Behind the “anti-rights” headline is a rape crisis centre that has supported more than 1,200 women mostly for rape, sexual assault, childhood sexual abuse and domestic abuse since it opened. Amnesty UK branded it a threat to human rights.
The Telegraph got inside Beira’s Place, JK Rowling’s Edinburgh centre, and found exactly what you’d expect from an organisation that takes safeguarding seriously: female-only staff, sessions kept calm and private, cabs paid for women who can’t afford them and a genuine understanding that most of these women aren’t dealing with one incident but years of layered trauma. Chief executive Lesley Johnston has worked in this field for 30 years and she says the levels of violence against women and girls she sees now are higher than when she started.
Since the Amnesty report, no-shows have risen and referrals have dipped. That’s the real cost of being wrongly branded “anti-rights”. While the report was merely a reputational inconvenience for Amnesty, for vulnerable women who need support it has led to hesitation to take up the services they need. Board member Johann Lamont, the former Scottish Labour politician, said it plainly: an organisation with Amnesty’s history “isn’t some random off-the-street thing that thinks it’s a good idea to slag off whoever about anything… it’s significant that they said it.”
This is what feminism actually looks like in practice: women showing up for other women at their most frightened, asking for nothing except the right to keep doing it. The fact that Amnesty UK felt able to target it shows how deep the misogyny runs with trans rights activism. Women – even those victimised in the most intimate, most traumatic of ways – have been branded as bigots merely for wanting a space to heal from male violence. Amnesty UK can’t apologise enough to them for that.
And it doesn’t want to apologize to them at all.
Leave a Reply