Email support

What is the email support service?

Our email support service is an online facility where you can send us an email at any time, and one of our trained women and AFAB non-binary volunteers will email you back. We aim to respond within 15 days, although it may take us longer at times, depending on our capacity.

The email support service provides you with a safe space to share as little or as much as you would like to. If you would find it helpful, you can share difficult feelings and talk about difficult situations. We will read your email and send you a supportive response without offering advice or telling you what to do. If you would like, you can reply to this and continue the conversation, and receive ongoing email support.

We can ask questions and help you explore your options, and if you ask us for information about other forms of support, we can help provide this too.

Who is the service for?

Our email support service is available for those who have been subjected to, or are being subjected to, any form of sexual violence and/or abuse, and who are:

  • women
  • girls
  • AFAB non-binary individuals
  • individuals who have experienced oppression as women

This includes women and girls who are trans.

It doesn’t matter when this abuse happened, whether recently or a long time ago, we are here for you.

The service is for these survivors of all ages, backgrounds and sexual orientation and who feel comfortable receiving support from a service that is run by women for women.

We are also here for woman, girl and AFAB non-binary supporters who are supporting these survivors, personally or professionally.

Email support address

Useful resources

Other support services

Queries

If you have any queries about the email support service, please have a read through our FAQs below. If you don’t find the answer you need, you can contact us at:

“I would just like to say a huge thank you to everyone that has contacted me through this email service. You have all helped more than you will ever know and I am eternally grateful for every single word in every single email.”
“Thank you so much for everything, you will never know how much it has helped me and continues to do so, knowing I have people I can talk to about my experience.”
“Sending that email was one of the best decisions I have ever made. I am so grateful for the reply I received, it was amazing and really, I guess, life-changing.”
“Taking that step and emailing CRCC has changed a lot for me. I’m not sure if I can ever really thank them enough.”
“I used to feel really alone with my memories and although they will always be there, I don’t have to be so alone with it anymore. They made me realise it is okay to need help and to ask for it and to receive it.”
“For the first time I felt listened to, I felt like every word I had written had been considered and replied to in a carefully thought out way. I felt understood and most importantly I didn’t feel alone anymore.”

Frequently Asked Questions

When you email us, you will receive an automatic response letting you know that we have received your email and that we aim to respond within 15 days.

This response time may change according to our capacity but when you email us you will receive an automatic reply with the current response time.

If you don’t receive a reply within 15 days, it may be worth checking your junk mail folder just in case.

Please note that we are unable to open any attachments (documents, photos etc).

You can email us more than once, and if you find it helpful you can email us regularly. Some emailers get in touch only once, some email regularly, others use our service as and when they need to over a period of years. This depends entirely on what you find most helpful.

If you email us more than once within a period of a few days, we will read your separate emails and respond with one reply which addresses them all.

You can talk to us about anything in complete confidence. We will never repeat anything you say outside of Cambridge Rape Crisis Centre.

The volunteer team can see your email(s) and we discuss them within the service – see ‘Will I always receive emails from the same volunteer?’ – however, we ensure this information never reaches anyone outside of Cambridge Rape Crisis Centre.

We do not report anything that is said to us to the police or any other outside body. Our Confidentiality, Data Protection and Sharing Information Policy is available for download if you want further information.

If you are under 18, we will not pass along anything you say unless you tell us your full name and address, and ask us to report to the county safeguarding team on your behalf. We respect your right to make decisions about your own life.

You can also find our privacy statement here.

We will not ask for your name, address or any other personal information, so unless you choose to give us this information you will remain anonymous (except for your email address).

If you contact us by email, we will know what email address you contacted us from.

This means that if your email address contains your name, we will know your name. If you do not want us to know your email address you could set up a free anonymous email address and use it to correspond with us. Companies such as Protonmail, Yahoo and Gmail supply free email addresses.

If you email us more than once over time, your emails will be answered by different volunteers.

Our volunteers are all trained in providing support to survivors of sexual violence, and if you have been emailing regularly they will be aware that you have contacted us previously. Volunteers discuss the emails we receive to encourage each other to deliver a good and consistent support service. It also makes it less likely that you will have to repeat yourself when responding to our emails from different volunteers.

Our volunteers are women of all ages (18 years +) and backgrounds.

This includes trans women and girls and non-binary individuals who have complex gender identities which include ‘woman’ and those who have experienced oppression as women and who feel comfortable volunteering within a service that is run by women for women.

We understand that it can be difficult to email us if you’re not confident writing in English, and we will read your emails carefully and support you as best we can.

If you need to speak to us in a language other than English, please email contact@cambridgerapecrisis.org.uk and tell us the language that you would like us to support you in and we will try to arrange this if we can, or suggest another organisation that may be able to help.

We delete emails after two months.

This means that if you email us more than once we will be able to see that you have contacted us before, but we don’t keep emails for longer than two months as a way to help preserve your confidentiality. This means that if you return to using the service after a significant break, we won’t have a record of your previous emails.

Our email support service is for women and girls.

While we recognise the experiences and pain of male survivors, here at Cambridge Rape Crisis Centre we have found that a women-only service provision is an invaluable environment for many female service users.

We recognise the need for specialist services for male survivors and more information about these services can be found here.

Our email support service is available for those who have been subjected to, or are being subjected to, any form of sexual violence and/or abuse, and who are:

  • women
  • girls
  • AFAB non-binary individuals
  • individuals who have experienced oppression as women

This includes women and girls who are trans.

It doesn’t matter when this abuse happened, whether recently or a long time ago, we are here for you.

The service is for these survivors of all ages, backgrounds and sexual orientation and who feel comfortable receiving support from a service that is run by women for women.

We are also here for woman, girl and AFAB non-binary supporters who are supporting these survivors, personally or professionally.

We treat all forms of sexual abuse seriously and are here for you. It doesn’t matter if you’re not sure how to name it, if you don’t fully remember or if aren’t sure how you feel about it, we will listen and talk this through with you.

You are welcome to send us an email, letter or call us at the office (full contact details are available on the contact us page). Also, you can fill out our online feedback form if you want to give us more detailed feedback on your experiences of our service. If you have any issues with this form and/or would like to request a paper copy sent to you via post, please call our enquiries number 01223 313 551 or email contact@cambridgerapecrisis.org.uk

Any feedback we get is treated anonymously, whether it is good or bad, and helps us to improve our service. We do sometimes use anonymous comments in reports to our funders and supporters, so if you don’t want your comments to be used please tell us.

Finally, if you wish to make a formal complaint about the helpline service, our Service User Complaints Policy is available here.

Email support volunteers will ignore prank or abusive emails.