Rape Crisis Centres

When​ I trained as a volunteer for a rape crisis helpline in 2017, I was taught to allow three rings before picking up. This gives the caller time to ready themselves: answer more quickly and they might feel startled; leave it too long and the gap can feel like abandonment. There are no rules about what constitutes a crisis. Calls can be about an assault that took place days earlier or an experience that has been buried for decades. Part of the work is giving practical information, such as where to get a forensic examination. But the most common calls are from people who know they have been harmed but don’t feel ‘rape’ is a word that really describes what has happened to them. The job of the operator is to allow what can seem unspeakable to be said.

In December 2022, the charity Rape Crisis England and Wales (RCEW) launched a 24/7 sexual violence helpline and a web-chat service, both funded by the Ministry of Justice. At the time, the national helpline was open for only five hours a day. The government’s End-to-End Rape Review, which had reported the previous year, recommended improving survivors’ access to support. The RCEW helpline is supplemented by a network of autonomous regional rape crisis centres, some of which have had their own helplines since the mid-1970s. The first centre, in North London, was modelled on similar services in Washington DC and New York that had emerged out of the Women’s Liberation Movement. The ambition of these centres was both political and palliative, taking rape more seriously than the state did while also insisting on women’s ability to recover from it. In a notice in Spare Rib in 1976, the London Rape Crisis Centre described its purpose as helping ‘raped women regain their strength as individuals’. Its services were run for women by women: self-defence classes, court chaperoning and support groups.

Callers of any gender can use the RCEW helpline, but the workers are all women and many of the original feminist principles guide its practice. Accepting a caller’s account of their abuse stands as a corrective to a generalised scepticism about the prevalence of sexual violence. Workers don’t tell callers what to do: advice on how to report an assault to the police, for instance, is given without the expectation that the information will then be acted on. The idea is to return a sense of agency to those who have had their autonomy infringed. The term ‘survivor’ is preferred to ‘victim’ (even though the demand to valiantly overcome an assault can be just as distressing as the idea that rape is ruinous). Rather than sorting callers’ experiences into discrete crimes, the rape crisis movement has long stressed the expansiveness and everyday nature of sexual violence, which legal definitions often fail to capture.

Speaking to a stranger on the phone creates a particular kind of intimacy. You hear breathing, crying, a baby mewling in the background, a cat purring on a caller’s chest. But a helpline conversation is one-sided: workers don’t disclose anything about themselves. The anonymity of the helpline emboldens people to use it. It is also one reason many helplines are plagued by ‘telephone masturbators’, callers who want to describe in explicit detail some humiliating or disturbing fantasy. Heavy breathing is often a giveaway.

In 2024, the rape crisis helpline handled a hundred thousand calls and web chats. These figures point to several problems beyond the ubiquity of rape and assault. Specialist sexual violence provision across England and Wales has declined steadily from a peak of 68 rape crisis centres in 1984 to 37 today. There is just one centre in Wales and in July last year the Suffolk branch closed. Labour has not committed to extending funding for rape and sexual abuse support services beyond 2026. As of last October, 14,000 survivors had been referred for free counselling and advocacy. Waiting times are often more than eighteen months, and many centres are so overloaded they don’t regularly take on new clients. With private treatment beyond the means of many callers, the helpline functions as a holding room for those with nowhere else to go.

These are the kinds of story you hear: a teenage girl falls asleep in a friend’s bed and wakes up to find him on top of her; a woman freezes when her long-term partner jams his penis into her anus during sex; a young man is pressured into sending nudes to a stranger online. Survivors tend to dwell on what they might have done to set the abuse in motion, describing acts of concession as though they were equivalent to consent. But giving in, lying still or ‘letting it happen’ are methods of calculated survival. Even when someone was abused as a child, feelings of culpability can accumulate. Self-reproach spirals into suicidal thoughts. Sometimes a caller will cut or burn themselves while on the phone. Late-night helpline slots tend to be filled with people who relive their experiences in their sleep. Sexual abuse confiscates good dreams.

Part of the government’s motivation for funding the new helpline was to prevent victims of sexual violence from dropping out of the criminal justice system. But most survivors never report their assault to the police, while others call the helpline to express regret about having done so. Many find themselves trapped in a limbo of delayed charging decisions or are told there will be ‘No Further Action’ (when police decide there is insufficient evidence to proceed with a case). Such outcomes are more likely for complainants with mental health issues or those struggling with alcohol or drug dependency. Survivors sometimes record video statements, only for their files to be lost. They sign consent forms for digital searches of their phones without realising that they have the right to refuse. They are often met by suspicion from police officers – some of whom have been accused of the crimes they are meant to investigate. In 2024, 400 Metropolitan Police officers were under active investigation for sexual offences.

In cases of adult rape, it takes the police an average of 344 days to decide whether to press charges (for all other crimes, it is 41 days). During this period, victims have no right to independent legal advice or representation unless they pay for it themselves. The court backlog of rape cases is at a record high. Court dates can be scheduled and then postponed with as little as 24 hours’ notice – I’ve heard of this happening to a victim more than twenty times. Outside the courtroom, victims may face intimidation from the perpetrator or his family. Once on the stand, they will be cross-examined and can be asked questions about whether they have ever engaged in rough sex or flirted with the accused. The defence may argue that the victim regretted consensual sex and fabricated the allegation, or that rolling over in bed signalled consent. If they have applied for compensation from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA), it might be suggested that they did so for financial gain.

Survivors with active court cases are often discouraged by the police from accessing psychotherapy or counselling. This is because a defendant’s solicitors have the right to request a claimant’s therapy notes, along with their medical, educational and social care records. As a result, there has long been a fear that engaging with a counsellor or psychotherapist could end up undermining a prosecution. Some counsellors try to get round this by keeping minimal records. There hasn’t been serious scrutiny of the way therapy has been treated as an extension of the criminal investigation until recently. In April last year, the Tory peer Baroness Bertin tabled an amendment to the new Victims and Prisoners Bill, proposing that the police must first demonstrate that obtaining therapy notes would ‘add substantial value’ to their investigation before requesting them.

Specialist services have become a focal point in debates about the perceived conflict between women’s and trans rights. Trans-hostile groups often point to rape crisis centres as examples of spaces that should be protected through stricter ‘sex-based’ criteria. RCEW has historically taken an agnostic approach to trans inclusion, allowing centres to set their own policies. Some operate as all-gender services (such as those in Brighton and Devon), while others provide single-gender support to all those who consider women’s services best for them, including trans women, intersex and non-binary victims (the centres in Cambridge, Tyneside and Northumberland). A few centres offer single-sex services that exclude trans-feminine survivors from certain women-only provisions. They claim to refer these people elsewhere, but such services are scarce. There is only one domestic violence refuge dedicated to trans and non-binary people in the UK, and Galop – the largest LGBT+ charity supporting survivors of hate crimes, abuse and sexual violence – doesn’t provide counselling or therapy.

In Scotland, Mridul Wadhwa, a trans woman who became the chief executive of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre in 2021, resigned last September. Her departure followed an employment tribunal ruling that a former staff member had been unfairly dismissed for holding gender-critical beliefs, as well as the publication of an independent report commissioned by Rape Crisis Scotland, which identified several procedural and cultural problems at the centre, including inadequate governance, the absence of a business strategy, poor data-protection measures and the removal of women-only sessions. These were phased out in 2022 when the centre expanded its services to support survivors of all genders. Although people could still ask to attend the centre when only women would be present, the lack of structured provision violated national service standards. Anti-trans journalists and campaigners seized on these findings as evidence that women’s services were being undermined by gender ideology.

But the tribunal judgment and report, read in their entirety, describe an organisation struggling with uncertainties about funding, staff shortages and post-Covid restructuring. From the time of Wadhwa’s appointment in 2021, she was misgendered by anti-trans commentators and social media vigilantes, who published her home address online and forced the centre to employ more stringent safety protocols. The report records overwhelmingly positive outcomes for survivors who used the centre during Wadhwa’s tenure.

As yet, it’s not clear how women’s organisations will interpret the recent UK Supreme Court decision that the meaning of ‘woman’ in the 2010 Equality Act refers to ‘biological sex’. RCEW has said it will wait until the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) publishes its code of practice on single-sex spaces in the summer before issuing new policies. Given that the interim guidance states that trans people may no longer use public or workplace toilets that correspond either to their assigned or their acquired sex, it seems likely the EHRC will go even further than it did in 2022, when it held that trans women can justifiably be excluded from group therapy because cis women are ‘likely to be traumatised by the presence of a person who is biologically male’. This not only peddles phobic fantasies of trans women, but appears to contradict the 2010 Equality Act, which legally requires organisations to act with proportion on single-sex matters and to adopt a case-by-case approach. The point of making gender reassignment a protected characteristic was precisely to mitigate blanket exclusions of trans people from public life.

One of the original motivations of anti-rape activism was to counter myths about sexual violence – today this would include the framing of trans women as potential perpetrators. It angers me that the rape crisis movement has not worked in a cohesive way to prevent these misplaced anxieties from being transformed into policy. Trans and non-binary people face significant levels of sexual abuse, especially in public spaces and at the hands of strangers. These attacks are not distinct from the violence that cis women and girls experience. We can learn much from them about the harmful ways in which society polices the categories of man and woman.