Rape Crisis Scotland and Scottish Women's Aid sign statement of support for Scottish GRR Bill

[IwantToRetire]

Violence Against Women (VAW) services in Scotland already operate on the basis of self-ID. Individuals are not required to provide their birth certificates to access services, something that would be hugely harmful. Instead, services have robust safeguarding processes that allow for individuals to be excluded where there are legitimate concerns. Rape crisis services in Scotland have been providing trans inclusive services for 15 years without incident.

It is demoralising to see how trusted and highly experienced experts on equality and providers of services to women — many of whom have provided world-leading services in Scotland for decades — have been drowned out in this debate and denigrated for standing against misinformation.

www.rapecrisisscotland.org.uk/news/news/a-statement-from-scottish-civil-society-organisations-on-the-uk-governments-intervention-o/

(Side note - if they are operating on the basis of self id, then they have been in breach of the EA, but still claim they are acting within in.)

These aren't neutral orgs. They are funded by the Scottish government. If they don't agree they lose their funding.

I have zero confidence they would report 'incidents' accurately or at all.

How is JKR's org for women only going to get around sex being re-defined as male and female in Scotland?
She can't disallow people on the basis of their sex to her rape crisis centre when with the new GRC any bloke after 3 months can say he's not just a woman but an actual female?

You took the words out of my mouth OvaHere. They are indeed scotgov funded mouthpieces. The whole farrago was rubber stamping in an echo chamber exercise.

Male sex being re-described as male or female that is..

Isn’t rape crisis Scotland the one headed by a trans ‘woman’?

Plenty of institutional capture regardless, and as pp have stated above, failure to toe the SNP line leads to funding being cut off.

Male sex being re-described as male or female that is..

I've always thought the simple work around is that if sex in law no longer refers to the real concepts of male and female, then you are released and free to discriminate on the basis of real sex as much as you like. Just need to make sure you're not doing it on the basis of legal sex.

Ie if you can demonstrate that you'd let both legal women in (if they were really female) and legal men in (if they were actually really female), you're fine.

Normally bad for women, obviously, but it means you no longer need the "single-sex exceptions" either.

The point is not whether you or I think they are paid stooges, but to the world at large the SNP, Greens, etc., will be able to say women's support services agree with us.

And quite honestly I dont think you can say they are going where the money(*) is. If you have any knowledge of the voluntary sector you would be aware that like many other sectors in society, trans activists have infiltrated. Added to which is the number of younger women who work or volunteer many of whom will have had the university experience of trans inclusion.

ie it isn't just about the money, it is about how many people including women, support the trans agenda.

And perhaps a more important quesition is where were all the gender critical women six and more years ago, when these services accepted self id.

Their (our) absence in these critical areas are what is most significant.

(*) More women's refuges have lost funding throughout the UK because local funders actually dont think women need refuges, they are just seen as a homelessness problem, and can, if lucky, be offered hostel accommodation. And this is local councils. ie ordinary men and women who are councillor think that in terms of budgets violence against women isn't a priority.

It's also been pointed out that they signed this letter against the Westminster government's intervention too quickly to have read and considered the statement of reasons that rhe government published.

Gosh well that will make....

No difference

So essentially the Scots Govt sock puppets have spoken.

Rape crisis services in Scotland have been providing trans inclusive services for 15 years without incident.

This is completely misleading on four counts.

First:

Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre was the first local centre to state that they welcomed a survivor who was trans in 2009. Dundee and Aberdeen were only highlighting that they adjusted their service to support such survivors in 2012/13. That's 14 years for one centre, but by no means all of them.

Second:

There are different approaches to VAWAG sector organisations supporting males who identify as trans. At first, these survivors were supported without impacting on female survivors. They also seem to have been primarily transsexuals. It wasn't until 2014/15 that the madness took hold and self-id with unlimited access was embraced.

(2015 saw the publication of the execrable guidance that compared survivors of male violence who encountered and objected to males in what they expected - and needed - to be a female-only therapeutic environment to racists and homophobes.)

So, again it's not 15 years worth of inclusion on the basis of self-id.

Third:

Rape Crisis Scotland is an umbrella organisation. It functions as a central office that operates the national helpline, but offers no frontline services whatsoever. When central office, aka Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS), moved to indiscriminate access on the basis of self-id, local centres, all run autonomously by their own local managers continued to do their own thing.

To this day, within the network of the 17 local centres, a female-only therapeutic environment is available that does not indiscriminately include males on the basis of self-id. However, we don't know which centres and that's because the repercussions of stating this publicly can be prohibitive.

Central office has no way of knowing how local centres support survivors who are trans. All the inclusivity training in the world isn't going to make their preferred approach happen, if the local manager believes in a female-only therapeutic environment for female survivors. That's precisely because local centres are run independent of RCS.

Fourth:

When trans inclusion policies were adopted, no impact assessment was done. There is also no data collection on issues sent to or made by the central office. No one from central office has ever canvassed female survivors either. They honestly believe that if there were any issues, they'd know, because survivors would - of course - lodge complaints. If no one complains, there cannot possibly be any issues. And that expectation comes from women dealing with vulnerable survivors who are typically in crisis when they approach rape crisis services.

So they have no way of knowing because local centres have always dealt with issues coming up locally and central office has never asked either.

At best, RCS can state that they are not aware of any incidents.

There's a very good reason for that. Local centre managers know fine well that RCS doesn't want to hear it and may well dismiss incidents anyway, so why would you - on top of having to deal with an incident - make your life even harder by reporting to RCS.

(Of course we do know from frontline workers and local centre managers that incidents have happened.)

There were MNetters among a group of women in a refuge and/or had used refuges who met with leaders to talk about the distress the presence of male people was causing them and to explain why, and what the issues were, and how this prevented some women accessing services.

They said the leaders barely listened, laughed, and afterwards one said to the press that no woman had ever raised concerns. Many of the women in that group, sharing deeply personal information to people supposedly informed in trauma and caring about abused women, were in tears by the end of the meeting. The threads are here to read.

Lies, gaslighting and unbelievable deceit is part and parcel of all of this - its based on an ideology of denying reality and selecting facts ffs.

First you have if women raise complaints, they're doing it with a male in the building that they're scared of. Chilling effect.

Second you have if women raise complaints they risk being scolded, shamed, threatened with exclusion from services or worse, reporting for hate crime.

Third, if women DO raise complaints, they're not recorded and the people then just deny to your face that it ever happened. It's a fact no likey it go poof like all the other unwanted facts, this is a part of what reality denial looks like . Think of that poor woman being told by the NHS she was not raped when there was bloody video evidence corroborating what she knew had happened to her body. this is the evil part. The abysmal abuse of women to further the interests of males without conscience. I don't give a fuck what a male wants to identify as, but I will not tolerate this abusive behaviour from anyone of any sex or identity. No decent person would.

Fourth: No one is measuring or counting how many women are now afraid and unwilling to access those services. So probably by this point they're only serving the compliant group. So arrogantly claiming that there's no problem is another big, fat lie. (Its one of the reasons JKR's new set up scares them so much: someone will start measuring how many women have been thrown out of women's services for the benefit of and centering of men.)

Sexism on crack. That's all this ever is.

thats it. Total sock puppets

Charlie. Bloody brilliant

I imagine bullying of women goes on in order to get the required approval and funding, but yet it does seem some women are fully in support of their own erasure.

@CharlieParley & @nilsmousehammer

Many many thanks for your posts.

I think the damage this statement has done not just to women service providers in Scotland but across the UK.

If a group that for outside purposes is seen to be speaking for both WA & RC are cynically saying we have corrupted the intent of the EA SSE to further our ideological beliefs, it undermines trust.

I think I said on another thread I hope as many women as feel able go to the SfW event in Glasgow and provide testimony against this and the traumatic impact it has, even if women could only doing while wearing a mask to disguise themselves.

But obviously it isn't right to ask women to do this ie anti SfW protests are already being organised and asking women to talk about their trauma in public is unacceptable, let alone one where there are threats of violence.. As indeed is wearing a mask because for women who have experienced some forms of violence this is triggering.

Do you think there is a way that say ForWomenScot or an ad hoc group could set up an online form for women to report annonymously their experience, in much the same way as one young woman did for girls in schools to report their experiences.

And also for women who work in refuges and rccs to say they do not support this to be able to log their experiences.

And of course to name and shame the funders and those meant to regulate charities who have colluded with this.

Wasn't a group started by two women who resigned from their jobs in the VAW sector in Scotland because of this.

I really feel that it is vital to show, not just to score political points, but to give confidence to potential users that (most?) women service providers act with integrity and committment to provide women with safe and secure support.

I have a quite a long experience of the women's sector (in England) and am only too aware how external politics and other influences can make keeping to the primary aims and purposes of voluntary sector groups really hard.

And am just trying to think of a way to counter the negativity of this outright deceit and manipulation of vulnerable women, and to stop other women's groups who have and do behave with integrity being smeared by this.

Or maybe someone could write a straightforward statement and get others to sign?