Big update on Rape Crisis legal challenge

[IamSarah]

I know many of you have been waiting for an update so first of all thank you for your patience and the many messages of support.

I am suing Survivors Network, the Sussex Rape Crisis service, as it refused to offer a single sex women’s group in addition to the mixed sex women’s groups. By mixed sex I mean inclusive of any males who identify as women.

I’ve been granted anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the case and it was submitted to Brighton County Court today.

I am being represented by law firm Didlaw and my Barrister is Naomi Cunningham (Chair of Sex Matters). So far they have acted pro bono which I am incredibly grateful for as it has taken a lot of time. The team are confident I have a good case but this is unchartered territory for women’s rights.

Many of you have very kindly offered to be involved and help with gardening. I don’t think I’m allowed to share details on here so please go to my Twitter page http://twitter.com/SarahSurviving/ which has all the info in a pinned post.

Of you’re not on Twitter feel free to send me a DM for more information on how you can help the case. Any publicity you can give the crowd funder would really help.

Thank you everyone.

Sarah x

The survey states at the end that they are running it with LGBT+ Inclusivity Scotland. So a completely agenda-free survey then.

They do say they are asking for view of local LGBT+ organisations and people. I'm Scottish but not in Perth and Kinross, I told them what I thought anyway.

Screenshot it, archive the text on several sites and report it to your lawyers.

Yes - their lies about their behaviour need to be recorded, and will form a crucial part of the evidence against them. You should not be continuing to argue with them about those lies at this stage.

I don't disagree with you@Artichokeleaves , but winning that argument will only come at immense personal cost to a few women who are prepared to take this fight the whole way.

I can easily see where settlements could be used to create a very uneasy truce, put a sticking plaster on the gaping wound.

That is why I always dig deep for these pivotal cases. These women bear the burden of a huge responsibility. The least i can do is stop them worrying about the financial cost.

I agree about the awful cost and will do all I can to support the very courageous women standing up for all women.

However I can't agree that a possible answer is to agree that women can have really crap, grudging services provided by those who don't want those women to have services at all, and are only interested in females in how they benefit and support the core service for male people.

That's no answer at all. I'd rather we as women went back to funding underground services in each others homes than women in desperate need have to settle for those grudging crumbs from the table.

If anyone lives in Sussex and can spare a few minutes to say why having the option of female only rape crisis therapy is important to you it could really help my case. Link here:

brightonsisters.wordpress.com/we-stand-with-sarah/

I agree, @Artichokeleaves
In practice all that will happen is that SSN will provide as shoddy a service as they can get away with and then find a reason to stop offering it but also somehow cover their arses so it's harder to make a case to sue them. Perhaps I'm cynical, but hey.

Good luck, Sarah!

I don’t live in Sussex, so am bumping the thread.

Weren’t many rape crisis services set up by women? What I don’t understand is how such services are later taken over by people who don’t centre female rape survivors.

Nobody with any sense of justice or fair play understands that either @Cattenberg. But that's where we are. All of women's gains can seemingly be removed by men on a whim.

What I don’t understand is how such services are later taken over by people who don’t centre female rape survivors.

Because people have agendas to push. Or think women's rights have already been won and males with special identities are more important. A lot of people in the third sector are highly privileged and don't have first hand experience or any critical analysis of structural misogyny and sexism.

This.

in a nutshell, anything labelled as 'for' women was made a political target for capture. Those who set out to carry out the capture had no interest in females or in the service being provided to females, merely in refocusing it to meeting TQ+ political aims and agendas or stamping it out so that the existence of female only provision was ended. Refuges have been brought down in this way, lesbian groups, women's groups of all kinds, and even women's support groups for disabilities and illnesses that only happen in biological females were either taken over, or stamped out and driven underground.

There is absolutely zero care for females; only that they are in the way of desired resources to be taken over and refocused to serve more important agendas.

Which is why I repeatedly point out: this political agenda is incompatible with providing any public service, it does very little but focus on serving its own aims. Once a workplace or service becomes involved, it rapidly begins to have major trouble meeting its actual aims, providing actual services, and finding time for much beyond the demands of serving the politics. (Looks hard at the police and NHS.)

And also due to this forced teaming, it has become apparent that women's services cannot and should not be provided by the same brief as the TQ+ because to conform to the current political brief requires and enforces the subordination of females and female interests, and not only does not permit parity of consideration and care but is actively prejudiced against it.

Weren’t many rape crisis services set up by women?

They were indeed. And I remember back in the 1980s and 1990s, women discussed whether we could include trans women too - yes they existed in those days and they wanted support. And women decided that sadly no we couldn't, because it was not safe to do that and because it silenced women.

Services such as rape crisis were set up by volunteers on a shoestring and there were never enough resources to support trans people separately, so trans women had to go without.

Then resources for women and other rape victims started to be funded properly, and it is possible now to set up separate services for women and transwomen. Sussex have nearly done it! But a lot of the political will to support women-only spaces has gone. So women whose boundaries have already been violated by rape are expected to take down another of their boundaries to make trans women feel welcome.

Rape support is not a competition for who is most oppressed. And it is not the job of women who have been raped to make trans women feel welcome at their own expense.

I think in the case it is discrimination because only women are not offered women only groups. Males, trans people are all offered separate counselling.

They were indeed. And I remember back in the 1980s and 1990s,

like you @AmaryllisNightAndDay I remember the way these services were set up. By feminists.

And I also remember how much such services were opposed by the powers that were. How they were seen as anti-man, and anti-society.

think in the case it is discrimination because only women are not offered women only groups. Males, trans people are all offered separate counselling.

Isn't the Sussex men's group also defined by gender? But I don't think that matters, though society being as sexist as it is, perhaps if men felt violated by transmen in their group then that might be an easier case to win? Seriously, there's a post on another FWR thread about a school immediately going back to single-sex facilities after the boys complained. Men are not rights-hoarding dinosaurs, after all. But anyway if women can't use the survivors' service because it's not single-sex then it should be indirect discrimination at least, and (IANAL) I think that's the basis of this case.

D'you know, I honestly believed society had got on top of this by the 1990s. But I wasn't involved with feminist or LGBT+ rights any more during after that. I dropped in to FWR once or twice during the last 10 years and it felt like stepping back in time. Why were these women still grumbling about trans? We had the Equality Act which said sex was a protected characteristic, why would anyone want or need to undermine that?

It took me a very long time to realise that there has been a sea change and how regressive that change is. But I guess feminism's like housework. You do the dusting and then a few days (or decades!) later someone else stomps in and messes things up and it's all to be done again.

Maybe I need a T shirt - or perhaps a frilly pinafore - "Proud to be Re-Radicalised by MumsNet".

"Resisting TERF’s and Transforming Their Organizations"

web.archive.org/web/20220524210052/queeratxlaura.wordpress.com/2020/05/27/resisting-terfs-and-transforming-their-organizations/

The author of this diatribe of hate and lies says:

"It’s important to avoid killing. . . . a dead person cannot find redemption. They cannot change their ways. Worse, they may become a martyr and attract more people to the cause of white supremacists. Why give Trump an excuse to call TERF’s “good people?” (He already knows they’re on his side.) Generally speaking, killing is a step too far.."

Ordinary women are "othered" as murderous fascists and bigots, simply for asserting their human rights to safety, dignity and privacy.

This is but a short step from the Bar Standards Council's Board of Ethics member who last week equated a black lesbian rejecting penis with white supremacists' imposition of Apartheid in South Africa.

The game plan is laid out in the following sections. It is horrifying to realise how easily this has played out across the world and how much its success has relied on cynical exploitation of the kindness, naivety, generosity and, ultimately, complicity of women:

• Tactics to Make Women Only Spaces Include All Women

• Parallel Institutions

• Leadership Reform

• Purse Strings

• Direct Action

• Against Presence

• Against Property

• Against Persons

• Conclusions:

What should you do to counter the presence of TERF’s in your area? First, make a parallel organization that makes theirs redundant. Out-compete them. At the same time, infiltrate and take over their group from the inside to reform it into an actual feminist organization. If that’s not possible, go after their money however you can.

If they still refuse to cease spreading hate, begin direct action. Online, shut down their means of communication by deplatforming them from social media. Use doxxing to remove their anonymity so they have to own whatever vile things they say. In the real world, deny them advertising. Shut them out of safe spaces.

Make their employers aware who they are and what they’ve said so they’re terminated. If absolutely necessary, escalate further into tagging vehicles, destructive disruptions, and, finally, making them take responsibility for harming others by reflecting that harm at their personal selves.

TERF’s like to portray themselves as the victims when you discuss protecting the community from their hate. They like to pretend that any kind of action against them is “violence against women.” This is false equivalence, an attempt to hijack the language of revolution for their evil ends.

When Richard Spencer was punched on live television, that wasn’t “violence against men” — it was action against fascism. If you take signs from TERF’s trying to insert messages of hate at a Pride Parade, that’s not “violence against women” — it’s action against bigots. When someone chooses to be a fascist they surrender any consideration you need to have for their dignity, possessions, or health — because they have chosen to have no regard for yours. The imperative to punch Nazis is always in place, regardless of what sex the Nazi is.

A fascist can always choose to peacefully change their ways and rejoin the community as a decent human being, which ends any need to treat them with hostility. But when TERF’s go after trans women and others, they don’t stop their harassment until the target is dead. This is why you are justified using any of the strategies outlined above when opposing their kind.

----

Sarah has to win and we have to help her to win because she is fighting for all of us. Not by physical violence so extreme that caution is urged to avoid killing, but by legal means, by pleading OUR human rights in court.

I do not know what it will take to wake up the women who have been manipulated to side with those who hate us. To realise that they are just as hated. More, that they are also despised, as brainwashed, expendable pawns.

But when TERF’s go after trans women and others, they don’t stop their harassment until the target is dead. This is why you are justified using any of the strategies outlined above when opposing their kind.

This is unhinged 😱. I’ve yet to hear of a single case of a “TERF” murdering a trans person.

And yet all across Twitter and in some places in real life I am told that I am the unconscionably violent person in any discussion about women's rights.

According to barrister Robin Moira White, Sarah is only taking this action to gain publicity for the 'movement'.

NM: In your opinion, what’s the motivation for this type of legal challenge – is it just about winning?

RW: There’s multiple motivations. These people know they might lose; if you look at the crowdfunding being run for the case against the rape crisis centre in Brighton, they say one of the reasons they are running the appeal is that they might lose and have to pay the other side’s costs. But they think it’s worth it to bring the issue into the public domain and grow their movement. And that has happened so far.

novaramedia.com/2022/05/31/a-barrister-explains-why-employment-tribunals-are-a-new-trans-rights-battlefield/

Thread:
www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4560402-anti-trans-spin-from-rmw

RMW also misrepresents the position of just about everyone else mentioned in that interview.

These people...

That just drips with the usual disdain RMW has for women. Makes me wonder why they so badly want to be one!!!

Based on a fundamental belief that females only ever think about male people and everything they do is focused on male people and about male people.

They don't exist enough to have issues or problems or needs of their own, and any problem they have that isn't a problem to a male person obviously isn't really a problem, so what are they on about?

The misogyny is off the scale.

I mean what would a woman want access to a rape crisis centre for?

Why on earth would any woman have an issue with mixed sex provisions?

It goes to prove. No matter how many times you explain it, repeat it - it isn't that we haven't tried to explain enough in small enough words or patiently enough, it's that those ears just don't hear females. At all.

But that's ok, because this is not about any more trying to make this compute: it's about moving on to national bodies with the capacity for fairness, reasonability and the ability to see females as actually human.

Ffs.

Exactly @Artichokeleaves Heaven forfend women actually want woman-only services for a trauma inflicted by men.

The ignorance & disdain! Why do men who hate women think so desperately that they are women?

RMW also misrepresents the position of just about everyone else mentioned in that interview.

If that is an authentic and good faith description of reality as perceived by RMW then I recognise that that is a grim way to experience life.

If is doing a lot of heavy lifting there and may speak volumes about the upside down of the shared immersive fiction maintained and reinforced by some people.

I've just caught up and donated again, Sarah. It does make me annoyed when we women are told how we should spend our money more wisely. Thank you for your courage.