Women who raised alarms about child exploitation were dismissed, sidelined and discredited — not by opponents, but by the very institutions meant to protect them, says Joani Reid.

They were not asking to change the world. They were asking to be believed.

There is a particular kind of courage in speaking up when the people you are speaking to would rather you didn’t.

The victims and families who pushed for a public inquiry into child sex abuse in Scotland were not lobbyists.

They had no press officers or media strategies. Many came from working-class communities where the relationship with officialdom has long been strained.

They knew what they were risking – not just the withdrawal of sympathy or the sideways glances, but something uglier than that.

They were called liars. Attention seekers. Unreliable witnesses to their own experiences.

Women who couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about what they had seen in their own communities.

Some were told exactly that. That by naming organised exploitation, by insisting patterns be examined honestly, they were feeding narratives that decent people did not feed.

The act of speaking was treated as suspect. Not the abuse, the speaking.

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This is not new. Women raising concerns about children’s safety have been dismissed and talked down to for as long as there have been institutions to do the dismissing.

What changed was the language used against them. It now came from people with lanyards and job titles in equality and inclusion.

Women who had benefited from feminist........

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