Who do politicians listen to and what questions should they ask? Rape Crisis Scotland as a case study
On 24 February, Lucy Hunter Blackburn spoke to the Forth Valley Feminist Gaithering in Falkirk. The event took place a few weeks after the hearing in the case of Adams vs Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre. Prompted by comments made by RCS as evidence emerged from the hearing, Lucy reflected on who politicians listen to, on issues affecting women, taking Rape Crisis Scotland as a case study. She examined how its role and remit had evolved over time, and what is known about how it reaches the positions it takes.
Adams vs ERCC
The Tribunal judgment has now been handed down and is available here. Adams won on all counts and the Tribunal’s comments on the case are exceptionally damning of the ERCC, as summarised in this piece by Dr Michael Foran.
As The BBC reported, Roz Adams said:
“For me it was dystopian, it was the strangest experience. I’ve never come across any other topic where to ask to talk about it and ask to find solutions that work for everybody is seen as hateful.”
Ms Adams said she thought there was a large number of people working in the sector who are “fearful” of talking about gender identity and the privacy of staff.
“People don’t want to go through what I’ve been through understandably so they won’t speak up,” she said.
Rape Crisis Scotland has announced that an independent review is under way, which it later emerged had been commissioned immediately after the tribunal hearing in January. It is not clear at the time of writing who drew up and agreed its detail remit and process, what that is, who appointed the person carrying it out (Vicky Ling) whose name was only shared after further media inquiries, who the review will report to or, most importantly, what input and oversight of this review there will be by those representing local service users, including the local authorities for the area it covers.
RCS’ role in running a review of the ERCC also needs to be considered in the light of the judgment against it in this employment tribunal from 2021, in which RCS was heavily criticised. The Tribunal expressed concern about the role played by RCS’ Chief Executive, Sandy Brindley, in the process, foreshadowing language used in this week’s judgment about the CEO of the ERCC, in describing her as an “invisible hand”. It said:
Ms Brindley appeared unable or unwilling to understand that her presence throughout both the grievance and disciplinary processes could have a bearing on the extent to which these were conducted in an impartial manner. It was clear to the Tribunal that Ms Brindley operated an invisible hand throughout both processes and her presence was not neutral.
Against that background, we are now posting the text of Lucy’s speech in February.
Rape Crisis Scotland
Rape Crisis Scotland does do some direct work with those who have experienced sexual violence, but the face-to-face counselling and therapeutic groups which make up the bulk of these services on the ground is provided by a network of local centres, for which RCS acts as an umbrella body. The structure and funding of these services, and those for domestic violence, was subject to an independent strategic review by the Scottish Government, published in June 2023. The review recommended a radical rethink, which would ground the direction and funding of these services more in local communities. Rape Crisis Scotland and Scottish Women’s Aid both expressed significant concern about any reduction in their role. Any change in the distribution of roles between national and local level based on the review appears likely only to happen slowly, if at all.
Speech text
Good afternoon.
I’m going to use my time to think about who politicians and civil servants listen to, when it comes to issues affecting women, and work my way round to an obvious question they are not asking.
I’m going to concentrate for simplicity on one organisation, as a case study. But similar points could be made about others.
Rape Crisis Scotland is a product of decades of work, much of it originally unpaid, by women. Right now, through its helpline and advocacy support project, it will be doing things that women who have suffered male sexual abuse are finding helpful, and which they appreciate. I want to start by saying that.
Last month RCS put out a statement in response to action being taken against the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre by a former employee, Roz Adams. The centre was coming out of this case very badly in the media, for its dogmatic insistence that some male people are women, and not men, and that some female people are not women, and the practices it had adopted as a result.
Rape Crisis Scotland’s statement appeared to throw its Edinburgh member somewhat under the bus. It said:
Rape Crisis Scotland works with a network of 17 member Rape Crisis Centres across Scotland. Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre is an autonomous member centre and as such, Rape Crisis Scotland was not involved in any of the circumstances leading to the tribunal and cannot comment on the proceedings.
It was a remarkable thing to read.
Because RCS has not always been so keen to distance itself from its members, and in particular from this one.
As many of us have known for a long time, in the autumn of 2019 a group of women survivors of male sexual violence and abuse approached Rape Crisis Scotland, seeking reassurance that they and other women could still obtain access locally to single sex provision.
Did RCS say this was nothing to do with them, because all the centres were autonomous? No, it did not.
The meeting was held at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre and the woman who was in charge of the Edinburgh centre at the time attended. So did the chief executive of RCS, who brought with her, wholly unannounced, an activist based at Edinburgh University, who has an eccentric but strongly held understanding of the Equality Act. That activist was allowed to use the meeting to talk to the women in a way they found traumatising. She told them bluntly – and wrongly – with the chief executive of RCS looking on approvingly – that it was legally impossible to provide the sort of single-sex support they wanted.
The group of survivors painstakingly documented this meeting, in a written submission to the Committee overseeing the GRR Bill. Joan McAlpine, who attended the meeting as an MSP, recently wrote up an account of the meeting for Holyrood Magazine. RCS has not publicly challenged either the submission to the committee, or Joan’s recent piece.
“Rape Crisis Scotland was not involved in any of the circumstances leading to the tribunal,” you may recall.
And in engaging with government and parliament on policy and the law more generally, RCS has been very happy to allow its status to be used to dismiss – to delegitimise, I would go as far as saying – any arguments and concerns other women have about the impact of self ID, both within the services that it is involved with, and more widely.
As recently as January last year – almost a year to the day before it distanced itself from the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre – RCS signed up to a statement which expressed “strong opposition” to the UK government’s block on the Gender Recognition Reform Bill.
So the sudden recent distancing from the Edinburgh Centre left me wondering about RCS and the claims it makes to be a spokes-organisation – for want of a better term – for the wider network of centres.
This led me to look at its history. For this purpose, its own account of that, its entry on the Companies House website and earlier versions of its website, accessed using the Wayback Machine, between them provided as much information as can be covered in a short speech.
The network of rape crisis centres in Scotland began in the mid-late 1970s. The first centre was in Glasgow, then Edinburgh, with more local centres following. The centres got into the habit of networking. By the mid-90s they decided they needed to formalise this arrangement and a constitution was put together, for what was called the Scottish Rape Crisis Network.
In 2003, the network was incorporated as a limited company. The company’s members could be formally constituted organisations providing local services to women and girls, or individual women that represented more informal groups.
The original articles of association – these are the agreed rules about how a company is run – said it would achieve its aims:
“by encouraging and assisting the development of locally based charitable voluntary organisations which provide relevant support services to women and girls and by enabling collaboration between such organisations”.
The company was also required to organise 4 “network meetings” every year, on top of its annual general meeting.
In 2009 RCS published a report based on interviews with many of the women involved from the 1970s onwards, called Woman to Woman – which adds a bit of interesting additional history. It says:
“The debate around supporting men and the importance of maintaining a women-only service was often aired within the network and was a challenge that centres wrestled with for many years. It was divided opinion on this issue in particular that created the fissure that ultimately separated some centres from those that went on to form Rape Crisis Scotland, which retained the feminist gendered analysis of rape.”
That is, membership of the RCS network was defined at the very start by a rejection of running mixed sex services, or indeed services just for men. RCS’s website in 2003, still accessible using the Wayback Machine, said “Our centres are women only and work from a feminist perspective”. That statement remained on their front page until sometime in 2010 or 2011.
So it’s pretty clear – RCS was a creation of the local centres, set up purely to support them, and with a specific woman-only focus.
Three years later – in 2006 – the name of the company was changed to remove any reference to it being a network. The Rape Crisis Scotland brand that already existed (in 2003, the witness to the original Articles of Association, Sandy Brindley, was already described as being a development worker for RCS) became its new formal name. The need to organise network meetings was dropped from its constitution.
In 2013, RCS amended its constitution again. References to “women or girls“ were changed to “individuals”.
In 2021, RCS amended its constitution once again. Working with local centres was no longer to be the core reason for its existence, but just something it could do. If it wanted to.
And associate membership was opened up to any organisation that support its aims, not just service providers. I can’t find if there are any organisations which have joined in that category.
National bodies – such as COSLA or Universities Scotland – that speak for a group of local providers typically, in my experience in government, have office bearers drawn from their member organisations. There is usually a system of formal committees or other democratic decision-making involving members which underpins any major policy position. These things give the organisation legitimacy at national level in speaking about the things its members do.
RCS has none of that. It does not appear to give its locally-based members any formal say or control over the policy positions that the organisation takes. The staff and the board appear unaccountable to the 17 members in that respect.
On some things, perhaps, that may not matter. But where there is controversy over how something will affect services on the ground – as with Gender Recognition Reform, and self-identification more generally – it does matter, and it’s unclear how RCS can say with authority that it speaks for local providers.
For example, RCS has repeatedly asserted that services in Scotland have long included male clients who identify as women, and that no problems have ever been reported.
Speaking in 2022, however, Isabelle Kerr, formerly Manager of Glasgow and Clyde Rape Crisis Centre, the largest in Scotland, said “none of that was accurate…not one single rape crisis centre and not one single women’s aid centre was consulted before that statement was put out.”
So, to summarise;
Supporting local providers is no longer the official reason for RCS existing. That’s an optional extra.
It no longer has any obligation to hold regular – or indeed any – meetings that bring local centres together.
It runs some activities directly; but not those right at the heart of the argument round self-ID. It is not a direct provider of face-to-face counselling, either one-to-one or in groups.
It has no internal democratic structure for deciding its policy positions with its members, who do provide those services.
It has opened associate membership – in theory at least and possibly in practice – to organisations that are not providers at all.
Its original purpose was to provide services exclusively for women and girls. It has dropped that.
Yet RCS positions itself as able to speak on behalf of the women who need face-to-face rape crisis services, from a position of authority, because it sits at the apex of a system of local providers.
That is, until one of its members is caught doing something reputationally risky.
So when politicians and civil servants are told that RCS speaks for a network of in-person providers, particularly on issues that are controversial and affect in-person services, I suggest that they need to start asking much harder questions about the basis on which its staff make that claim.
I’ll finish by going back to the 2009 account of the history of the network. It highlights lesbian women, and black and ethnic minority women, as distinct groups that providers need to think about.
There is one group it does not discuss. A word search for trans, transgender, transsexual or gender identity yields no results.
But the report does talk about men. I’ll finish with a comment from Margaret Brown, who was central in setting up rape crisis services in Dundee, talking about the risks of abandoning a clear focus on women in rape crisis services:
“my concern would be…that men’s experience would taint women’s experience, because we live in a world where we don’t have equity as women, …and the male experience is therefore always, always the one that is seen as more valid…and I would be concerned, for those reasons, that what we provide for women… could be tainted, it could be taken away down another route, and I don’t know how you ensure that that doesn’t happen.”