I NOTE the resignation of the chief executive of a rape support centre, who reportedly spoke of rape victims “reframing” their trauma and “having a more positive relationship with it”, and that “bigoted” rape survivors should be re-educated about transgender rights.

Firstly, what have transgender rights got to do with rape – a crime that can only be committed by a biological man against a biological woman? Secondly, no woman can “reframe” the trauma of rape which can last a lifetime and affect the next generation and no-one can have “a more positive relationship with it.”

Of course, dedicated women-only spaces should be provided in a rape support centre. How could anyone think otherwise? Women-only spaces for all women have been eroded in recent years.

Although mixed sex wards were outlawed in Scotland in 2003 they still exist as I well know and am still suffering from my experience. It is also impossible, as I also know from personal experience, to get a female-only toilet even in a gynaecological cancer clinic in Glasgow.

When I was ill, my late mother, whom I looked after for 20 years, had to temporarily go into a home. A man with dementia kept trying to get into her bed during the night believing she was his wife. My mum was unable to move. When I complained and asked for her door to be locked, I was told that it was his home and he had “rights.” My mum, apparently, had no rights, not even to be safe from attack in her own bed.

This was a 92-year-old woman who had been raped during the Second World War, when she was in the services, by a male colleague who offered her a lift home from a training course and drove her to an isolated spot where he attacked and raped her. She was 26 and became pregnant. She was sent away to have the child, who was then brought back into the family and a story told of her mother dying in childbirth.

Shortly before she died, I held my mother in my arms and finally, after nearly 70 years, she was able to tell me the full story of what had happened to her. I knew something was troubling her and she needed to let it go but I had no idea of what I would be told.

Only then did many things that had happened and that she had said over the years make sense to me. I held that frail, very ill, old lady and told her “give me all your pain and I’ll take it and I’ll never let anyone hurt you again.” It then became my burden to carry. Eventually I said to her, “what hurts you, hurts me. Are you going to let that man hurt me?” She replied “oh no!”. I said, “we need to let this go . He’s not going to have power over us any longer.”

I was advised by Rape Crisis to tell the daughter who had lived abroad for many years, happily married and with a large family. She refused to believe it and said terrible cruel things about my mother. My mother had protected her from the truth all her life, to save her from pain.

Although mum and dad had a very long and happy marriage, she was very protective of me and I have never married and have no children. 

The rapist, a married man with children, was killed in a car crash shortly after I was born. He had got himself transferred to another unit immediately after the rape. It was all hushed up as the disgrace would have been on my mother, not him.

I asked her how she felt about the news of his death and she replied, 70 years later, “it wasn’t bad enough. He should have suffered more.” What does that tell you about what she suffered?

“Reframe” the trauma and have “a more positive relationship with it”? No-one who could say that should be allowed anywhere near women.
Dorothy Connor, Rutherglen.

 

History provides the answer
ACCORDING to Helen McArdle (“Why has the UK become so used to crippling inequality?",  September 14), Professor Danny Dorling, an expert in human geography, asks why “there is so little public debate or even awareness that the UK is a low-tax, low-spend country”.

One answer might be found in history.

The British Empire is long gone, but in much of the UK there’s an atavistic tendency to identify with countries which use English as their mother tongue, rather than with our European foreign-speaking neighbours.

So the UK Government adopts the priorities of the USA and our public services are compared with those in the USA rather than with those of Western Europe.

The fact that Scotland is more European-oriented than the rest of the UK might also be down to history: as an independent state Scotland traded widely with European countries rather than making war on them.
Mary McCabe, Glasgow. 

 

Prohibition in Scotland
CONSIDERING Scotland’s drink and drug problem, and with little commercial or economic development talent in the Parliament, but a strong bias towards social engineering, it is only a matter of time before we have prohibition in Scotland.
Malcolm Parkin, Kinnesswood, Kinross. 

 

Confused priorities
I AM trying to understand how the SNP council in Perth can close down three  good sports facilities and build a new one to replace them when one of the sports that school children use – curling – is not going to be included. I would have thought the money spent on this could have been better spent on fixing up the roads or go towards duelling the A9.
Bob Mitchell, Elderslie. 

 

How to stop a runaway train
ALISON Rowat’s review  ("New drama shoogles on to our screens", September  17) of Nightsleeper, the new BBC thriller about a runaway train, is very comprehensive and entertaining – but shouldn’t she have pointed out that the whole series could have been shortened to thirty minutes by getting the train operators to shut off the electric power to the overhead wires?
Alan McGibbon, Paisley.

 

WFH still has its benefits
IT is interesting that Amazon is to order its staff back into the office for five days a week. Other companies have tried to end, or at least truncate, WFH. I can see the business imperatives but personally I think WFH has lots of merits for hard-working employees.
L Duncan, Glasgow.