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 arguments about being believed deployed those arguments selectively, or not at all, when the women asking to be heard didn’t fit the expected template.

Organisations ostensibly dedicated to women’s safety were more concerned with protecting reputations than confronting what was being reported. The sisterhood, it turned out, had conditions.

The Scottish Government, which rarely misses a chance to present itself as a leader in gender equality, was slow to acknowledge the seriousness of what was being raised.

The SNP has built much of its political identity on progressive credentials: the language of lived experience, of centring the marginalised, of listening to those without power.

When ordinary women from ordinary places came forward with precisely that kind of testimony, the system those credentials were supposed to produce failed them badly.

Warm words in Holyrood. Cold shoulders in practice. That is what happens when equality is a communications strategy rather than a governing principle.

What makes this worse is that the Scottish Government didn’t manage it alone.

Over years in power, the SNP has cultivated a third sector that in too many cases functions less as an independent voice for the vulnerable than as an extension of government priorities.

The consequences of that are now visible, and they are ugly.

'The Scottish Government, which rarely misses a chance to present itself as a leader in gender equality, was slow to acknowledge the seriousness of what was being raised. ' (Image: Jane Barlow/PA Wire)

With the honourable exception of the NSPCC, which maintained its independence and kept its focus on child protection regardless of the political weather, the third sector lobby was either silent or complicit.

Organisations funded specifically to advocate for women and vulnerable people opposed calls for an inquiry.

Others went quiet at the moment it mattered most.

They absorbed criticism that might otherwise have reached ministers and deployed the moral authority their charitable status confers – authority derived from the very women they claim to represent – in defence of a position that served the Scottish Government rather than those women.

Some didn’t merely stand aside. They actively reinforced the dismissal.

When ministers needed resistance to an inquiry, bodies dependent on ministerial goodwill found reasons to comply.

Women trying to be heard found the institutions that existed to amplify them closing ranks instead.

That is a scandal in its own right, arguably the largest in this entire story.

These organisations failed catastrophically at their primary purpose, and most will face no consequences whatsoever. No resignations. No serious public examination of how bodies committed to women’s welfare spent months shielding a government from scrutiny of child sex abuse.

Websites will be refreshed, strategies rewritten, and funding renewed by the same government they just finished protecting.

That cannot stand. We should cancel funding for third sector bodies whose conduct falls so far short of their stated purpose.

Public money intended to support women and vulnerable communities must go to organisations with genuine independence – bodies prepared to challenge power, not serve it.

Those that failed that test should face a reckoning, and it should begin with their budgets.

Scotland presents itself as having done the work on women’s rights.

The strategies, frameworks and carefully constructed language are all in place. But language is not proof. The test is what happens when a woman says something that unsettles the room.

Too often she was managed rather than heard. Her evidence contextualised rather than confronted. Being taken seriously seemed to require softening the truth first.

The inquiry will examine whether girls were believed, whether agencies shared information, whether warning signs were missed. That scrutiny is long overdue.

But those failures didn’t occur in isolation.

They occurred in a culture where some voices carry automatic authority and others must fight for credibility, where women from disadvantaged communities are cast as beneficiaries of policy rather than participants in shaping it.

Ministers protected reputations. Officials deferred upward.

The SNP has governed Scotland for nearly two decades. Child protection, social work funding, police resourcing – these are devolved. The accountability sits in Edinburgh and cannot be shuffled elsewhere.

The women who persisted through all of this, who came back after being dismissed, accused of bad faith, made to feel their experiences needed qualification before they could be taken seriously, were not political insiders.

They were ordinary citizens who refused to be sidelined.

They saw the risk early. They spoke clearly. They were not believed quickly enough, and children paid for that.

If anything lasting comes from this, it should be an unsentimental reassessment of who speaks for women in Scotland, who funds them, and whose interests they are actually serving.

They were not asking for much. They were asking for what most of us assume as standard.

That is what makes the failure so hard to forgive

Joani Reid is the Labour MP for East Kilbride and Strathaven

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