Statement issued July 28th 2023
It’s been a week, and we’ve been very quiet, which is unlike us. Last week we shared a post on our Instagram and Facebook without ensuring that proper safeguarding measures were in place. We’ve been taking some time to process our thoughts and discuss what we want to do next together as a team.
We acknowledge and take responsibility for the harm caused to the Black women and women of colour who we tagged in our post. Before we do anything else, we want to apologise to these women, as well as our staff, partners, volunteers and everyone who read the comments. Especially those who were re-traumatised as a result of our actions.
Right now, the Pregnant Then Screwed team are pretty deflated. We want our corner of the internet, our team and community to be inclusive and safe, however the privilege that is occupied by some of us meant that this was gravely overlooked and those people in our team caused harm to people internally and externally.
For the past six months we have been working behind the scenes to change some of the ways that we operate and address barriers that make our services less accessible to racially marginalised* communities. We haven’t been covering this work on our social media because it’s long term and to be honest, the bare minimum. As a team we are reassessing the work we are doing in this space in terms of impact and priorities.
Thank you to everyone who has sent us messages of support and to those who have supported our learning over the past week. A commitment to anti-racism is a lifelong journey and we’re grateful to have the opportunity to continue to do our vital campaigning and support work with you all, while also working on improving ourselves as an organisation.
– The PTS Team
* This term refers to racial and ethnic groups that are not White British. We recognise that the language used to describe a person’s racial identity is not fixed and there is no perfect term that accurately captures the diversity of racially marginalised people’s experiences.
