One Month On: An Open Letter Read, and Ignored
On 28 December 2025, we published an open letter addressed to women’s organisations in Scotland.
It wasn’t a “debate me” piece. It wasn’t a rant. It wasn’t a trap.
It was a simple request for engagement on a narrow set of procedural questions that sit at the heart of justice in sexual offence cases.
Since publication, that article has received over 700 visits.
And there has been not a single reply.
No correction
No disagreement
No request to clarify
No “we won’t engage”
Why we’re posting this follow-up
Some people will read this and think, “So what? Organisations don’t reply to everything.”
Fair enough. But this wasn’t a casual comment or a social media argument.
Many of these organisations are not passive observers. They influence public discourse, shape training, advise institutions, lobby Parliament, and are regularly treated as authoritative voices on what “justice” should look like in sexual offence cases.
When organisations hold that kind of influence, non-response to basic procedural questions isn’t neutral.
It shapes outcomes just as surely as speech does.
What we asked, and what we did not ask
We did not ask anyone to minimise rape.
We did not ask anyone to “take the accused side”.
We did not ask for personal opinions on individual cases.
We asked something more basic:
How do you reconcile complainant-centred advocacy with the presumption of innocence and the accused’s right to a fair trial?
A month is long enough
Early silence can be logistical. Christmas, staffing, inbox overflow. Fine.
But time changes the meaning of silence. A full month, with ongoing readership, means the reality is simpler:
it was seen, and not engaged with.
Why silence matters in this area
Sexual offence cases sit inside a moral climate. The fear of “getting it wrong” is intense. Institutions are risk-averse. In that climate, silence functions like a veto.
If reasonable procedural questions are met with silence, the message received by everyone else is that these questions are beyond the boundary of acceptable discussion.
Not refuted. Not answered. Just quietly excluded.
And that exclusion has consequences. If you remove space to talk about fairness, you don’t get better justice.
You get moral certainty paired with weaker procedure. That is how miscarriages of justice happen.
Accountability can’t be selective
Many organisations in this arena speak in the language of accountability. They demand it from the police, the courts, and “the system”.
Accountability is good. We agree.
But a basic test of sincerity is whether the same principle applies inwardly. If you influence justice policy and claim to speak for fairness, you should be able to answer straightforward questions about the rights of the accused.
At minimum, this means engaging with:
- the presumption of innocence
- the right to challenge evidence
- the right to present a defence
- the importance of context
- the risk of procedural imbalance
What this follow-up is
This is not a “gotcha”. It’s not an accusation. It is a record.
We are noting that publicly because silence is not nothing. Silence shapes what is allowed to be questioned,
and what is treated as settled.
The one question that remains
If organisations that regularly speak on justice, fairness, and women’s safety will not answer basic procedural questions about the rights of the accused, who exactly is responsible for ensuring those questions are ever answered at all?