Rape crisis funding pals on a Christmas mission
A PAIR of old friends will be giving up festive food and chat in a show of solidarity with victims of sexual violence.
Lindsey Watson and Stevie Cossar will be taking on the mammoth challenge to raise funds for Glasgow Rape Crisis who have been ‘swamped’ with cases throughout the year.
Over a period of eight months, the charity provided medium and long term face-to-face support to 1498 survivors of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse.
In the same period, staff carried out 12,957 support and advocacy calls, texts, emails, Facetime, Skype and Instant Message/Live Online Support through their website.
After hearing these figures, the pair decided to take on their most challenging expedition to date.
They will walk from Edinburgh’s Rape Crisis centre to the Glasgow offices, before going on to Paisley and Dunoon, where they will spend Christmas with their families.
Rather than indulging in the festivities, they will be fasting, while Lindsey, 37, will undertake a length of her local pool for every person who reported a rape or attempted rape against them in Glasgow in the last year.
The biggest challenge of all will see the self-proclaimed chatterboxes staying silent throughout the threeday challenge.
Lindsey, who owns her own feminist clothing company, said: “Rape Crisis is something that’s quite dear to me.
“With the resurgence of the Me Too campaign this year it’s an amazing time for survivors of sexual violence because they feel like they can speak up now.
“Glasgow Rape Crisis is already stretched and I want to make sure survivors have somewhere to go when they feel strong enough to speak out.
“After we decided on a challenge, we went in and spoke to the team to find out what they needed money for and they said the drop in clinics are one of things they needed to keep open to give people somewhere to go.”
While Stevie, 39, takes on a testing challenge every year, this will be Lindsey’s first. She added: “We hope that it might raise awareness of how many incidents actually happened this year..
“When we get together we just constantly talk so I wanted to add to the challenge.
“So many survivors feel like that they can’t speak out because even with the Me Too campaign, people are asking them to prove it or they don’t believe it. We want to show them that we are there with them. It’s going to be three days of not talking which could be the hardest part – but we also thought it would be quite powerful.”
The pair will be setting off on their challenge tomorrow and will be posting Facebook live videos throughout the weekend.
Isabelle Kerr, manager at Glasgow and Clyde Rape Crisis, said: “We really admire Lindsey and Stevie’s commitment to our work, the support they’ve shown rape crisis and the solidarity they have shown. It has been really inspirational.
“It will help show how survivors can be so silenced and isolated. We are really keen to highlight the work both of them are doing for us.”
To donate to Lindsey and Stevie’s challenge visit https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/ habsandstevie