LAST year I “outed” myself as a survivor of child sexual abuse, to launch a new group, Survivors against Fascism (SaF).

It’s fair to say this has not gone down well with the far right. The abuse I get from them is at a peak, and my actual freedom is under threat. I can’t go into detail, but I suppose it all equates to a good review for SaF.

Here’s why I intend to continue.

Firstly, it’s important to state that anti-fascism has always been women’s business

Fascism invariably itself presents as macho in the extreme; tough guys swaggering around in militaristic uniforms.

For women, it claims to offer protection,  as long as we behave ourselves, and retreat into Kinder, Kuche, Kirche (kids, kitchen and church — it’s no coincidence we’re currently seeing a resurgence of ‘Trad Wife’ ideology).

Yet Britain’s strongest early voices against fascism were female.  

In November 1922, after Mussolini’s coup, Anglo-Italian fascists marched to Westminster Abbey. There they gave fascist salutes and were blessed by the Dean.

Almost alone in the media, Sylvia Pankhurst in the Workers’ Dreadnought  sounded the alarm: “Let there be no mistake. Fascism is an international menace.”

The Dreadnought exposed the misogyny beneath purported fascist chivalry: “In some towns in Italy, Fascisti have blackened with charcoal the faces of women trade unionists; and forced women to drink .. castor oil, dragging them through the town until, suffering extreme pain, they are forced to excrete in the street. That was done in Bologna to Alda Costa, daughter of Andrea Costa, one of the founders of Italian socialism.”

In Nazi Germany, women’s activists would go into hiding for their own safety.

Yet in another contradiction, our first British fascist leader was female.

Born into a wealthy family in Kensington, Rotha Linton Orman had a fanatical hatred of communism.

In 1923 she founded the British Fascisti with financial help from her mother.

Not a female first to be proud of; but her most determined opponent would be.

Ethel Carnie was born in 1886 in Lancashire. Unlike Linton Orman, she was working class, a full time “mill girl” from 13. She began composing poetry to the beat of the machinery, and her work was acclaimed.  

From 1923, she and husband Alfred Holdsworth began producing socialist paper The Clear Light.

Alert to the rising threat of fascism, Carnie became organiser of the National Union for Combating Fascism, and relaunched Clear Light as its paper.

This enraged Rotha Linton Orman, who began a dirty tricks campaign, threatening to blow up their publisher, and trying to trick Carnie Holdsworth and her husband into sedition (which could have led to life imprisonment, away from their young children).

Ethel responded courageously that she was flattered by the attention.

By 1934 Mosley’s Blackshirts were cornering the fascist market, and Linton Orman fading from public life.

Mosley’s own wife, Cimmie, began to loathe his new ideology and threatened to expose him in the press. Had she not died young, the former Labour MP might have become a formidable anti-fascist.

Another fascist with female opponents was the infamous “Lord Haw Haw.”

Before he abandoned Britain for Nazi Germany, Mosley’s chum William Joyce had been slashed in the face by, he claimed, a gang of communists. His former wife later revealed the assailant to have been a lone female Irish anti-fascist.

After World War II, British service men and women returning home to the horror of re-emerging fascism reacted by forming the “43 group.”

Young Jewish woman Doris Kaye went undercover in Mosley’s organisations, and the perfectly-named Julie Slogans fought side by side with the 43’s men on the streets.

As fascism has risen again and again over the decades, women have always been there to oppose it. Julie Waterhouse of the Anti Nazi League was considered such a threat to fascism that a gang of Combat 18 and Ulster Defence Association thugs tried to break her door down with sledgehammers.

As recently as 2018, Edel “Lola” Carroll in Luton was harassed and tormented by Tommy Robinson and his team. When Carroll ultimately killed herself, the coroner specifically mentioned the abuse she suffered from the far right.

Then Tommy Robinson doubled down on the lucrative “Muslim Grooming Gang” narrative long beloved of the far right, setting up an HQ in Telford.

It’s important to say that victims in Telford were appallingly let down by authorities. There still hasn’t been enough accountability or help for them. This created a vacuum Robinson was keen to fill, with his Rape of Britain project.

The far right latched on to the “Muslim groomers” narrative en masse in 2012, after  sensationalist and inaccurate media coverage, playing into ancient tropes — Foreign Men! Our Girls! Rape!

This allowed the far right to seem, for once, the good guys- protecting women and girls, while the left was “letting them” get raped for the sake of “wokeness.”

It didn’t matter that most gang predators are white men; facts scarcely matter in a story this emotive.

It also allows the far right to claim they’re not being racist: “Islam is not  a race!”

This is not to say no Muslims abuse children — but paedophilia seems to exist at a steady percentage, about 2 per cent, across all populations and religions.

But the claims made bank for Robinson, and were hard for the left to counter. Who likes paedophiles (except other paedophiles)? And who doesn’t want to protect children?

I was considering this dangerous “narrative capture” whilst counter-protesting in Telford. It was obvious why anti-fascists didn’t have survivors as speakers — hardly ethical to approach them, let alone expose them to risk and re-traumatisation publicly supporting us.

The fascists have no such qualms, of course.

It occurred to me it was statistically likely we already had survivors with us; and then, that that included me.

I was abused from four to 13, by a single perpetrator. A close friend is a “grooming gang survivor.”

It was hard to speak out not because of residual shame about being a survivor, but because I know it makes others uncomfortable, and because as a collectivist it feels almost like attention seeking: but I spoke to my friend, and we decided we’d speak out.  

My friend can’t speak publicly, but I decided I could: the far right had long since “doxed” me.

I told her story, which included being approached by Tommy Robinson’s team after escaping abuse, and being threatened and verbally abused as soon as she refused to let her story be used for racist ends. Her words were powerful.  

I also brought with me for the first time a list of far-right sex offenders.

They include Richard Price, a close friend of Tommy Robinson’s, with whom he founded the EDL, and whom he defended after his arrest.  

The list is now at 105, and includes men who rioted last year in the name of “protecting our children.”

I’m pleased to see it being taken on other demos and rallies around the UK.  

Tommy Robinson never had another Telford rally after this, and in fact abandoned the lucrative “grooming gang” campaign; in part because his team were caught giving drugs to, and having sex with, victims they were “supporting.”

Then, Elon Musk suddenly jumped on the bandwagon, reviving the narrative. As tainted as Robinson knew his campaign to be, he was always going to climb aboard, with Musk dollars on offer.

September this year saw the largest ever fascist march in London, with Musk believed to have funded it, possibly to as much as £5 million.

We will keep fighting. Despite the attacks on me I’m working to make Survivors against Fascism a larger organisation, and make our voices louder. Please help to amplify us, and to centre survivors when protesting the far right.  

This is the fight of our lives; led by the examples of our anti-fascist foremothers, we can and must win.  

Contact: survivorsAF@proton.me