24th July 2025
WDI UK Response to the “Safe With Me” Campaign: A Dangerous Undermining of Child Safeguarding and Sex-Based Rights
Women’s Declaration International UK (WDI UK) is gravely concerned about the recently launched “Safe With Me” campaign, promoted by BBC presenter Dr Ronx Ikharia. Highlighted in a recent South West Londoner article, https://www.swlondoner.co.uk/news/23072025-bbc-presenter-launches-new-trans-visibility-campaign.
While marketed as a gesture of trans “allyship,” the campaign’s premise, that adults or children wearing a badge should accompany trans-identified individuals into toilets or other gendered spaces, represents a shocking failure of safeguarding and a gross misrepresentation of UK law.
Dangerous Safeguarding Breaches Involving Children
The campaign encourages people to wear a yellow badge signalling to trans-identified individuals that they are “safe to approach,” especially when accessing public toilets or other sex-segregated spaces.
Those wearing the badge are invited to accompany trans-identified people, potentially strangers, into toilets, as a form of visible support.
More disturbingly, the campaign explicitly calls for the badge to be adopted in schools, implying that children may be encouraged to wear the badge and act as allies. In practice, this could lead to situations where children are asked to accompany strange adults into sex-segregated spaces, a scenario that would be utterly indefensible under any responsible safeguarding framework.
The ”Safe With Me” campaign turns children into participants in a campaign that normalises contact with unknown adults in intimate spaces, directly contradicting established safeguarding principles that exist precisely to protect children from grooming, exploitation, and abuse.
Children must never be put in the position of being “allies” to adults in a context that overrides safety boundaries.
No badge, no matter how well-intentioned, should be used to bypass the rules that keep children safe from harm.
This is not allyship. It is institutional recklessness masquerading as inclusion.
Misrepresentation of the Law
In addition to its safeguarding failures, the “Safe With Me” campaign falsely claims that the recent UK Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act is merely “guidance.” This is legally incorrect. The ruling can be read here https://supremecourt.uk/cases/judgments/uksc-2024-0042
In reality, the Supreme Court has confirmed that the correct interpretation of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 is biological sex, not gender identity. This ruling did not change the law; it clarified what the law has always meant. The judgment is binding and must be followed by all institutions, including schools, workplaces, and public services. The ruling strengthens legal protections for single-sex spaces and makes clear that biological sex, not self-declared gender identity, determines eligibility for access to spaces where sex-based privacy and dignity are essential.
To claim otherwise is to encourage duty bearers to break the law, potentially exposing them to legal liability and further eroding public trust in safeguarding and legal integrity.
Sex-Based Rights Must Be Upheld
This campaign is not harmless. It risks violating both the rights of women and girls to privacy and dignity in single-sex spaces, and the right of all children to be protected from exposure to adults in vulnerable situations.
We refer to Article 8 of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, which reaffirms the need for the elimination of violence against women by ensuring that states should:
“(b) ……include the provision of single‑sex services and physical spaces for women and girls to provide them with safety, privacy, and dignity. … Single sex provisions … should be staffed by women on the basis of their sex and not ‘gender identity’.”
This principle is grounded in international human rights law, particularly the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). WDI’s Declaration is available here:
https://womensdeclaration.com/en/declaration-womens-sex-based-rights-full-text/
Dr Ronx and those supporting this campaign must be held accountable for promoting policies that endanger children and mislead the public about the law. Schools, NHS settings, and employers must not adopt initiatives that disregard both legal clarity and basic safeguarding obligations.
Women’s Declaration International UK stands firmly for the sex-based rights of women and girls, and for the uncompromising protection of all children from ideological campaigns that erode essential boundaries.