I don't feel sorry for her at all. AB adopted the nonsense identity non binary knowing full well what the implications of her new male sounding name would be and then did the whole drama of I'll be so traumatised if anyone mentions this or tells the service users, those service users who are traumatised rape victims who should be the first consideration in a Rape Crisis organisation,. Instead we have/had the service providers and the insidious, dangerous GI ideology being put front and centre. What kind of person are you that does that?

Secondly AB was the one who started the hate fest on Slack about JKR and the opening of Biera's Place, again what kind of person are you that does that?

How low can the proponents of GI ideology go?

I feel quite sorry for her. She seems to have been coached by the organisational ethos into believing she could adopt an identity that was plainly going to cause confusion to service users. And then she also appears to have been given the impression that she could insist on being insulated from any of the ensuing organisational attempts to deal with this confusion.
She asked to be kept out of an email chain and was instead copied into an employment tribunal!
Must have been extremely distressing for her and I wonder whether, if she had not been part of such a strange organisation, she would actually have been a perfectly reasonable and lovely colleague

I hope she is OK.

MW used AB to punish Roz, and now the world and it's support dog know AB is a woman who has declared she is non binary. Which was exactly the thing AB didn't want!

I wonder what happened to "AB" after all this?

They really did press the "self destruct" button at ERCC.

From the Spectator article.

"Gender identity ideology did not march through the institutions so much as sprint and in the rush to embed its extreme and anti-rational prescriptions, many an organisation has stored up trouble for the future. As the ideology begins to lose its footing, those organisations would be well-advised to get out of the gender identity business while it is still possible to save face."

Hope you are paying attention all you captured organisations. You have been warned.

Even if you thought Letby was innocent (even if, in reality she HAD been innocent) the circumstantial evidence ALONE should have resulted in her being removed from hands on nursing far far earlier than she was.

I think this is what people don’t understand. The process can be very punishing where an innocent person is involved but the risk of allowing them to continue can be devastating. Sometimes it can be difficult to get the balance right.

Also see the Rotherham Child Sexual Abuse scandal.

Yes, that's another really great example of a total failure of safeguarding.

Even if you thought Letby was innocent (even if, in reality she HAD been innocent) the circumstantial evidence ALONE should have resulted in her being removed from hands on nursing far far earlier than she was. And then, IIRC, she was sent to a back office job concerned with safety compliance! Couldn't make it up.

And the doctors should NOT have been punished for raising safeguarding concerns EVEN IF THEY WERE WRONG. The whole POINT of safeguarding is that you WANT people to speak up and not punished even if they're wrong!!

As far as I've heard no-one in management who let this happen has suffered any consequence and they should. Letby should not have been allowed to be in a position to harm many of her victims. Safeguarding should have stopped her far, far earlier.

If people are never held to account, there is no disincentive to allowing things that harm the most vulnerable - in this case babies - to happen again.

I really hope the families take civil action because it seems pretty clear no-one's going to suffer any negative consequences otherwise.

Among all the other alarming evidence in the judgement of the poor way in which the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre operated, I was struck by how deeply mired in internally developed jargon all of the staff appeared to be in all of their emails.

This matters, because it is evidence of just how entirely inward looking organisations can become, especially in the third sector. Inwardness enables organisations to lose sight of their purpose - of the service users that they are meant to serve. It is demonstrated when employees start to communicate in terminology that reeks of policy documents, training modules, funders' criteria, etc etc to the point where staff can no longer communicate clearly with one another about basic reality.

Even Roz Adams' emails, for all their compassion and concern, were couched in a weird kind of sub-therapeutic jargon. It was obvious that she was trying to incorporate all the modes of communicating that had become obligatory in the organisation. And it pointed to how HARD it is to simply operate like a human being in organisational cultures like this.

I would bet good money that this horrible bureaucratic distortion of communication preceded the TRA takeover by years and actually facilitated it. When people become obliged to speak in cobbled-together mantras they are progressively less able to retain a robust relationship between language and reality -- which makes it much easier for bad actors to arrive on the scene and gaslight people into a much more aggressive denial of basic material truths.

@Ginnyweasleyswand you are so right. See also Lucy Letby and the doctors being essentially harassed for raising safeguarding concerns about what turned out to be a serial murderer of premature babies!! I mean you couldn’t make it up!

Sorry if I've missed discussion of this upthread but it appears to me under the current setup ERCC cannot safeguard their clients.

Safeguarding should be at the centre of what ERCC does. Where's the penalty for serious safeguarding breaches? Turning women away and further traumatising them by a) offering no support and b) branding them as bigots? Or in the worst case scenario (because we know MW did some counselling) forcing them into an abusive situation where they are coercively controlled and their most basic instincts and perception questioned? Told they are wrong and bigoted for calling someone they see as a man, a man. That would be considered coercive control in a personal relationship.

Roz A was trying to safeguard vulnerable women. For trying to safeguard, she was subject to constructive dismissal.

Whilst it's great GC beliefs are protected in law, this only protects the employee not the vulnerable service users. In terms of the harmful impact on people, this is about safeguarding and the huge breaches that occur due to gender ideology. Biological sex is important for safeguarding, you can't really safeguard vulnerable people if you're pretending it doesn't exist and this applies in schools, for the poilce, in prisons and in the justice system.

I'm sorry but I think safeguarding is dead. Every safeguarding training course every year in schools says 'safeguarding is for everyone' and 'you must speak up' but look what happens when you do? Your life is destroyed - RA, Rachel Meade, Sonia Appleby and more. ALL trying to safeguard according to the law and being not only stopped from doing so but PUNISHED for YEARS. So people shut up, because they're scared. And safeguarding dies.

Eventually something dreadful will happen, it has already of course - who knows what happened to all those women turned away from ERCC? All the teachers and employees forced out of their jobs. All the excellent social workers who've had to shut up?

And the victims of this cannot cope with the stress of or afford "justice".

The judiciary needs to start looking at scientific reality and safeguarding, not just belief. But I can't see any way of it happening, sadly.

This bit from Rape Crisis Scotland's statement [which otherwise looks positive, fair dues, e.g. 'we recognise that for some this includes choices about the gender and/or sex of their worker. '] deserves an award for Understatement of the Year:

“We have been concerned by some of the evidence arising from the tribunal suggesting that some practices at ERCC may have fallen short of these standards"

.. 'some', 'suggest' and 'may' ??

Two threads unpicking some of the governance issues:

https://x.com/dworkinprogress/status/1792536473566130427?s=46&t=peWfqWbuEDgzGk1K2MAK8g

https://x.com/dworkinprogress/status/1792561839697465537?s=46&t=peWfqWbuEDgzGk1K2MAK8g

(By, er, me )

The review quotes ERCC in big letters "Services at the Edinburgh charity will remain unaffected."

I was rather hoping that services at the Edinburgh charity would be improved. After all, the case arose when ERCC failed to respect a service user's needs.

"In a statement, Rape Crisis Scotland said: “As a national organisation working to end sexual violence, the needs of survivors are our priority.

“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 that led to the tribunal.

“All member Rape Crisis Centres are signed up to working within UK-wide National Service Standards. These standards detail the high quality of service every survivor can expect to receive from a Rape Crisis Centre. Membership of Rape Crisis Scotland is based upon a shared commitment to, and evidencing of, the UK-wide Rape Crisis National Service Standards. "

I've found (I think) the standards they mention but haven't read them yet.

https://rapecrisis.org.uk/about-us/national-service-standards/

https://tfn.scot/news/rape-crisis-centre-placed-under-review-following-employment-tribunal

Pleased to see Third Force News has FINALLY reported on this. I think one single sentence mentions the issue in the tribunal and the focus is entirely on the review commissioned by Rape Crisis Scotland. They do at least include the quote from Roz.

"The evidence led before the tribunal reads like a right-wing parody of intersectional feminism and every other fashionable progressive stance. One of Adams’ colleagues complained that she had said ‘something about being inclusive of everyone, open to hear all views and for everyone to have representation’. The monster! "

😁

This is good, the Speccie as ever dealing with this stuff head on.
Roz Adams’s tribunal win is a victory for liberty | The Spectator

I'd say MSPs, yes. Most funding comes from the Scottish government. I mean, I have views on how useful it is trying to engage with anyone in the SNP. But still. Sometimes it's worth letting them know so they can't pretend that everyone is fine with the absolute pig's ear they're making of the country.

So who can we write to here that might have some impact on ERCCs running? It's clear that service users and staff have been harmed by the culture.

The board and RCS are clearly fully on board with gender ideology nonsense though .

Edinburgh city council? MSPs?

Yes. This whole organisation has harmed women and failed those it is ostensibly there to support.

'reframe yourself to the other side of the paywall'
very clever; you never fail

Those who supported Wadhwa’s grift should hang their heads in shame. This is a case of abusive behaviour and appalling workplace practices presided over by a zealot. Wadwha has said, “the women’s sector must cleanse itself of bigotry.”

If only. The bigot here is a man who bullies anyone who does not agree with him. You can dress that up in all the radical language you like, it is a story women know inside out.

Ooof! Good article!

Suzanne Moore has written about this in the Telegraph, she's essentially resummarised the case

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2024/05/21/edinburgh-rape-crisis-centre-trans-lobby-starmer-gender/

https://archive.ph/jKuQC reframe yourself to the other side of the paywall

This article addresses some of the questions on the thread about TRA CEOs seeking to get buy in at all levels. It appears that rape crisis CEOs can question potential board members about their trans inclusion ethos.

This was published 2.5 years ago, it's incredible how much progress has been made:

gal-dem.com/trans-inclusive-sexual-violence-services/