notanothersoprano

While this journey hasn’t been easy, and I’ve faced plenty of nastiness along the way, I’m so grateful to the thousands of you who have followed along and supported me on this journey. I am unbelievably grateful 🖤

What was also incredibly important to me was seeing my community represented. As a mixed-race woman with Bengali heritage growing up in Scotland, it was rare to see minority ethnic women in public life. I’m glad I’m now able to bring a bit more diversity to the scene.

That is perhaps the most special thing to me - when I hear from women every week that my story made them come forward, or made them speak out, or made them reach out for help. There is an incredible community of survivors out here, and I’m so glad I found them.

I’m so glad I did. From then I continued speaking out and lobbying for change on issues that were so important to me - this lead to tangible policy changes. Most importantly it also made others feel less alone.

Waiving my anonymity was not an easy decision. While I’d been committed to activism for sometime and had spoken out in the media about my own experiences of racism, putting something so personal and stigma-loaded out there was terrifying. But I knew I had to.

I waived my anonymity in a joint investigation with The Times Scotland. Before my case went to court I’d started looking into university policy regarding admission of those who’d committed sexual offences. I’d found a dangerous loophole I needed to expose.

I wanted to reclaim my power, I wanted to show I wasn’t ashamed, I wanted to break stigmas, and most importantly I wanted to make change.

I felt so powerless and degraded watching him being humanised with these lists of accolades, while I was simply the nameless body he violated. My hopes, my dreams… all irrelevant. My first class degree, my impressive athletics career… all meaningless.

It’s been two years since I waived my media anonymity following my rape case. I was sick of hearing about that “promising young man” and not THIS promising young woman. HE was the “talented athlete” whose medical career was ruined, I was just “victim”… I needed to reclaim me.