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Research has established that alcohol advertising,like that for tobacco and fast food,influences behaviour. It encourages young people to drink alcohol sooner and in greater quantities. From a public health perspective, advertising of alcohol should clearly be limited. The United Kingdom has opted for a system of self regulatory controls that focuses primarily on the content of advertisements, with some limitations on the channels that can be used. As part of its alcohol inquiry, the House of Commons health select committee wanted to explore the success of self regulation. It obtained a large number of internal marketing documents from alcohol producers and their communications agencies in order to examine the thinking and strategic planning that underpin alcohol advertising and hence show not just what advertisers are saying, but why they are saying it. Here we present the key insights to emerge

Traditionally, consuming alcohol in bars, pubs, and clubs represents a masculine leisure activity at odds with conventional understandings of appropriate feminine behaviour. However, contemporary young women appear to have new freedoms to embrace this leisure activity. This paper focuses on the views of young women (18–25 years), drawing upon data from a qualitative study which explored young women’s views, experiences, and behaviours in relation to their safety when socialising and consuming alcohol in bars, pubs, and clubs in Scotland. Findings from this study identify socialising and consuming alcohol in bars, pubs, and clubs as a central aspect of young women’s social lives. However, for young women the consumption of alcohol in this context is also equated with risk, vulnerability, loss of control, and increased responsibility for their safety. These findings pose significant difficulties for locating women’s experiences of consuming alcohol in bars, pubs, and clubs within a poststructural framework of freedom and liberation

Since 2000, the Scottish Government has adopted a gendered definition of domestic abuse which explicitly positions it as both a cause and a consequence of gender inequality. Following the launch of a new strategy to prevent and eradicate violence against women and girls, the Scottish Government announced proposals to create, for the first time, a bespoke offence of domestic abuse, designed to encompass the spectrum of abusive acts that constitute domestic abuse, including emotional and psychological abuse. The new offence is intended to better reflect the experience of victims subject to coercive control, improve the criminal justice response and facilitate access to justice. It represents one of the most radical attempts yet to align the criminal justice response with contemporary policy and feminist conceptual understanding of domestic abuse as a form of coercive control. Drawing on feminist scholarship which has interrogated the value of law reform, we critically assess the scope of the (proposed) legislation, the likely challenges associated with its use in the Scottish context, and the potential for unintended consequences.

Concerns about the criminal justice response to rape have prompted the development of victim 1 advocacy services across a range of jurisdictions, yet research evidence about the nature, meaning and value of advocacy remains limited. This paper draws upon a study evaluating an innovative advocacy model introduced in Scotland to assist reporting rape to the police. Findings from interviews with nine victims highlight the importance of advocacy that is independent of statutory and criminal justice agencies. However, it is argued that this does not mitigate the need for specialisation or reform in the criminal justice response to rape and, further, that the distinction between advocacy at an individual and societal level represents a false dichotomy.