Do rape-crisis centres exist to support rape victims, or to validate the beliefs of gender ideologues? This was the question at the heart of a recent UK tribunal ruling, writes Jo Bartosch for Spiked.
In a damning ruling at the Edinburgh Employment Tribunal, a judge has condemned a trans inclusive rape crisis centre, and criticised the organisation’s transgender chief executive for pursuing a “Kafkaesque” nine month-long investigation against a female employee who held gender critical beliefs.
Roz Adams, a support counsellor who has worked with vulnerable communities since 2003, brought the case claiming she suffered discrimination when her views on the importance of rape trauma and counselling services remaining single-sex became known to senior colleagues at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC), including the centre’s chief executive, transgender woman Mridul Wadhwa.
Jo continues:
Adams’s ordeal began when she tried to advocate for traumatised service users who wanted reassurance that they would be seen by a female counsellor. A female colleague, referred to as AB in the ruling, identified as nonbinary and chose a name that would be widely understood as male. This prompted one service user to ask Adams whether ERCC staff were all female because ‘as a woman, I would be very uncomfortable talking with a man’. Adams then emailed her manager for advice.
In a trail of emails, Adams pointed out that ‘people who have been abused by men… are very attuned to be triggered by the presence of male bodies’. If the biological sex of the ERCC’s case workers were to be disclosed, then the ‘barriers to [women] accessing support would be reduced’, she explained. But her lengthy and considered email asking for guidance was referred to by AB as ‘violent and humiliating’. The court dismissed this entirely, stating that ‘the email has not caused [AB] the upset and humiliation’ that she claimed it had. ‘It is also suspicious that the claim of humiliation only comes later after [AB had] been in contact with Mridul Wadhwa’, the judges added.
No matter how spurious the claims of offence, Adams’s colleagues insisted that she was a transphobe. She was then placed under an investigation that was described in the ruling as ‘somewhat reminiscent of the work of Franz Kafka’. Wadhwa, the tribunal noted, had already ‘formed the view that the claimant was transphobic’ before dismissing her. ‘This led to a completely spurious and mishandled disciplinary process.’
As it happens, there is a service in Scotland for those supposedly ‘bigoted’ survivors of sexual violence who need support. In 2022, in part as a response to the takeover of the women’s sector by trans activists, JK Rowling funded a single-sex centre called Beira’s Place. But workers at the ERCC were barred from referring women there or even advising them of its existence. Wadhwa told ERCC staff that Beira’s Place is an organisation ‘founded on a platform of exclusion, misinformation and what I would describe as white feminist imperialism, that interesting combination of the flaws of white feminism and the white saviourism of colonialists and of course capitalism of which the founder is a beneficiary’. This is a long-winded way of saying that ERCC staff should go out of their way to avoid helping women who don’t share the boss’s ideology.
Worth reading in full.
