The rot at the heart of Rape Crisis Scotland
An old friend writes.
You may remember the young woman who wrote to me about her traumatic experience of sexual assault, where unfortunately the assault itself was only the beginning. Soon, she discovered that Midrul Wadha was CEO of Rape Crisis Scotland, and she knew she couldn’t use services run by someone who cast as bigots women who needed female care. She gave me permission to post her latest thread on the matter.
I've been accused by @churchscotland @RevKarenH of weaponising my trauma because I self-excluded from an initiative of Rape Crisis last year due to my views on the current self identified male and the abhorrent comments made about victims in the past, including calling us bigots.
Let me be absolutely clear, I really needed therapy, I often thought over the past year that I'd be coping better if I had just ignored the comments but how could I have proper therapy from an organisation that puts the feelings of one person above the women they help?
This is from the day I self-excluded.
When I say events of the past few months, I am talking about putting in the GDPR request to see the words -if they still existed, and they don't - of the male doctor who did not believe me when I told him I was raped.
After the GDPR request the man who raped me went missing. As a strange coincidence, I had been on his street the day he went missing, I'd taken my daughter to the museum, the first time since lockdown. When I saw the news article about him being missing I thought he had seen us, looking happy and excited or that he knew I'd taken screenshots of the Facebook messages he had sent me years before, which as another strange coincidence I had done the night he went missing. I'd had an impulse thought, perhaps a sign from above @churchscotland, that he might delete his account and I wouldn't have my "evidence", where he just about admits it but forgives himself, and his name would disappear. So as you can imagine, having experienced several mental health crisis previously, I convinced myself that he knew, either about the GDPR request from someone at the uni (not true).
Or that he knew I took the screenshots, or that he had seen me. It's all I could think about, day and night, if I could sleep I had nightmares and I told my partner I should contact the police, that I had the missing information they were after. He stopped me thankfully because as it turns out, his disappearance had nothing to do with me. I was told by a friend I knew years ago that he had been arrested for stalking two women and that someone who knew him described him as "a sexual predator until the end". I drove myself mad reliving the past when really he hadn't changed. When I was off work I received emergency counselling from the critical care team. The woman there was amazing. There was no "reframe your trauma" or "some victims are bigots", statements Rape Crisis Scotland have never condemned.
Instead, she said "sometimes the trash takes itself out". Words I needed to hear. Because you know what, even after he was dead, and I knew it had nothing to do with me, I still felt guilty. She encouraged me to take therapy by therapists trained to help rape victims and that was my intention. But I'd spent years on @MumsnetTowers, sometimes posting anonymously and that's where I learned about the scandal at Rape Crisis, the male who objected publicly to victims being examined by females only. I learned so much more there too about the dangers of Self ID.
The men already abusing their special status. It was there that I learned children were being experimented on, irreversibly harmed, sterilised, with gay and autistic children most likely to be vulnerable to being groomed by the gender identity industry and it horrified me.
I joined twitter in April because I wanted to warn people because I wasn't reading about it in the news, this huge scandal for women's, children's and gay rights. What I found was a huge number of intelligent, articulate people already here doing just that. I obviously didn't know the man who raped me would go missing and to be honest I believed I wouldn't need counselling again because I was feeling good physically and mentally, I wouldn't have done the GDPR request if not. And there I was having a breakdown,again.
That was a year ago now and I'm OK most of the time, we'll I say OK, I take medication every day to get to work, I have panic attacks when I least expect it, which has been a lot over the past year, then I feel depressed and like a scab I keep on picking, my mind returns to not only this, but the other times male violence had affected me, including the times an ex was violent. I wrote to my MSP last year @BillKiddSNP, telling him that I feared for women's rights and his reply was heartening but his silence since then has been disappointing. I have lived through Enough situations of abuse where I could have stopped manipulative men but I didn't have the support.
But I won't be silent while manipulative men and women try to destroy boundaries and safeguarding, not when I have a young daughter who could be harmed by policies that promote sexist, regressive stereotypes, that allow men to self id as lesbians, self id in to Women's prisons where many women are there because of abuse. Policies that have allowed children to be given experimental drugs and have healthy body parts cut off.
My heart breaks for detransitioners and every vulnerable person who should be receiving good therapy that does not harm them physically long term but that is not what is happening in Scotland, with ever increasing numbers of people being affirmed as trans. I don't care if anyone thinks I am weaponising my trauma, @RevKarenH because I won't support any group or organisation who supports self id, not when I've learned the hard way how hard life can be, especially if you are a woman.
The thing that should be urgently reframed is Wadhwa's employment at Rape Crisis Scotland. An adult human female qualified for the job should be appointed instead and the Board held to account for allowing Wadhwa to take a job that was subject to an essential legal exception.
This is not the Scotland I have lived in for most of my life. I don’t recognise the lack of compassion for women and children, for those in distress. I don’t understand why your pain is less than the loss of face of this man pretending to be a woman. Mostly I don’t understand why no one is listening to those of us crying foul at this disgraceful state of affairs. The men in my life, husband, brother, father and now grandsons have all been honest decent respectable men who would not have stood back and tolerated I’ll treatment of women.
MPs. MSPs, counsellors, medical staff, teachers, step up as our men would once have done and stand alongside us women because we really need more help as Scotland goes down the pan with Nicola Sturgeon at the helm.