Glasgow Rape Crisis Centre was opened in 1976 by a group of women armed only with a tiny grant and an even tinier office space in the centre of Glasgow. There were no paid staff for many years after the centre opened, with all of our services provided by volunteers. We still keep volunteers at the heart of our helpline support service with a training programme being run annually. Our top image shows a 1970s photograph of the group that would become the Glasgow Rape Crisis Centre. And now … We still have that same banner at the Centre. Thanks to the former rape crisis woman who gave us this banner at our 30th anniversary event. Proud to still have it. If you’d like more in-depth information about the early days of rape crisis in Glasgow, and across the rest of Scotland you can read the oral history on our website. One thing that hasn’t changed though is the struggle we have for funding. After 40 years, hundreds of thousands of phone calls, and latterly texts and emails, tens of thousands of survivors receiving one to one or group support and thousands of volunteers trained, we still struggle to fund our service. We don’t have a ‘product’, nothing to ‘sell’, just the expertise of our support staff who work with survivors of all forms of sexual violence, abuse and exploitation. And this abuse is most commonly perpetrated by the men that they know or that they live with. So, in our 40th year we’ve caught up with the 21st century and we have embraced technology (#notadinosauranymore). We are online, on Facebook, Twitter and on Instagram. The world is changing especially the way in we access information and have to move with the times. We’ve grown so much that we’ve outgrown our Centre. The space we have right now can’t cope with the numbers coming through our door so we’re going to be using our social media to help raise the funds we need to expand to meet that need and provide those services as quickly as possible. Back to top |