LGBT History Month: ERCC’s LGBT history and journey towards Silver Charter Mark

This month marks LGBT History Month; as an organisation we are proud of our LGBT roots and the work we have done over the years to make our services LGBT inclusive.

We are pleased to announce that we have been working towards the LGBT Charter of Rights Silver Charter Mark to ensure that we proactively include LGBT people in all aspects of our work. In this blog we reflect upon what we have done to achieve this and what our next steps are.

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Throughout our history we have worked to make ERCC an accessible LGBT organisation, and will continue to do so. Recently, we’ve been working towards the LGBT Scotland Silver Charter Mark and reviewing our policies and practices to ensure we are fully LGBT inclusive organisation as possible.

12 years ago, in 2008, we recognised that members of the trans community experience high levels of sexual violence, and we were one of the first Rape Crisis Centre’s in the UK to offer support to all members of the trans community. Our support workers have been fully trained to be sensitive and respectful through awareness raising training from the Scottish Transgender Alliance. In 2009, The Guardian shortlisted us as one of their charities of the year in part to recognition of this work.

In 2013 after a large consultation with service users and stakeholders, we changed our name from Edinburgh Women’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre to recognise the work with boys and young male survivors aged 12 – 18 as part of our STAR project.

All our specialist trauma-informed support services are open to women, all members of the trans community, non-binary people and young people aged 12 – 18 who have experienced any form of sexual violence at any time in their lives, by abusers of any gender. This includes rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, child sexual abuse and commercial sexual exploitation.

As part of our journey towards the LGBT Charter Mark we:

Training

• Ran an internal half-day training by LGBT Youth Scotland for staff on how to better understand how homophobia, biphobia and transphobia impacts on LGBT people's experiences of domestic abuse and their access to services.

Policy

• Reviewed policies in order that they meet with the Equality Act 2010 and Human Rights Act, and ensure that all our policies take LGBT people into consideration.

• Amended our monitoring and evaluation forms to make sure they are appropriate.

Information and resources

• Reviewed our information and resources to ensure they contain gender neutral and inclusive language throughout, as well as being pro-actively inclusive and using LGBT specific examples where appropriate.

Campaigns and practice

• Hosted information stands at Pride and Trans Pride in both support of the events, and to increase our visibility as an organisation to the LGBT community.

• Used our experience of supporting trans survivors of sexual violence over the last decade to inform our submission for the Gender Recognition Act consultation to help address prejudice and discrimination.

• Undertook an impact assessment of our whole service and building for LGBT inclusivity which resulted in us changing the signs for our bathrooms to be gender neutral and displaying LGBT posters in communal staff and waiting areas.

• Marked commemorative days on our social media and supported Glasgow and Clyde Rape Crisis Centre’s 2019 Transgender Day of Remembrance Speak Out campaign.

• Wrote a blog for LGBT History Month about our work supporting survivors from the trans community.

• Most recently we have launched a survey with the trans community to better understand the barriers that trans people face in accessing services, with the view to improving access to our services. We worked with the Scottish Trans Alliance to ensure our survey was appropriate, and have used a range of different contacts and networks to maximise its reach.

Next steps

It has been quite a journey and we’ve learnt a lot working towards the LGBT Charter Mark. Or future plans include:

• Consider increasing our LGBT inclusivity through using pronouns in our emails.

• Producing a report based on our survey with the trans community that highlights the barriers faced by trans people to improve awareness and understanding of these issues, and identifies key actions we must take to improve the accessibility of our services for the trans community.

• Annual refresher training for all our team to help us continue to provide high quality support to members of the LGBT community.

As an organisation we are committed to supporting survivors and those who face discrimination and injustice within society. We will continue strive to ensure that we continue to keep our organisation LGBT inclusive and take forward our learning from this journey and aim to weave it into all our future developments and practice.