Rape crisis centre refuses female-only therapy group for victims
A SEXUAL assault survivor is suing a government-funded rape crisis centre for allowing a transgender woman to access its female-only support group.
The rape victim, who has been granted court anonymity but goes by the name Sarah, sought counselling from the Survivors’ Network in Brighton last year after she was abused as a child and raped in her twenties.
Sarah joined the peer therapy group in 2021, and said she initially felt “relieved” to be able to share her story among women with similar experiences. But she claims to have left a session last September feeling “shaken and upset”, after noticing “someone who appeared to be a man” attending.
The network’s policy states its women-only services are available to any “self-identifying woman”, defined as “an individual that feels their gender identity is a woman, irrespective of the gender they were assigned at birth”.
This also applies to counsellors and volunteers. The organisation ruled out any change to its policy when Sarah requested a separate support group solely for people who were born female. “They made it really clear they can’t offer me any help”, she said.
The network, the only registered rape crisis centre in Sussex, last year received £100,000 in funding from government bodies, including the NHS, the Ministry of Justice and the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner.
After filing her legal claim on Friday, Sarah said: “On the surface it appears anti-feminist to challenge a rape crisis centre” but she added that “hundreds” of survivors have reached out to her having had similar experiences requesting female-only rape counselling.
“I want to stress that we’re not looking for this instead of the mixed-sex women’s groups,” Sarah explained.
“It’s in addition. It seems like a really small ask for a supposedly trauma informed rape crisis centre.”
Another sexual abuse survivor has claimed she was told by Jay Breslaw, the CEO, to “reframe her boundaries” after she explained why a women-only service was important to her. Ali, 41, was “furious” when she applied for oneto-one help and was told that the centre could not guarantee her counsellor would be a biological woman.
“A massive issue for people who have been sexually abused or raped is your boundaries and your ability to consent,” she said, “and women can get triggered, distressed or can freeze in the space of a man in these situations”.
“It takes a woman a lot to contact a rape crisis centre in the first place. To be told you might turn up and there could be a male counsellor is appalling,” she added. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) last month published guidance permitting the exclusion of trans women from single-sex services, including rape counselling, where it is judged victims are “likely to be traumatised by the presence of a person who is biologically male”.
In response, the Survivors’ Network penned an open letter to the EHRC, criticising it for “framing the support needs of cis women as more important than the support needs of trans people”.