Today has seen the publication of a damning report into the culture of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre under CEO Mridul Wadhwa, a man who identifies as a woman.
[https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/mridul-wadhwa-edinburgh-rape-crisis-centre-sw5fpfzql]

According to the report’s author, legal specialist Vicky Ling, the regime of the rape crisis centre under the trans-identified CEO “caused damage” to survivors. Some “did not feel safe” using it. It was because I knew sexual assault victims were self-excluding from the only rape support centre in my home city, that I founded and fund @beirasplace, a woman-only service for female survivors of sexual assault in Edinburgh and Lothian.

Responding to Ling’s report, Rape Crisis Scotland said today: ‘It is important that survivors can make informed choices about the services they access at Rape Crisis Centres, and we recognise that for some survivors this includes the choice of a single sex service.’ Yet Edinburgh Rape Crisis has never referred a woman in search of a single sex service to @beirasplace and was found to have constructively dismissed support worker Roz Adams for believing that service users have the right to know the sex of staff.
[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/20/edinburgh-crisis-worker-wins-tribunal-over-gender-critical-views]

A staff SLACK conversation about @beirasplace came to light during Roz’s tribunal. The opening of the new single-sex centre was described by one employee as ‘really terrible news’ and ‘a festive stinker.’
[Image on original tweet: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1834364837763182678]

Umbrella organisation Rape Crisis Scotland claims to have been in ignorance of the Edinburgh centre’s failings. As @ForWomenScot says below, this is nonsense. They were warned, yet supported Wadhwa and his ideology throughout his tenure.
[Image on original tweet: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1834365577831612875]

Chief Executive Sandy Brindley appears to have been fine with Wadhwa’s publicly expressed views that female survivors are ‘bigots’ if they don’t want to share spaces with trans-identified men and that the best way to deal with gender critical staff is to fire them.
[Image on original tweet: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1834365833939693653]

Wadhwa remained in post even after the Edinburgh centre allowed a man now convicted of serious sexual assault, who the judge said harbours ‘hostility towards women’, to access a space supposedly reserved for traumatised female survivors.
[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/17/predator-cameron-downing-trans-inclusive-rape-crisis-centre/]

Some might have expected the Chief Exec and her ‘amazing sister’ to resign today, but no. The government continues to fund a service dominated by ideologues, vulnerable women have been denied help, and Brindley and Wadhwa continue to draw their salaries.

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