”
But finally, in January this year, having omitted the question of repeal
from the forthcoming Local Government Bill, local government minister
Nick Raynsford told the House of Commons that the government would welcome
an amendment from a backbench MP to remove the “unnecessary and undesirable
piece of legislation.”
The Labour MP for Colne Valley, Kali Mountford, has tabled such a cross-party
backbench amendment to overturn Section 28. The measure is now being debated
by the House of Lords.
The 1988 legislation predates the national curriculum and the current
rules on sex education. It has never been used in court and the Department
for Education has long expressed doubts over whether it could ever have
been used against schools.
Head teachers and boards of governors are exempt from Section 28. Since
it is these people, in consultation with parents, who decide on sex education
policy, local authorities have no rights over what is taught.
But as Towle says, it has still had, “a deeply insidious effect”
and “created great confusion about whether teachers can talk openly
about sexuality,” adding “to a culture which fails to recognise
lesbian and gay families.”
Since the insidious clause was introduced, conferences of teachers’
unions have heard exactly how that fear stopped teachers being able to
talk to young people who were confused and needing help.
Children’s charities have illustrated that Section 28 has been a
factor in increases in playground bullying and, more tragically still,
in the number of suicides among young people.
In June 2000, the Scottish parliament scrapped Section 28, yet in July of the same year, the House of Lords voted to retain the clause, ensuring that this overt piece of legislative discrimination remains on the statute book in England and Wales. Hopefully, that will not be for much longer.
As part of the campaign to get rid of Section 28, UNISON co-hosted a
Winning the Arguments conference in January, where lesbian and gay trade
unionists came together to discuss tactics.
Perhaps we are finally on the verge of seeing the back of this homophobic
law. But vigilance is still required. It is still worth raising the matter
with your MP and there are still petitions that can be signed, including
an online petition at Stonewall, the group that campaigns for lesbian
and gay rights.
But, by the beginning of May, when the moment for a final vote arrives,
hopefully we will be able to celebrate clause 119 of the Local Government
Act – the repeal of Section 28.
Of course, sometimes, it’s quite easy to believe that, ‘symbols’
like Section 28 apart, gay equality is already largely with us. Yet it
was only as recently as 1992 that the World Health Organisation officially
declassified homosexuality as a mental illness.
And gay men in particular still face ridiculous daily onslaughts. For
instance, the current law is such that, if more than two gay men get together
for sex, then they are open to prosecution, no matter that they are consenting
adults.
But the idiocy of the current law goes even further: if one woman is
present during such a sexual scenario, then the law assumes that the men
are having sex with the woman and, therefore, everything is fine.
For women, however, the case is quite different, since the law, from
Queen Victoria’s time on, has never recognised that two women could
or would have sex with each other.
On a more everyday level, gay men are frequently persecuted for simply
doing the same things that straight couples regularly do, but because
they are gay, they fall under the discriminatory catch-all of ‘gross
indecency’.
For instance, many gay men have been criminalised and forced to sign
on the Sex Offenders’ Register for the heinous crime of being caught
with another man on local ‘lovers’ lanes’.
According to Stonewall, this sort of case has been particularly prevalent
in North Wales, due, they say, to “over-zealous policing”.
In 2000, Stonewall put the UK in the dock at the European Court of Human
Rights, where judges in the case of ADT v UK, ruled that the current offence
of gross indecency is discriminatory, since it is only applied to gay
men (and, very occasionally, lesbians).
Now the Sexual Offences Bill - currently in committee stage in the Lords
- will, amongst other things, seek to address such discriminatory legislation.
It will place heterosexual and homosexual law on an equal footing, with
a new public order offence dealing with sexual acts in public and the
behaviour leading up to them, where these are likely to cause distress,
alarm or offence to anyone seeing them.
Working on the assumption that this Bill will pass into law, Stonewall
has joined forces with the Liberal Democrats to campaign for an amendment
that would mean that any gay man who had been convicted of an offence
that was now no longer an offence would have his name removed from the
Sex Offenders’ Register.
Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Walmsley told UNISON that it was important
that, “if the law has moved on, we should move on and be humane.”
“It [being on the Sexual Offenders’ Register] affects life
opportunities, such as job opportunities. If the law has moved on, we
should let people’s lives move on.”
UNISON is clear that campaigning on all these issues needs to continue.
With so much at stake, we must not be complacent.
Contact the article's author Amanda Kendal
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