When Research Becomes Heresy:
The Paradox of Dr Stuart Waiton and JIMS
How Scotland’s culture of outrage now punishes those who defend fairness
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Dr Stuart Waiton’s paper The Empathy Trap is not an act of provocation. It is an act of scholarship, an attempt to examine, in measured terms, how empathy for alleged victims has come to eclipse the presumption of innocence in Scotland’s courts.
His analysis traces a clear historical line: from the creation of rape-shield laws in 1985, through their reinforcement in 1995 and 2002, to the “seismic” narrowing of admissible evidence described in government-funded studies today.
What Waiton argues is simple yet dangerous to say aloud: that compassion, when weaponised by policy, can distort justice. He warns that a system built on empathy rather than evidence invites miscarriages of justice, a claim grounded not in ideology, but in the testimony of advocates, judges, and even the very reports commissioned by the state.
And for writing it, he is treated not as a scholar but as a heretic.
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From Thesis to Thought-Crime
The Abertay episode exposed precisely what The Empathy Trap predicted. A criminology seminar intended to discuss fairness and due process was swiftly reframed as an act of moral betrayal.
Dr Waiton was not accused of bias or error, but of allowing the wrong kind of thought into the room. The outrage followed the same pattern he documents in law: empathy transformed into accusation, and accusation into orthodoxy.
In both academia and the courtroom, the principle is the same, belief first, inquiry later.
A courtroom that withholds context from juries now finds its reflection in a university that withholds context from students. Each, in its own way, narrows what may be said in the name of safety.
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The Mirror Between Law and Academia
The Empathy Trap describes how Scotland’s justice system came to privilege emotional protection over evidential fairness. The Abertay controversy shows that the same ethos now governs the university.
Where Section 275 excludes context from trials, institutional caution now excludes context from debate. Where trauma language redefines courtroom procedure, it now dictates academic policy.
When a lecturer must apologise for permitting lawful discussion, we see the moral logic of Section 274 transposed onto campus life: discomfort becomes danger; questioning becomes harm; dissent becomes misconduct.
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When Advocacy Becomes Orthodoxy
The backlash against Dr Waiton and JIMS did not arise from evidence of wrongdoing, but from the politics of moral authority. A small but vocal circle of campaigners, often presented as the unquestionable voice of “survivors,” has sought to silence any discussion that challenges their preferred narrative.
The seminar had been arranged as a routine criminology discussion on due process and evidential fairness. Within hours of the event’s conclusion, coordinated social media posts, open letters, and direct complaints to university leadership erupted, not in response to factual errors in Dr Waiton’s research, but to the mere presence of a JIMS speaker.
National rape crisis organisations and prominent survivor advocacy accounts declared the session “dangerous,” “a betrayal of victims,” and “platforming harm”, after it had already taken place, and without engaging a single argument presented.
Through these rapid, post-event campaigns, any critique of Scotland’s sexual-offence laws is reframed as an attack on women themselves. It is a calculated conflation that replaces argument with accusation and makes dissent a form of social deviance. This is precisely the dynamic that The Empathy Trap warns against.
When empathy becomes a political currency, it ceases to enlighten and begins to coerce. Those who defend due process are no longer seen as upholding fairness but as betraying compassion. The result is a moral climate in which advocacy hardens into orthodoxy, and inquiry becomes heresy.
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A Nation Afraid of Its Reflection
The treatment of both Dr Waiton and JIMS illustrates a deeper cultural drift: the replacement of principle with performative virtue. In this new moral economy, emotion outweighs evidence, and fear of reputational ruin silences those who would otherwise defend justice.
Scotland’s challenge is no longer to prove the existence of bias in its justice system, it is to rediscover the courage to confront it. Until compassion is separated from compliance, the innocent will remain vulnerable, and those who defend them will continue to be punished for doing so.
By the Accused.Scot Editorial Team
Standing for fairness — in courts, in classrooms, and in public life.
*The Empathy Trap is currently in draft form.
A Note to the Silent Majority
- To Dr Stuart Waiton — thank you for refusing to treat scholarship as sin.
- To JIMS, and every family quietly fighting a conviction built on empathy over evidence — you are not alone.
- To every organisation, lawyer, or citizen still willing to ask “Where is the proof?” — keep asking. The courtroom may narrow the question. The lecture hall may silence it. But fairness will not be cancelled.
We stand with you. — The Accused.Scot Editorial Team