Me on Mridul Wadhwa and Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre

I am so pleased to hear that the Employment Tribunal for Roz Adams against Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) has agreed that Roz Adams was subjected to discriminatory treatment and that she was unfairly constructively dismissed.

This is undoubtedly a personal victory for Adams. To be told that you are under investigation for gross misconduct and facing immediate dismissal with no pay is intensely stressful and upsetting. For this to be followed by a nine-month procedure that results in ‘only’ a formal warning, is no exoneration. Even the escape route – resignation – is itself a punishment, the loss of job and income compounding the knock to your self-worth. I’m glad that after being discriminated against and unfairly constructively dismissed for believing that women who had been raped had the right to be supported by a female counsellor and to know the sex of their counsellor, not only did Adams find a new job with Beira’s place, she also found within herself the strength to take ERCC to employment tribunal. I’m delighted for her that she won.

Important though Adams’ victory is for her personally, and by extension, for those of us who understand that the support needs of women who have been subjected to men’s violence are best met by women and in women-only environments; Adams’ tribunal success is most important for women victim-survivors of sexual and domestic violence and abuse.

In May 2021, ERCC announced the appointment of Mridul Wadhwa as its new CEO. The post had been advertised as restricted to women applicants. Kathryn Dawson, Chair of ERCC’s Board of Directors, exclaimed: ‘We are delighted that a woman with such a strong track record in improving the lives of women and campaigning against all forms of inequality will be leading our organisation into the future.’ This is gaslighting. Wadhwa was well known in Edinburgh and Scotland and it was widely known that he was, indeed is, male. For a chair of a Rape Crisis charity to claim otherwise is a gross dereliction of duty and a failure of what should be a key aim of such an organisation to put their beneficiaries first.

In the opening paragraph of my book, Defending Women’s Spaces, published in November 2022, I quoted Wadhwa’s submission to the 2016 Transgender Equality Report published by the government’s Women and Equalities Committee where he bemoaned ‘I am disappointed to think that someone has the right to refuse work to me and others like me in my sector just because they think that I might not be a woman.’ But Wadhwa is not a woman. And he should not be in the sector because he has prioritised his need for validation above the needs of women who have been subjected to men’s violence. Needs which include a trauma-informed single sex space. Needs which include being heard and believed.  Needs which include being able to trust what you can see with your own eyes. The heart of Defending Women’s Spaces sets out why single sex spaces are so important for women’s recovery after men’s violence.

The grip of transgender identity ideology on the nation’s psyche has been loosened by concerted feminist and lesbian and gay rights activism since then. Legal cases taken by Allison Baily, Maya Forstater, Jo Phoenix, Rachel Meade and Denise Fahmy have demonstrated how women who dare speak up for other women have been treated but the law has repeatedly found that we have been unfairly treated.  The mantra ‘transwomen are women’ is no longer so frequently end vehemently regurgitated by its apostles and disciples. 

Within months of appointment, Wadhwa said ‘sexual violence happens to bigoted people as well’ and that ERCC service users would have to rethink their relationship with prejudice if they brought views that the charity believed to be discriminatory. This, as the tribunal showed, became a condition of accessing support.  In a later interview, Wadhwa revealed that ‘large groups of survivors’, who did not want to be exposed to men with transgender identities, were not using ERCC services. He did not appear to see this as a problem.

It is to the detriment of the specialist sector supporting women victims of sexual and domestic violence and abuse, and sexual exploitation, that the feminist activist roots and the political nature of the work is being detangled in too many cases from service provision. For me the sector has to frame our work within efforts to end men’s violence against women as a cause and consequence of sex inequality. If we can’t say what a woman is, we can’t end sex inequality.

The employment tribunal found Mridul Wadhwa, ERCC’s Chief Executive, ‘was the invisible hand behind everything that had taken place.’ Not only did Wadhwa lead an organisation to a place where enforcing transgender identity ideology was prioritised over supporting women victim-survivors of men’s violence, he refused to take responsibility in the employment tribunal, he did not appear. The tribunal judgment said ‘absolutely no explanation was provided as to why she (sic) refused to give evidence in the case’ and concluded that they were therefore ‘entitled to draw an adverse inference as to what their evidence would have been in relation to those matters where the respondent’s position conflicted with the claimant’s evidence.’

As a CEO of a charity your role often goes beyond your job description in ways that can be hard to define. In short, you set the tone. It appears that Wadhwa has indeed successfully set the tone at ERCC. But that tone does not prioritise victim-survivors of rape and sexual assault. It is now the responsibility of the board of trustees of ERCC to address this critical failure of mission.