When justice becomes emotional theatre, scholarship becomes heresy.
DR STUART WAITON has done what good academics are supposed to do, he asked difficult questions. Last week, for that crime, he found himself at the centre of a national pile-on. The Abertay University criminologist had invited a speaker from Justice for Innocent Men Scotland (JIMS) to discuss due process and fairness in the Scottish justice system. Within hours, the event was condemned by rape-crisis groups, denounced by politicians, and disowned by the university.
The Times reported a scandal involving “men’s-rights extremism”; The Mail on Sunday highlighted a survivor who has now lodged a formal complaint against Waiton, citing a 2018 column he wrote about her civil case; The Herald warned that equality before the law no longer exists; and the activist site Accused.Scot defended Waiton as a martyr to free inquiry.
What might once have been an obscure faculty seminar has become a national morality play and a mirror of the country’s deepest fault lines: gender, justice, and the politics of empathy.
And of course, the truly shocking part – brace yourself – is that a criminologist dared to question whether serious criminal allegations should be settled in civil courts. Shocking, I know. Someone should probably alert the thought police immediately.
Context: the argument that lit the fuse
Back in 2018, Waiton published a Herald column titled “Do civil rape cases mark the destruction of justice?” It questioned why rape allegations, after a criminal acquittal or “not proven” verdict, were being re-litigated in civil court, first with footballer David Goodwillie, then with St Andrew’s student Stephen Coxen.
Waiton argued that this practice, while technically lawful, breaches the spirit of double jeopardy. He pointed out that civil cases need only a 51 per cent “balance of probabilities” standard, allowing a single sheriff’s opinion to brand someone a rapist without a jury or corroboration.
He accused the Scottish Government of funding these second trials through Legal Aid grants tied to “gender-based violence” programmes and of embracing a narrow, punitive strain of feminism that has forgotten its humanist roots in truth and equality. The result, he warned, was a justice system drifting from objectivity to emotional closure, where “believe the victim” becomes a moral command rather than a test of evidence. That essay closed with a line that now reads like prophecy:
“What we are witnessing is the destruction of justice.”
It is this same piece that the Mail on Sunday resurfaced last week, prompting “Miss M,” the survivor in the Coxen case, to lodge a formal complaint against Abertay. The so-called “lecture scandal” is therefore not an isolated controversy, but the continuation of a long, bitter argument about whether empathy has overtaken law in Scotland’s treatment of sexual offences.
In that 2018 column, Waiton described what Sheriff Weir had characterised as “a drunken night that ended in sex” between the two students, a line later quoted by the Mail on Sunday as if it were Waiton’s personal judgment. In context, he was summarising the court’s own language to illustrate how civil verdicts on such serious allegations can hinge on opinion rather than evidence. His criticism was directed at the legal process, not at the woman involved.
Justice is for everyone, or it isn’t justice at all
Let’s be clear: no civilised society can be indifferent to the suffering of victims. Compassion and protection are moral imperatives. But justice cannot serve one group by abandoning fairness to another. When a system replaces evidence with empathy, it risks betraying both the victim and the accused.
This debate is not about diminishing survivors. It is about ensuring that their pain is not exploited to justify bad law. When the presumption of innocence collapses, the first casualty is truth; the second is trust including the trust of genuine victims who rely on a system respected for its integrity.
There’s nothing more dangerous to women than a justice system that the public stops trusting. Protecting fairness protects everyone, women, men, victims, and the innocent alike.
I honour survivors by fighting for systems that tell the truth not by pretending that emotion is evidence. Compassion must never come at the cost of truth.
When courage becomes a disciplinary offence
The Abertay affair is now a test case for the moral health of our public life. The Herald sees in it the collapse of equality before the law; The Times sees a reputational crisis fed by extremism; The Mail sees the anguish of a survivor betrayed by an institution that lost its moral compass; and Accused.Scot sees the martyrdom of reason itself. Each tells a partial truth. Together they reveal a country that no longer knows what it believes in, a culture that has confused empathy with justice and moral outrage with courage.
Universities once existed to protect unpopular inquiry. They now appear terrified of it. When a criminologist can face investigation for discussing fairness in rape trials, we are no longer talking about pastoral sensitivity we are talking about censorship dressed up as care. The principle at stake is not whether you agree with Waiton or JIMS. It is whether a free society still allows scholars to interrogate sacred cows without losing their livelihoods.
The Catholic view: truth, dignity and the courage to disagree
Catholic Social Teaching insists that truth and dignity stand together you cannot honour the person if you abandon the pursuit of truth. Justice must be merciful, but it must also be just. Compassion without truth is sentimentality; truth without compassion is cruelty. Caritas in Veritate charity in truth demands both heart and reason.
Academic freedom is not a bourgeois indulgence; it is a moral duty. The search for truth, even when it offends, is part of human dignity itself. The Church calls this the principle of subsidiarity: those closest to a problem must be free to think, speak, and act without fear of institutional coercion. Waiton has spent his life in inquiry of the justice system. A university that silences its own scholars in the name of “safety” breaks that covenant. It turns education into therapy and truth into taboo.
Justice depends on reason because emotion, however sincere, can’t tell the difference between guilt and innocence. That’s why civilisations build courts instead of mobs.
The common good cannot be served by fear. A culture that no longer tolerates questions about its laws or its assumptions is not protecting the vulnerable, it is infantilising the nation.
The wider drift of Scottish justice
What is happening to Dr Waiton does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of a wider pattern, a moral and political drift that now defines Scottish public life.
Earlier this year, the Scottish Government abolished the “Not Proven” verdict, a 300-year safeguard that allowed juries to acknowledge doubt. Ministers claimed this would help rape survivors; legal scholars warned it would erode the presumption of innocence. The verdict’s removal was cheered as “progressive,” but in truth, it marked another retreat from humility in the face of evidence.
Meanwhile, Holyrood has openly defied the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that “sex” in the Equality Act means biological sex. Rather than accept legal reality, ministers doubled down, signalling that ideology now trumps law.
Both episodes reveal the same moral logic: emotion over evidence, conviction over complexity. The state, the courts, and the universities now move in unison, replacing deliberation with declaration. Whether redefining justice, redefining sex, or redefining safety, Scotland’s institutions have become missionaries of moral certainty.
The result is a political theology without grace: punishment without reflection, compassion without truth. The same spirit that silences a criminologist also abolishes a verdict and rewrites biology. It is the spirit of a nation so afraid of doubt that it would rather change its laws than face its conscience.
Empathy and evidence, A broken covenant
What’s playing out at Abertay is bigger than one lecturer or one bad headline. It’s the collision of two moral economies: empathy and evidence that no longer trust each other. The justice system, once anchored in proof and presumption, now trembles under the weight of emotion and optics. Academia, once the home of dangerous ideas, has become the custodian of psychological safety. Both mean well, yet both are losing sight of truth.
When compassion hardens into policy, it stops healing and starts governing; when inquiry offends, it stops existing. Scotland’s tragedy is that in trying to protect victims, we are learning to fear ideas and a society that fears ideas cannot do justice to anyone.
Real recovery whether personal or national begins the moment we stop outsourcing courage. It means facing what’s painful without rewriting it to suit our politics. Scotland doesn’t need more apologies or hashtags; it needs grown-ups who can hold justice and mercy in the same hand. The work of healing, like the work of scholarship, is never safe but it is sacred. If we can’t bear to let uncomfortable truths be spoken in a lecture hall, we’ll never face the harder ones waiting in our courts, our institutions, or our own hearts.
Author’s Note
This piece defends justice as a universal good, not a partisan cause. It stands for the dignity of every person, victim and accused alike, and for the right to seek truth without fear. Compassion and fairness are not opposites; they are partners in any civilised society.
Further Reading: Four Versions of the Same Story
- The Herald – Calum Steele, “Abertay Uni apology for hosting Scots rape-law sceptics so depressing.”
Argues Scotland has abandoned equality before the law, and that Abertay’s apology proves academia’s loss of intellectual courage. - https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/viewpoint/25595365.abertay-uni-apology-hosting-scots-rape-law-sceptics-depressing/
- The Times – Marc Horne, “University lecturer in men’s-group row hits out at female critics.”
Reports on the institutional backlash, graffiti, and investigation, framing the case as a reputational crisis and extremist controversy. - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/university-lecturer-mens-group-jims-reacts-9l9d7zgx2
- The Mail on Sunday – Hannah Rodger, “Rape survivor hits out after criminology lecturer dismissed her attack as ‘a drunken night that ended in sex.’”
- Covers the survivor’s renewed complaint and Abertay’s response, focusing on questions of institutional ethics and victim confidence.
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15258585/Rape-survivor-hits-criminology-lecturer-dismissed-attack-drunken-night-ended-sex.html
- Accused.Scot – Editorial Team, “When Research Becomes Heresy: The Paradox of Dr Stuart Waiton and JIMS.”
Defends Waiton as a victim of ideological persecution, framing the episode as proof that compassion has replaced justice in modern Scotland.
https://accused.scot/when-research-becomes-heresy-the-paradox-of-dr-stuart-waiton-and-jims/
Truth is not the enemy of compassion; it is its foundation. It’s a truth Scotland will have to rediscover or lose both compassion and justice together.
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