WOMEN’S SUPPORT SERVICES SAVE LIVES. SO WHY IS THE GOVERNMENT CUTTING THEIR FUNDING?

A powerful new report from the black feminist organization Imkaan has revealed a state of emergency among black and minority ethnic (BME) women’s groups working to end violence against women and girls and providing specialist support for survivors. The report, which campaigners handed in to Downing Street along with a petition to protect such services, outlines a funding crisis affecting BME services, including refuges, helplines, outreach and advice provision.

In this week’s spending review, Chancellor George Osborne announced that, instead of ending the ‘tampon tax’ (which requires women to pay 5 per cent VAT on sanitary items by classing them as a luxury), he would use the £15m levied by the tax to help fund women’s charities. But quite apart from the problematic conflation of periods and refuges which, intentionally or not, suggests male violence against women is a women’s problem for women to solve, his speech didn’t make clear how the funding would be distributed or whether charities, apart from those explicitly named, would be supported. Even a major national organization, such as Rape Crisis, which wasn’t named in the Chancellor’s speech, remains uncertain of its future, with a spokesperson saying the charity is in ‘a very precarious position’. For smaller, specialist organizations, which are more likely to get their funding from local councils, deep cuts to local government budgets mean that the situation remains hazardous.

Responding to the spending review, the End Violence Against Women Coalition pointed out the ‘alarming 29 per cent cut to the Communities Department budget’ and expressed serious concern about the impact this could have on violence against women specialist support services. It concluded: ‘Today’s announcement fails to offer them a life raft.’

There are more than thirty-four dedicated specialist BME violence against women and girls services in the UK, offering flexible and diverse support systems that take into account the specific and complex needs of their service users. But when Imkaan, which acts as an umbrella group for BME organizations, surveyed its members, a shocking 67 per cent reported uncertainty about their sustainability in the current climate. One organization responded: ‘Very uncertain. We did a tender for a refuge in April/May and still don’t know the outcome. If it is not given to us, it will mean we close in the next year or so.’

Imkaan’s report finds that BME women and children in the UK have great and urgent need of specialist services, which uniquely understand the situations they face. During the last financial year, in London alone, 733 BME women sought refuge spaces and only 154 were successful. Nationally, seventeen BME violence against women and girls organizations supported a total of 21,713 women, also over the course of just one year.

Marai Larasi MBE, executive director of Imkaan, says: ‘These organizations are well known in the communities they serve and have the highest numbers of women approaching them directly, rather than being referred on by police, social workers or others. Bigger, more generic services are rarely able to achieve this profile or these “self-referrals”. If these services are lost, lives will be lost. When this lesson is learned, it will be hard to start again and rebuild. We urge the government to show that it understands the needs of BME women facing violence and to commit to a nationally ring-fenced funding solution.’

As funding cuts continue to impact the women’s sector, the report highlights a trend towards councils awarding funding to larger generic providers at the cost of specialized services. Apna Haq, Rotherham’s only BME women’s service, remains at risk of closure after its £145,000 contract for providing domestic violence support was terminated by the council in favour of a mainstream provider with no specialism in minority ethnic women’s needs, which could carry out the work at a slightly lower price.

Zlakha Ahmed, executive director of Apna Haq, says: ‘Independent, specialist and dedicated services, run by and for the communities we seek to serve, are life-saving. Our “led by and for” services offer uniquely empowering experiences to women and children as service users are reflected in staffing, management and governance structures . . . Demand is increasing every day. We, and many others, simply cannot afford to close.’

In 2012, the European Institute for Gender Equality carried out a review of the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action in the EU member states on violence against women and victim support. One finding of that review reads: ‘Specialist BME services are in short supply throughout the European Union. As a result, it is of upmost importance for member states to strive to support their existence, in order to not only provide effective support for BME women and children, but also to contribute to states’ fulfilment of their human rights obligations in the area of combating violence against women, including Article 22 of provision of specialist support services, as specified in the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence.’

The convention referred to, also known as the Istanbul Convention, came into force twelve months ago. It specifies the requirement for short- and long-term specialist services for those who have experienced violence against women. But despite signing up to it three years ago, the UK government has still failed to ratify it. In February this year, the Joint Committee on Human Rights released a report under the headline ‘Government doing less at home than abroad on violence against women and girls’, in which it explicitly warned that the government could harm its international reputation by failing to ratify the convention. And in March, Women’s Aid received a letter from David Cameron confirming that the coalition government would not ratify the Istanbul Convention, allowing the issue to drag on. Though eighteen states, including Italy, France, Spain, Denmark and Sweden have all ratified the convention, the UK still has yet to do so.

Ratification would mean that the UK government would have to bring its provision, such as the one cited above relating to specialist support services, into force through domestic policy and legislation. While it drags its feet, services providing specialist provision for black and minority ethnic women are at crisis point.

Originally published 30 November 2015