Sarah Cheverton
WVoN co-editor

The Islington Tribune reported this week that advisers from the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) are concerned that non-English-speaking women were being denied places in North London refuges.

Refuges confirmed that they can no longer afford translation services due to the cuts and are being forced to refuse women as a result.

IKWRO’s Director, Diana Nammi, stated in the article that individual refuges are not to blame.

“We are seeing a trickle effect. Central government thinks bankers’ lives are more important than women’s lives, so they give money there. Refuges don’t have the money in north London, so they have to turn women in the borough away.”

The Tribune’s report provides the latest evidence of the impact of government cuts on domestic violence services.

However, Lynn Featherstone, Home Office Minister for Equality told the Guardian recently, “I would rebut very firmly that the sector is in crisis.”

Her rebuttal notwithstanding, it would seem that the evidence from the violence against women sector paints a different picture.

Recent research by Sylvia Walby for Trust for London found that an average of 230 women a day were turned away from Women’s Aid refuges last year, following funding cuts of 31% to the sector.

The report found that women experiencing violence were increasingly being told to find shelter in police stations, A&E departments and even Occupy camps.

Last June, the Women’s Resource Centre reported that 95% of women’s organisations were facing cuts over the next year.

Sound like a crisis yet?

Currently the most devastating impact of the cuts is being felt by those most vulnerable women in our society: not only women with limited or no English, but also women with no recourse to public funds, or women in minority groups experiencing forced marriage or honour-based crimes, for example.

New commissioning models disadvantage many smaller, specialist services, which are closing or being merged into larger organisations as a result.

Hannana Siddiqui, of Southall Black Sisters, recently told the Guardian, “We have built up the expertise to meet the needs of hard-to-reach BME women. And if you reduce the quality and quantity of provision that has serious implications. More women are turned away, there are more suicides, more homicides, more forced marriages.”

As a result, hope is dimming for marginalised women whose only hope for escaping violence comes from such specialist services addressing the needs of women from the hardest to reach groups.

While Lynn Featherstone stands blithely by denying the evidence that the cuts programme is devastating the lives of all women experiencing domestic abuse, there is also a danger here that women’s services will increasingly be pitted against each other in the struggle to compete for available funding.

Social commentators are currently decrying the effect of funding cuts in turning the working against the non-working poor, and we are in danger of sidelining the rights of marginalised women in a similar way.

Laurie Penny recently wrote in the New Statesman:

“Last week during a radio phone-in, I spoke to a woman whose voice shook with rage at the idea that immigrant families might be receiving tens of thousands of pounds in payments when her own benefits are due to be cut. It’s a callous but effective strategy: turn the anger of the working poor against the non-working poorer, diverting attention from the biggest redistribution of wealth to the very rich in a generation.”

It is easy to imagine the same views being expressed as an excuse to let slip away the hard-earned progress and long-fought victories in the struggle for the rights of marginalised women in the UK, a struggle which is far from over.

We should resist this impulse, and not only because it plays into the hands of the government. More simply, and along with the broader political and economic approach of the Coalition, it doesn’t work.

Heather Harvey, Research and Development Manager at EAVES told the Guardian:

“Women are literally having to find a way of staying safe on the streets, or staying in violent relationships where they could end up dead. And the ultimate costs of that are huge – to the police, the NHS, the courts – it’s a total false economy.”

Services that support, protect and advocate on behalf of women experiencing violence are vital to our society. Women’s organisations across the UK understand and negotiate the complex reality of violence against women and girls across the UK.

In so doing, they save money and resources needed by our police and health services, but most of all, they save lives.

We ignore their increasingly desperate pleas at our peril.

Because if these organisations and services are forced to fail as the government stands idly by pointing the finger anywhere but at itself, we will all be left with blood on our hands.