As we write this article, Sandy Brindley (on the left of the pic below) is still in post as the CEO of Rape Crisis Scotland.
For as long as that remains the case, rape victims in Scotland will not be safe.
A few days ago, Brindley claimed to be unaware of calls for her resignation over the scandal around Mridul Wadhwa and Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre.
As we say in Scotland: well, ye ken noo.
But so far she seems determined to cling on to her taxpayer-funded salary and status as a semi-official government mouthpiece and head of extra-judicial lynch-mobs.
(She’s very keen on other people being held accountable for actions, and not being allowed to investigate themselves and fob things off until they can retire in peace. Ironically, that’s precisely the process and outcome she wants for herself.)
But it’s not just the Wadhwa case that reveals Brindley as unfit for her job. She’d previously caused great distress to a group of rape survivors in 2019, by inviting a “trans activist” to a meeting about gender reform legislation, who proceeded to berate the survivor group – who hadn’t been warned about the activist’s presence – as bigots and dismiss their concerns.
But the academic in question wasn’t just any old transactivist. She was Sharon Cowan, the Professor of “Feminist and Queer Legal Studies” at Edinburgh University, the other woman in the picture at the top of this post – and also, by a remarkable coincidence, the girlfriend of Sandy Brindley.
Well, that’s awkward.
Cowan, as those au fait with the ways of the modern world might guess from her job title, is quite the character. Readers may enjoy these extracts from an interview she gave to a student magazine in 2018, in which she complains about gay people having equal marriage rights because makes them normal (or as she puts it, “normalises queer identities”), robs them of grievances, and interferes with attempts by people like her to “undermine […] heteronormative forms of living”.
(Because if you’re a boring old heterosexual and just want to have a monogamous lifelong relationship with someone of the opposite sex, that can’t be allowed because it’s “regressive”.)
She is, in short, the kind of batshit-mental colon-gazing narcissist sociopath who thrives in academia because they couldn’t hold down a normal job for 30 seconds and sticking them in a university by and large isolates the problem and minimises the amount of damage they cause to society, in much the same way that powerful families in the past stuck their dimmer offspring away in the church.
(Cowan is even an exhausting chore to other “queer” activists.)
An illuminating example is the way in which Cowan is obsessed with “transgression”, and is actually enraged when people accommodate her – an attitude which, entirely by intentional design, guarantees perpetual (and lucrative) conflict everywhere she goes.
And that’s all well and good in academia, which is supposed to be about exploring challenging new viewpoints and what not. You don’t want these people working the checkouts at Tesco, because they’d be charging you £700 for a tin of baked beans as a provocative boundary-pushing transgression, or calling the police if you tried to buy anything made in Israel.
And as long as they’re arguing this stuff amongst themselves and writing impassioned papers that no-one reads, they’re not bothering anyone else (with the exception of their unfortunate students) and that’s fine.
The problem, of course, is that when such types come to interact closely with people from the real world who have serious responsibilites to others, their lunatic idiocy can spread to places where it can bring about real harm.
It’s hard to imagine anything more “transgressive”, anything that would more powerfully shock and repel any normal and decent human being, than staffing rape crisis centres with creepy and malign male people and then gaslighting service users about it. But that’s exactly what Sandy Brindley did.
And despite everything that’s happened, even after a brutal tribunal judgement and an independent inquiry excoriatingly detailed the disastrous effects, the traumatising and self-exclusion of rape survivors who were cruelly deprived of woman-only support in Edinburgh for almost a year and a half, it’s what she continues to do.
Because even now, Brindley won’t stop lying. Trina Budge of For Women Scotland this week detailed on Twitter how Brindley’s blithe assurances (in a grotesque pity-poor-me interview in The Times in which Brindley offers not a single word of remorse, regret or reflection) that all Scottish rape crisis centres under RCS supervision were committed to offering women-only services were blatantly false.
Not only did Budge find that just ONE centre in Scotland – Glasgow And Clyde – actually provided reliably single-sex services, but that almost every other one was openly misrepresenting the law about “trans inclusion” in such a way that women could be exposed to males without their knowledge, and – in a shocking revelation – was doing so via the guidance of none other than the highly controversial child-abuse-linked charity LGBT Youth Scotland.
(Which it should go without saying has no legitimate locus in rape crisis services, which are neither particularly a youth issue nor an LGBT one – rape has no age barriers and is overwhelmingly heterosexual. But LGBTYS has plenty of form in flagrantly exceeding its remit, seemingly while enjoying complete impunity from the Scottish charity regulator.)
Survivors looking for support would have to run a gauntlet of LGBT propaganda under the auspices of LGBTYS and its “Charter” award scheme which forces applicants to prioritise trans people, to the point where in some cases it was impossible to tell that a centre was for rape survivors at all.
It’s very difficult not to join the dots and draw a direct line between Sharon Cowan, Sandy Brindley and the subversion and subsuming of rape crisis services in Scotland into a tool for the promotion of “the politics of queerness”, at the expense of some of the most vulnerable people in the country who have nowhere else to turn.
(It’s equally hard not to note the clattering, bleak irony of the last tweet on Cowan’s Twitter, about companies not focusing on the needs of their customers.)
It precisely mirrors the hijacking of the Scottish prison system by transactivist lobby groups funded by the Scottish Government as a sort of covert Trojan horse test-bed for “trans inclusion” policies, with vulnerable women once again the luckless guinea-pigs.
Of course, we’re only speculating that Sandy Brindley’s appalling multiple betrayals of rape survivors, ongoing derelictions of duty and refusal to accept the slightest shred of responsibility for anything – she has lied repeatedly in the wake of criticism and blamed everyone else – are the result of her relationship with Sharon Cowan.
But we struggle to come up with any other plausible reason – other than the placing of “transgression” and “the politics of queerness” above the safety of rape survivors – for her belligerent support for Mridul Wadhwa (years after his hideous nature was well known), the venom with which she campaigned against Johann Lamont’s amendment to allow rape victims to be entitled to a female examiner, her extraordinary and offensive equation of black women with men in the Times interview, and her continued insistence that transwomen are women, which completely torpedoes any possibility of RCS meaningfully complying with the recommendations of the Ling report.
When viewed through that prism – and pretty much only then – Brindley’s actions make perfect sense. If purposely transgressive politicisation of “queerness” and undermining “heteronormativity” are your primary motivations, it’s absolutely rational to knowingly put a male in charge of a capital city’s rape crisis centre and then hotly deny you’ve done any such thing no matter how badly he behaves or how often people point it out to you. In any other circumstances it’s blindingly obviously insane.
(The same applies to Nicola Sturgeon, come to that.)
It is manifestly plain that even now Sandy Brindley refuses to accept that she’s done anything wrong. In such circumstances it’s logically highly likely that the appalling harm and additional trauma to rape survivors described in the Ling report will be repeated as long as she is in charge of rape crisis provision in Scotland, because she refuses to acknowledge how it happened in the first place.
(And even leaving aside the ethics of offering up rape survivors as sacrificial lambs to the media, Brindley’s dragooning of their testimonials revealingly misses the point. Harold Shipman didn’t kill ALL his elderly patients. Some of the time he actually did his job like he was supposed to and helped them. You don’t have to be 100% evil all the time to be evil, and Brindley seems to want credit for the women she didn’t stab in the back at their moment of need.)
Brindley and Cowan are both a deadly menace to every woman in Scotland – arrogant ideologues willing to see innocent females thrown under the bus in the service of their own selfish political philosophy and egos. Ultimately, which one is most at fault and which is influencing the other is an irrelevance.
But while Cowan’s position is grossly unmerited, it’s not the one that puts women in danger. If Sandy Brindley has a single dusty atom of decency still lurking anywhere in the deep dark shadows of her soul, she needs to walk away before any more women suffer from her lack of integrity and courage.
