Pheona Matovu: I think we need to reconsider what the law does. it's in what it does, not in what it is. What it is can be changed. We can rethink, we can remodel, we can redesign. we must consider that when these laws were put in place, perhaps the people that should have been in the rooms were not in the rooms.

Jen Ang: Hello and welcome to a special series of three podcasts, part of our Equal under the Law series, which explores three big questions about the complex relationship between law and social justice through interviews with some of Scotland's most inspiring and impactful activists campaigning today. Over the past few months, we have interviewed 11 guests for the Lawmanity podcast who work across a range of social justice issues, including LGBT rights, racial justice, migrants rights, Scottish traveler rights, disability justice, and the rights of women and girl survivors. We asked each of these guests three big questions because we wanted to understand what their personal experiences, whether drawn from a few years of campaigning or sometimes as many as four decades of activism, told them about the relationship between law and justice. We also have a content warning for you. As mentioned, some of the activists we interviewed with work with women and girls survivors of violence, and that means there are some references to sexual violence, including rape, in this episode.

Jen Ang: Today, we're going to look at the answers we got to our second question. Is the law a barrier or a tool or both in the struggle to achieve greater equality for people and communities that are marginalized and excluded? Across the board, our guests told us that they saw the law as both a barrier and a tool for change. Talat Yaqoob, political commentator, activist and co chair of the National Advisory Council for Women and Girls, believes that the question of whether law is a barrier or a tool for social change can only be answered by looking at the wider political and social context at any given time.

Talat Yaqoob: So I think it can be both, but I think it is so deeply influenced by where society, people and politics is at the time. So if you'd asked me a few years ago, I think I'd be much more secure in saying both in the current political landscape that we're in, where law is being very successfully used to demonize communities, either to eradicate rights that are in law, or to manipulate the interpretation of the law, or to change completely the law, implement new ones. Now, I'm not just talking about America here. I am talking about here in the UK We're seeing it across Europe as well. The rise of

Far right politics and populism actually uses the law to its advantage and exceptionally, with exceptional strength, with exceptional clarity. So with that influence, right now it feels more like a barrier, than a positive tool. But it is so dependent on where society is. And I think that really reinforces how politics, how law is not separate from politics in society. Where we are, as a society dictates what laws we prioritize, implement, right, and how they're written, who they're written by, all of those things. So I think I still hold strong to the fact that it can be both, but it is so dependent on where, where politics and society is at the time.

Jen Ang: Similarly, other guests spoke about the function of the law and legal systems as essentially a neutral tool in the hands of different forces, the determining factor, therefore, being who is using the law and for what purpose. Pinar Aksu, a migrant rights activist and PhD student at the University of

Glasgow, had spoken earlier about the Borders Citizenship and Immigration Bill 2025 passing through Parliament as an unjust law that benefited some people, harmed many others. She told us, for example.

Pinar Aksu: And it depends who uses the law and how they use the law. it's a combination because when we talk about migration, such as right now, the new, Borders Bill, that's being, gone through and being debated, that's going to make things very difficult for a lot of people, and that is using the law and how can we challenge that is very difficult, I think, as activists or even people who are lawyers themselves or by the general public, because I think we have reached a state, or we have reached a moment in the UK that becomes very difficult to intervene and challenge and the government is able to just pass policies, just there and here, just like that. and that for me is concerning for democracy and is concerning for all of us. How do you reverse that? How do you mobilise the whole community, the whole country basically, to say what you're doing, what you've written there is wrong and how do we, how do we change that? and I think, yeah, there was a combination of how we can, how it could be challenged, but how it could be used positively as well.

Jen Ang: Tim Hopkins, LGBT activist and former director of the Equality Network, also sees the law as both a tool and a.

Jen Ang: Barrier in advocating for LGBT rights. Again, very much tied to how particular issues are seen in a political and social context. Reflecting on the change he has seen as an activist from the 1980s to the present, he said, so I guess.

Tim Hopkins: For LGBT people, obviously, at the beginning when, when we started this work, the law was a big barrier because there were so many things that were wrong with it. Section 28 sex offenses law treated gay men in particular very different from anybody else. There was no gender recognition of trans people, there was no recognition of same sex couples anyway, same sex couples couldn't be joint parents. and then there was no protective law, so there was no equality law or, hate rank law protection. so in that sense the law was a big barrier. As we've gradually got, things changed. Some of those changes were about barriers disappearing. So, you know, it took, I wrote down that it took four separate acts, two of them at Westminster and two of them in the Scottish Parliament, to remove all of the discrimination against gay and bisexual men in Sexual Offences Law. that didn't happen. It started in 1980, it didn't finish until 2009. So that was removing the barrier. And then of course, apart from removing all of the barriers, and I would include in that, you know, the introduction of civil partnership and then the instruction of equal marriage, actually before even civil partnership, the recognition of cohabiting same sex couples, laws around parenting, all of that is about removing barriers. But there also were more positive laws, the Equality act and the hate crime legislation, which are about protecting people. So I think the answer is the law has both been a barrier, a huge barrier, but for LGB people those barriers have been bit by bit taken down. But also the law is a protector and it has been genuinely protective. The Equality Act as genuinely protective people doesn't always work, of course, but some people are being protected from sexual orientation discrimination. And hate crime law has given some people some justice. but the law at the moment is a huge barrier for trans people, especially after the Supreme Court, judgment in April, really, the situation of trans people now is, I think, worse than the situation was for LGB people, even going back to the 1980s. But the legal situation, you know, the fact that it looks like, trans people are not going to be able to use toilets is just appalling.

Jen Ang: Pheona Matovu, founding director of Radiant and Brighter, looking to her own experience personally and professionally working with racialized and migrant families, is firmly convinced that the law as it stands is designed to treat excluded and marginalized groups unequally, but also believes that the law can be redesigned to achieve inclusion and positive social change.

Pheona Matovu: My experience is that, it's more of a barrier, it can enable, but it is more of a barrier. And that's not because it's the law. It's because I think we need to reconsider what the law does. it's in what it does, not in what it is. What it is can be changed. We can rethink, we can remodel, we can redesign. we must consider that when these laws were put in place, perhaps the people that should have been in the rooms were not in the rooms. And so at the point of design, at the point of, where the thinking was happening, there wasn't enough critical thinking perhaps around equity. I do know,

I'm not a master of the law. I have very little understanding of law in how it operates and how it's designed, because I'm not a lawyer. But I am aware that women were not even allowed to be lawyers for a while, I believe. And so if the very people, that have to adhere to the law are not in the room, what is being designed and who is it being designed for and for what? So it's in the design that there is a fault. And therefore it creates barriers. It creates barriers where we, are seeking to be, a society that's, that's, that's engaging. So here in Scotland, one of the key, one of the key statements is, Scotland welcomes refugees, right? another statement here in Glasgow is people make Glasgow. And we know that Glasgow is made of, very many migrant communities. But those statements do not mean anything. When you try to get into a system that says, hang on a minute, we don't know who you are, we don't understand you, and it pushes back. And so the law can do good, and it perhaps has done good in some areas. But I think in the design of it, we need to rethink that to make it do the good that it should, it should protect, it should look after it should engage and consider the way in which people experience it, particularly those that are most, excluded and marginalized. But I don't think it does that enough or even at all in certain cases.

Jen Ang: Some guests spoke about the law as a tool for change, acknowledging, for example, that the law establishes a basic framework of rights against unfair treatment, which people do benefit from. Satwat Rehman, Chief Executive Officer of One Parent Families Scotland, reflects I really do.

Satwat Rehman: Believe that laws empower us and can empower us and can offer us those protections against unfair treatment and securing rights to housing, benefits, support services, you know, and they're, absolutely. I think without them we'd be in a much, much worse position than we are now.

Jen Ang: Amanda Amaeshi an activist with the Young Women's Movement and former law student at the University College of London agrees.

Amanda Amaeshi: In regards to being a tool, obviously people can go to court, have a case, and especially with cases of strategic litigation where it can use individual cases, can be leveraged to advocate for wider legal precedents that can address broader systemic issues. And there's also legal protections embedded in anti discrimination legislation like the equality that, for example, which equality is in the name. So I suppose like in that sense it's definitely a tool.

Jen Ang: Although Pinar Aksu points out that there can be challenges in using the law to challenge the law.

Pinar Aksu: Obviously there are lawyers out, ah, there who uses the law to protect people and who uses the law to find different ways to uphold their human rights and find different mechanisms as well. and I think it's a difficult one because they are challenging the law itself as lawyers. But then it's the law that's the problem.

Jen Ang: And Tressa Burke, Chief Executive Officer of Glasgow Disability Alliance points out that strategic challenges, even when successful, do not have the strategic impact hoped for because a public authority that has been challenged will settle to avoid a strategic win that could positively affect many more people.

Tressa Burke: And what we find, for example, is.

Tressa Burke: If you look at situations of.

Tressa Burke: Social care where somebody maybe threatens judicial review, the next thing the case is settled. And so we don't have case law established.

Tressa Burke: And it's, you, know, on a.

Tressa Burke: Case by case basis that seems to be how local authorities resolve things where they think they might lose.

Tressa Burke: So where it could be a tool, I mean it is a tool for that person.

Tressa Burke: The threat of it is helping that individual, but it's not changing the systemic inequalities or barriers that people are facing.

Jen Ang: And Satwat Rehman points out, that.

Jen Ang: Even where a legal challenge has been successful, there is a risk in the wider political, social and economic context that the legal victory is unenforceable. She describes this here as an example of a right that might have been won in law or in court, but that fails to achieve real world change for the families that need it.

Satwat Rehman: But we always are, pushed back to the fact that what we can do is constrained by the system and the finances within the system. I mean, you know, if we want to look at a really fundamental right, every child has a right to an education right, every local authority has a duty to fulfill that right to that education. But what we do is do it in a way which will suit what we think is the majority. You know, so it may work for 70% of children and young people, but there are 30% whose rights are often compromised. And when you speak about why that is, you're told it's because of resource constraints, you know, so if you've got a child with additional needs, if you've got a child who might require more one to one support to settle in class, those rights aren't realized in terms of their access to education being equal because the resources aren't there, you know, and they're incredibly difficult things to challenge as an individual, as a parent. And that's where I think that there is a real role for the law as a tool in terms of collective action and being able to look at an issue and say, okay, then do you know that parent there spoken about it? Actually the evidence is showing us that this is a pattern and then it's the pattern that you need to be challenging in law. The problem then becomes you could win that, but how do you implement, your victory? Where are those resources going to come from? Are those who've got the duty to provide and to realize that right going to be able to do so? And so, you know, I mean, let me just give you an example of something that's coming up more and more which impacts on single parent families, will impact on lots of families. But obviously we're hearing about it from single parent families where due to the fact that resources are so limited in so many schools, if they've got children who've got additional needs or who may be, you know, playing out the impact of early life trauma or any of those things, parents will tell us about the fact that sometimes they haven't even got as far as walking back home and through the door before the school will phone to say we don't have the staff and we don't have the resource. It's not safe. Can you come and pick your child up?

Satwat Rehman: What parent is going to say no? You know, and we've been hearing about this beginning to happen more and more to the families that we're working with. And so there's a fundamental there about that child's not receiving an education.

Jen Ang: Right.

Satwat Rehman: But then if you look at the welfare system and the fact that we've got a welfare system which has conditionality built into it and you're sanctioned if you can't then meet those conditions. These are parents who are also being expected to be looking full time for work, enter work and increase their hours in work. And all of those areas have conditionality which if they don't meet they would be sanctioned.

Jen Ang: Many of our guests focused on barriers to accessing justice for individuals and communities, pointing out that not only is the court system and access to courts an issue, but that huge unmet legal need and the difficulty that people experience in accessing legal advice information and lawyers is for many people the insurmountable barrier to securing rights supposedly provided under law. Next, Amanda Amaeshi shares her experience of volunteering at a free legal advice clinic during her time as a law student at the University College of London.

Amanda Amaeshi: In regards to the practical barriers, so I thought about this through. I've volunteered over the past year at UCL's Integrated Legal Advice Clinic. So it's located in East London in Stratford. And the clinic offers legal aid and also pro bono, support in regards to housing, welfare benefits, community care and education. And so I had the opportunity to volunteer there both as like an admin volunteer and also like through one of my final year modules which is called Access to Justice and Community Engagement. So I got to help out a bit with like helping the lawyers with their casework.

So I guess like thinking about that experience and like it really illuminated for me like the practical barriers that come with like accessing law, like first off to do of the cost, like well the fact that so many people are having to access legal clinics like UCL's ILAC it shows that just accessing legal support is really prohibitive. If private legal services are charging exorbitant fees and it just becomes really inaccessible. And then even where obviously legal aid does exist and the aim of that is supposed to be to provide access for those who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it, legal aid is being slashed. there's been lots of cuts and it's had a major impact on the sustainability on the legal aid sector. And as a result I've seen that there are relatively few services offering free legal assistance, especially when it comes to ongoing support or representation beyond initial advice and the limited numbers of clinic that clinics that do exist like UCL ILAC are often inundated with inquiries and they have no option to like signpost clients elsewhere. And especially when I was like working on the telephones like answering client inquiries, I found myself having to do this a lot, having to do some research to like find other places that the inquiries could go to. But it also becomes like a kind of inescapable loop because I remember quite a lot of the times like I would say like oh maybe you can go here, you can go here and, and then the inquirer would be like, oh,

I've already been there and they already didn't have capacity. And in fact they were the ones that told me to come to you. So it just like, it almost becomes a bit hopeless. You're kind of just like going round and round in circles if you are lucky enough to get that support. There's then like so much bureaucracy and like opaqueness within the legal system, like statutes, regulations, guidance. It's often difficult to find and even more difficult to understand and, and like lots of technical language. And I remember, so I was helping out with the casework, having to like come up with like legal arguments and I'd spend ages like reading these documents. And even for me as a law student and even talking to like the other lawyers as well, it wouldn't always be so straightforward to figure out like, what does this mean? So if it's already difficult for, for those of us who have like some like experience already with law, then how much more difficult would it be for, for those who are in a legal crisis and then in a heightened state of vulnerability and perhaps with other compounding inequalities on top of race or disability or age, how are they supposed to navigate this system? And sometimes, maybe I'm being a bit cynical, but it also sometimes seems that this opaqueness and difficulty to navigate the system is not just a flaw, but kind of like a purposeful design.

Jen Ang: Having highlighted the idea that the difficulty of navigating legal and bureaucratic systems might be a purposeful design, Amanda goes on to give an example of what she means and to question the justice of a system that is so difficult for ordinary people to navigate.

Amanda Amaeshi: Like I remember there was a client we had once needed to challenge a decision, regarding the Department for Work and Pensions. And the deadline for submitting the application to challenge the decision had technically passed. But, the lawyer who was supervising me said that appeal could probably still be made because of exceptional circumstances in this case to do with recent house moves and disability related difficulties. And then it raised the question for me of who gets the benefit of this procedural flexibility. And the fact that late appeals could be accepted suggests it kind of suggested to me that deadlines could function more as deterrent as opposed to absolute cutoffs, which could potentially discourage claimants who assume that they have no further options after they've gotten this decision. And if there is this flexibility in regards to the extenuating circumstances, why isn't this more explicitly communicated? Why is this something that claimants actually have to fight for? And in this case we're fighting for rive, the support of the legal professionals, sir. It would be even worse if the claimant was trying to do it by themselves. And it almost seemed that the system is designed in a way that if there are fewer, challenges, then it becomes a more manageable caseload. But that's not how justice is supposed to work, is it?

Jen Ang: Guests highlight other barriers in the legal system as including the time, money and emotional capacity involved in pursuing legal justice.

Jen Ang: Tressa Burke explains why, in her experience, many disabled people do not pursue legal cases even where they have a clear right to do so.

Sandy Brindley: People can't afford to access legal justice.

Pheona Matovu: They can't afford, not just in financial terms, and I would argue that is the biggest barrier, but actually in terms.

Tressa Burke: Of capacity, emotional energy. You know, being disabled and relying on services is a battle.

Tressa Burke: Your life is a battle and people don't always have the energy for what's required.

Jen Ang: Heather Fiskin, Chief Executive Officer of Inclusion Scotland, a disabled persons organisation, agrees, saying of.

Heather Fiskin: The law, it shouldn't be a barrier, it should be a tool. It should be something that we can use and readily use it. It's not easy to do that. There's all kinds of reasons why disabled people don't use the law. and as individuals, disabled people and their families are up against a huge weight of officials involved in their life. which piece of discrimination do you activate here? Which piece of discrimination are you challenging here? Because from when you wake up in the morning until when you go to bed and everything you do in between, whether that's employment, learning, being a family member, trying to access services, socialise, use transport, use general services like shops, etcetera, there's discrimination in all of that. Which bit do you challenge? It's exhausting because I had one ex colleague and I remember her telling me that she had something like 24 different professionals involved in her life. She had a filing cabinet in her home for all of these different types of professionals involved in her life. And then we've got, people being refused healthcare, people who don't have their social care needs met. You have people who. Or young people who have, an educational needs assessment, assuming you can get that in the first place, and the needs aren't being provided for. Which one are we going for here? And then, of course, where do you find the lawyer? Where do you find the lawyer who can and understands and has the competence and the willingness to take on your case? Where do you find the legal aid to do it if you're not on the passported benefits for it. Where do you find the capacity and the time and the energy? And one of the other things, perhaps the biggest thing really, or one of them is the fear, the fear of losing social care support if you try to challenge that. I remember going to an event in a town up north and we were being told by the parent of a disabled child about how their child had been excluded from the school trip because there was no wheelchair accessible bus. So they stayed at home or they stayed at school in the library while everybody else went for a fun day out. And the mother tried to complain about this, but the problem was that in such a small rural place, and I think it's important to remember what it can be like living in a rural place. The headmistress lived in the same street and she didn't feel she could take serious action, whether that be legal or complaints processes, knowing that this person was her neighbour.

Jen Ang: Satwat Rehman talks about the long time frames it can take to resolve issues using a legal route, such as judicial review, which is a challenge to a decision made by a statutory authority as a major deterrent for people pursuing a legal remedy. Here Satwat talks about trying to find a family to participate in a judicial review being brought by a charity called the Child Poverty Action Group, or cpac.

Satwat Rehman: That's right. I mean, I remember speaking to a group of firm, parents because there was cpag were looking for parents who might consider you know, taking part in things that they were wanting to do as part of judicial reviews. But you have to commit to be around for a long time for that, you know, and the family said they were just not in a position to say, actually, yeah, I can be on this journey with you for two years.

Jen Ang: And Heather goes on to caution that lawyers themselves, who people approach to help them bring legal challenges, can themselves be insurmountable barriers to accessing the legal system.

Heather Fiskin: I do remember somebody, years ago, to be fair, who pulled out of working with a lawyer because the lawyer said, it takes me an extra hour to speak to you because of your impairments, therefore I'm going to charge you double. And I was thinking that's a reasonable adjustment. Shouldn't you as a lawyer understand the concept of reasonable adjustment in the Equality Act?

Jen Ang: During today's podcast, we've heard guests discuss the law as a barrier or a tool to achieve equality for marginalized and excluded groups. We've had reflections that look at this question in social and political context. And I've also noted that changes in the law can promote equality and provide protection for some groups, but laws designed without excluded groups in mind can just amplify discrimination and exclusion. We've seen some discussion as well on barriers in accessing justice due to the complexity of legal procedures, the costs of legal advice, the inaccessibility of lawyers and of course the exhaustion that is a real life part of life for people who are marginalized and excluded.

Jen Ang: We're ending today with a final reflection from Sandy Brindley, Chief Executive Officer of Rape Crisis Scotland and a part time PhD student at the University of Glasgow School of Law. Sandy explains why she still believes that legal reform is important because of the impact on the lives of people in the justice system and also as an educative tool for change in wider society.

Sandy Brindley: I think it is both. I mean I think it's a feminist engaging with the concept of law reform. I think we need to be aware that there are I think really powerful arguments, particularly from black feminists about the intrinsically hostile nature of the justice process and potentially intrinsically racist like that There are limits that I think we need to be realistic to how much we can improve a system that really wasn't set up to achieve justice for women who've experienced such an intimate violation. But I don't think that means that we can try. And I feel like as long as women are still seeking justice from the criminal justice system, to me we have an onus to improve that system to minimize the harm it causes. So I've been doing interviews for the PhD. I'm doing the part time PhD at the University of Glasgow. I've been interviewing, they're called complainers in Scotland. So survivors going through the justice process around sexual crimes. I've interviewed 24 complainers and part of what I've been exploring is what does justice mean to you? Because I think that's a question we don't ask often enough. For women who have been raped, like what would justice look like? What would it feel like to get justice for what you've been through? And overwhelmingly what women have said to me is that justice means safety. And I think it is hard to see any way for women who have been raped to feel safe without engaging with the criminal justice system like that. Prison does actually have, as much as there are many flaws to this system, prison does have an important role and that enables women to feel safe for at least a period of time while the rapist is in jail. I mean there was one woman that I interviewed who was just terrified Because a rapist was up for parole and she was saying, I know he's going to kill me when it gets out. So I think it's important to bear that in mind. About as much as there are limits and criticisms of feminist engagement with law reform, these are really urgent issues for women who've experienced, rape or sexual crime. So I think law reform is important. I think the law can play a really important role. I think it can also play an important educative role. So we reformed, our approach to look at the definition of rape and gave a definition of consent for the first time back and I think, was it 2009, the sexual offences Act? But anyway, we set out a definition of rape which included male rape for the first time, which I think was important. It also defined consent as free agreement and it set out a list of circumstances where consent is presumed to be absent. And I think that is so important as an educative tool, particularly for speaking with young people. I think one thing that the government should have done and didn't when they introduced the Sexual Offences act that redefined rape and defined consent, was I think there really should have been, a proper public education campaign and community engagement, particularly with young people, to say this is what the law is. Because you can have really great law on the books. If people don't know, for example, that having sex, and I'm putting sex in quotation marks with a woman who is sleeping is rape, then the law really is failing and its function. So I think as an educative tool, it can be really important. We had another example of that recently where there was a judgment, an appeal judgment came out that confirmed that you can't consent to known fatal strangulation. Like we're seeing this a lot in rape cases like forensic nurses are reporting to. As I've really seen quite a lot of this and rape exams, like forensic rape exams, defence lawyers. I was speaking to an advocate, a Casey, the other week who was saying they've just seen this so much in cases where they're defending young men. Like so many of these cases, sexual offence cases involve non fatal strangulation. To me, it's clearly coming from what young men are seen online and particularly the impact of pornography and depictions of sexual that portray, for example, women enjoying this or that's been a normal part of sex. So I think it's so important that young people are equipped with knowledge about the law, both for young men, so they don't end up carrying out this behavior thinking it's normal and Then they end up before the cause. But also for young women, I think it's really important because young women are under so much pressure to, like to, to perform in a particular way in relation to femininity and in relation to heterosexuality, that I think it can be hard for young women to really connect with what feels pleasurable to them and what feels okay to them. And that's not just societal pressure, fed by the narrative of pornography. So I think that is really important that we can speak to young people and say this is actually what the law says. And I think we shouldn't forget the power of that. while we also look at other ways of trying to change societal attitudes, that the law has a really important role there.

Jen Ang: And that was Sandy Brindley concluding today's podcast by reminding us the different ways the law can be a tool for change. Where for example, it works to keep us safe from people who do harm, and where an educative tool for setting or even changing social norms. Lots more big ideas today from our guests and I'd love to hear what you, our listeners, make of it all for you. Is the law a barrier or a tool to greater equality? Or perhaps both. Meanwhile, heartfelt thanks to Talit Yaqoob Pinar Aksu Tim Hopkins, Pheona Matovu, Satwat Rehman, Amanda Amaeshi, Tressa Burke, Heather Fiskin and Sandy

Brindley for their contributions to to today's episode. And thanks so much to you, the listener, for tuning into the Lomanity podcast and our special series on equality under the law in Scotland. If you loved this podcast, please do hit the subscribe buttons and also like and share our episodes with friends and colleagues who might enjoy learning a little bit about how law really works in practice and how it can be used to make the world a better, brighter place. Our Equality under the Law series has been generously supported by a grant from the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity hosted by the London School of Economics. The Lomanity podcast is co produced by me, your host Jen Ang, and by the brilliant and talented Natalia Uribe. And the music you've been listening to is Always on the Move by Musicians in Exile, a Glasgow based music project led by people seeking refuge in

Scotland. Thanks so much for tuning in today. We hope you enjoyed listening and see you next time.