The first centres in Scotland

The first two rape crisis centres in Scotland opened in Glasgow in 1976 and in Edinburgh in 1978.

They and the centres that opened over the following years were founded on feminist principles, recognising that rape and child sexual abuse are crimes of violence and abuses of power. It is the imbalance of power within our society that allows and perpetuates abuses of women and children.

Centres, in common with others worldwide, based their structures on collective working, aiming to agree by consensus. Our policy statement says: “Collective working is about sharing the power and responsibility in the organisation and allowing women involved to determine the direction and priorities—.collective working does not mean everyone has to be the same.”

Campaigning in Scotland has of course been based on the Scottish legal system, which is independent and distinct from the English system. Women in the various rape crisis centres opening around the country provided - with very limited resources - what support services they could for survivors of rape and sexual abuse, including running occasional groups. And they worked to change attitudes especially within the criminal justice system. Women were survivors not victims, were always believed and were supported in their own choices about whether or not to report to the police. Issues and prejudices affecting lesbian survivors were tackled and centres found many women wanting support were coming forward about rapes or child abuse from years earlier.

Centre workers — all unpaid in the early days - wrote letters, gave talks, lobbied MPs and spoke to groups of lawyers, police, doctors and others whose attitudes affected the ways in which women who had been assaulted were treated.

Challenging the myths

It is a matter of record that too many official approaches in those days often focused on attacking, blaming and disbelieving the women who complained of rape. The work of rape crisis centres was therefore regularly about challenging deeply sexist myths and beliefs about rape and rapists, including arguing that rape in marriage must be treated as a crime. We worked in wider areas with Women’s Aid and abortion campaigners and others in demanding a complete change in attitudes to women.

Three events in early 1982 coincided to put a number of the issues we were working on firmly in the public eye and this built on the groundwork already laid by several years of campaigning. These were:

	Roger Graef’s documentary about Thames Valley Police which showed the unsympathetic questioning of a woman reporting a rape. It led to then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher criticising police treatment of women reporting rape and to the establishment of “rape suites”.
	Publicity about ‘the Glasgow rape case’, and the subsequent resignation of the Solicitor General, Nicholas Fairbairn. The prosecution did not pursue charges over the rape and horrific razor assault, arguing the complainer was too traumatised to go to court. However, a later successful private prosecution led to convictions against three teenagers. One, aged 18, was sentenced to 12 years detention for rape and the razor attack. The other youths were convicted of indecent assault.
	A judge in England fining a convicted rapist. The judge said the woman had contributed to her own rape by hitchhiking late at night

Mainstream opinion started to reflect criticisms of the most overt failings in the way women were being treated. Then in April 1982 a rape in marriage prosecution very belatedly established the principle in Scotland that this was a crime (although in this first case the man was found not guilty - and it took until 1989 before a case was prosecuted, also unsuccessfully, involving a husband still living with his wife).

From 1983-1987 rape crisis centres started to receive slightly more funding than their previous reliance on voluntary contributions and occasional small grants. In 1982 Glasgow Rape Crisis changed its name to Strathclyde Rape Crisis Centre after winning funding from Strathclyde Regional Council for a part-time administrative worker. They then obtained Urban Aid funding to set up the Women’s Support project in Glasgow’s East End. Edinburgh Rape Crisis said it was not possible to prove how many women it was helping in urban aid areas and they also resisted naming working class areas as more prone to sexual violence. This is just one example of how our political analysis can sometimes clash with funding bodies’ requirements. Such clashes have been a frequent feature of rape crisis work around the world, with different groups trying different ways to work within funding rules while trying to change them, and with others opting not to try to meet criteria they dispute, but then having to work with even less public funding.

Lothian Regional Council gave Edinburgh RCC some running costs from 1987, and by then there was considerable joint work by all the centres. From 1982, there were centres in Aberdeen, Central, Dundee and the Highlands, with joint campaigning involving them, Edinburgh and Strathclyde from 1983.

Edinburgh and Strathclyde centres started contributing to police training programmes, and new research in November 1983 confirmed Rape Crisis criticisms of the police treatment of women complainers. (Investigating Sexual Assault, Chambers and Millar 1.) Slowly there were shifts in police attitudes and the reintroduction of women and child units, with better facilities and questioning by specially trained officers.

Further research by Chambers and Millar (Prosecuting Sexual Assault 2) - confirmed complaints about how women were treated in court. Rape crisis centres stepped up campaigning to try to stop the questioning of women in court about their past sexual history. Scottish Office research from 1988 by Brown, Burman and Jamieson 3 (not published until 1992) demonstrated the way defence advocates easily got round legislation designed to protect women complainers from this type of questioning.

Incest survivors speak out

But in the meantime another major change was well under way. From the early days of Rape Crisis, all centres found that many of their calls came from incest survivors. Many set up support groups for incest survivors and the women themselves spoke out increasingly and courageously about the extent of child sexual abuse hidden within the family. In 1987 three hundred women from all over Scotland met at a Women Against Violence Against Women conference to assess progress and plan future campaigns, with child sexual abuse and incest a major focus.

When Childline was launched by Esther Rantzen in October 1986 there were mixed feelings as it had no specifically feminist analysis, but the new telephone helpline for children did demonstrate the massive shift in public awareness of child sexual abuse and incest. The survivors who spoke out played a key role in achieving such a change. And ChildLine, like Rape Crisis, found that many calls came from adults who had been abused in childhood many years earlier.

We remained angry at the low level of rape convictions; although sometimes women were able to take some limited comfort from the fact that Scotland has three verdicts. When a jury found a case against an accused “not proven”, rather than finding him guilty or not guilty, there was at least the implication that there was not enough evidence, rather than that they had not believed the woman.

In May 1993 a Tory party worker “Judy” spoke at the party’s Scottish conference in front of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher about her own experience of sexual assault and the leniency of sentencing. Her widely publicised comments helped contribute to changes in government thinking and followed on from the recent Edinburgh District Council Women’s Committee’s excellent Zero Tolerance campaign of posters highlighting violence against women and children. It seemed various messages were getting through, with much more recognition that women are never to blame.

Rape Crisis has also tried to explain in our campaigning that women and girls who have been sexually assaulted should be seen as survivors, not victims - and we describe the work we do with women and girls as “support”, not counselling. However, this is one area which different centres around the world and sometimes in Scotland have over the years taken varying lines on. Some resist the concept of counselling in favour of saying that what we provide is information and support. Others have been interested in developing and defining a feminist counselling approach. Certainly more and more women contacting centres have often had an expectation they would be helped by trained ‘counsellors’, with women volunteering to offer support also expecting that is what they would do. Partly this has been because the term counselling is now widely understood. The general public became more educated about post traumatic stress disorder following major incidents including the Lockerbie bombing and the Piper Alpha oil rig fire, both in 1988. Counselling became a commonly used term and this all increased expectation about what rape crisis centres would provide, not necessarily matched by what they could provide or chose to provide. However, regardless of what the support work is defined as, our centres all provide lengthy initial training and ongoing training for all workers, paid and unpaid. There are also plans to develop common SRCN standards and to investigate accreditation of our training.

Birth of the Scottish Rape Crisis Network (now Rape Crisis Scotland)

Various successes led to increased funding of centres in the early to mid 1990s and discussions began on setting up a formal network. Between 1994 and 1996 the constitution for the new Scottish Rape Crisis Network was drafted and approved by the Inland Revenue.

A training pack, a press conference and a financial appeal to fund a television advert were featured at the launch of the network and the ad ran eventually on STV and Grampian for twelve weeks in late 1996 and early 1997. Joint work at this stage focused on improving services, whereas previously it had been much more about campaigning for legal and social change.

However, a major problem over funding arrangements arose with local government reorganisation in1996. Edinburgh has seen a steady reduction in grant and in Glasgow the relatively stable funding base was shattered, with the centre which used to cover all of Strathclyde now having to apply to nine different local authorities. All rape crisis centres, in common with many other voluntary organisations, find they have to spend far too much valuable time chasing funding instead of providing their core service. This is something that Rape Crisis Scotland has tried to highlight locally and nationally to all the relevant agencies as it is a constant drain on energy and resources. Women survivors deserve a much fairer distribution of public funding.

Another problem with funding has been the increasing demands on voluntary organisations, under the contract culture and ‘best value’ approach, to demonstrate they provide good value for money. We would argue that it has to be considered whose ‘values’ this means. It can become harder and harder for rape crisis groups, which clearly do provide a much needed, used and valued service, to fit into criteria which often are interested only in our role as service providers, when we see our other work as extremely important to those services….our work as campaigners with a clear feminist analysis and a radical agenda.

However, we were pleased at the success of the Zero Tolerance campaigns, which were being taken up by councils elsewhere in Scotland and south of the border, continuing to promote public debate and helping boost funding for services for survivors in some areas by demonstrating the need. Central Region in particular received extra money to increase service provision. New efforts by councils to work in partnership with the voluntary sector provided a further boost. Rape crisis centres were able to influence and feed into local government policy and were involved in the 1997 working group which produced the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities’ Guidance on Preparing and Implementing a Multi-agency Strategy to Tackle Violence Against Women.

Much of this often ‘behind-the-scenes’ work has contributed to the gains we are seeing in the Scottish Parliament in this field and multi-agency working is widespread now, with rape crisis centres widely involved and respected for their work and the expertise they have built up.

References:

1. Chambers, Gerry and Ann Millar (1983), Investigating Sexual Assault, Edinburgh: Scottish Office Central Research Unit
2. Chambers, Gerry and Ann Millar (1986), Prosecuting Sexual Assault, Edinburgh: Scottish Office Central Research Unit.
3. Brown, B, M.Burman and L.Jamieson (1992), Sexual History and Sexual Character Evidence in Scottish Sexual Offence Trials, Edinburgh: Scottish Office Central Research Unit.

NOTE: This herstory has been adapted (incorporating much factual information and some of its themes) with permission, from the chapter by Aileen Christianson and Lily Greenan: “Rape Crisis Movement in Scotland 1977-2000”, from the book “Women and Contemporary Scottish Politics: An Anthology“,edited by Esther Breitenbach and Fiona Mackay, Polygon 2001. ISBN: 190293024X. Thank you to the above authors and to Polygon. Any errors in adaptation are ours.