Blog by chief executive of Women’s Aid, Farah Nazeer

This is my first International Women’s Day as Women’s Aid chief executive, and I am proud to have joined such an incredible all-woman team.

My passion has always been working towards ending violence against women and girls and progressing women’s rights and women’s equality, particularly for those who are most marginalised within our society. Seeing an end to, and full provision for, survivors of domestic abuse is fundamental to this.

To me, International Women’s Day is a day to celebrate women, their achievements, honour women’s struggles and celebrate our vital work as part of the women’s sector work towards equality.

It’s also a day to remember how far away we still are from equality, how prevalent violence is and to come to together to revitalise and rejuvenate our commitment towards ending violence against women and refocus our efforts towards true equality.

I was shocked in my first week at Women’s Aid to hear that one of our member organisations, RISE in Sussex, had lost local authority funding for providing services for survivors of domestic abuse. The local authority had taken a ‘gender-neutral’ approach to commissioning its domestic abuse services, which led to RISE – a women-centred service which has been providing domestic abuse services for over 25 years – losing the contract. And this is by no means the first time this has happened. This is part of a worrying move by some local authorities to disregard the gendered nature of domestic abuse and to ask domestic abuse services to provide a full range of services on an ever-shrinking budget.

While every survivor of domestic abuse needs to be able to access safety and support, there is clear evidence that women make up the majority of victims and experience the most severe and dangerous forms of domestic abuse –  91% of domestic violence crimes that cause injuries are against women, and three women every fortnight are being killed by a current or former partner in the UK.  Women need spaces where they feel completely safe, and women’s refuge and specialist domestic abuse services have the expertise and experience to ensure this. Trust is essential to women feeling able to reach out for support.

This is never to say that other services are not needed or important, and access to services should never be a race to the bottom – funds are needed for all those experiencing domestic abuse and sexual violence. The lack of funding, poor guidance and often poor commissioning practices should be addressed here. However, and it has to be repeated  –  91% of domestic violence crimes that cause injuries are against women, and three women every fortnight are being killed by a current or former partner in the UK – and services should commissioned firmly in this context.

In Sussex, RISE runs a LGBT refuge and said ​it could expand its approach for heterosexual men, but it was still not successful because being ‘gender-neutral’ was prioritised over decades of experience by a specialist women-led service.

Last month Women’s Aid’s report ‘Fragile Funding Landscape’ showed that over 1 in 5 domestic refuge services are running without local authority funding, with refuge spaces for Black and minoritised women being far more likely to be unfunded. To compound this, the domestic abuse bill returns today to the House of Lords, and although the bill requires councils to fund accommodation for survivors, nowhere does it mention the word ‘refuge’, which is absolutely essential to ensuring women’s safety. Coupled with the current government plan to separate domestic abuse from the Violence Against Women and Girls strategy, this will only serve to encourage more ‘gender neutral’ responses to domestic abuse.

We need to stop this right now. Every survivor deserves support, and we know that safe, separate services are necessary for this. Do not defund women’s services in exchange for a ‘one size fits all’ approach, because this does not work for domestic abuse services.

On International Women’s Day, please respect the knowledge and expertise of the women’s sector and the role that women’s refuges and domestic abuse services play in saving lives.

Today we launch a petition to the government to ask that it requires local authorities to fund women’s domestic abuse services.

Please sign here and share widely.

Together, we can make a difference.

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By Maia Samuel, Senior Research and Evaluation Officer at Women’s Aid

Monday 15th February 2021: Today, Women’s Aid published a new report, Fragile funding landscape: the extent of local authority commissioning in the domestic abuse refuge sector in England 2020

Read the report: Fragile funding landscape

Fragile funding landscape: the extent of local authority commissioning in the domestic abuse refuge sector in England 2020 looks at the levels of local authority commissioned funding for refuge services in England. It reveals that a significant proportion of spaces in refuges services are run without any local authority commissioned funding, and a disproportionate number of these spaces without funding are run by specialist ‘by and for’ services for Black and minoritised women. Refuge services have continued to offer their life-saving support for survivors amid the Covid-19 pandemic, which has led to increased demand for their help. Now more than ever, adequate and secure funding for all services is urgently required.

Decreasing levels of funding for refuge services

The national network of refuge services in England is a vital lifeline for those fleeing domestic abuse, providing both safety and specialist support to empower survivors to recover from their experiences and rebuild their lives free from abuse. Local authorities have long funded support in refuge services. Over the last decade however, there have been significant cuts in the amount of funding available to local authorities to invest in domestic abuse services, largely due to austerity measures, the strict economic policies first introduced by the Coalition government in 2010 which continue to restrict council budgets today. Fragile funding landscape looks at the amount of funding available through local authority domestic abuse contracts and finds that, taking account of inflation, 59% of local authorities implemented a real-time cut to their domestic abuse funding in 2019/20.  Shrinking local authority budgets have resulted in a funding crisis for the domestic abuse sector, leaving refuge services under-resourced and currently unable to meet demand. In November 2020 there was a 24.5% shortfall in the number of refuge spaces that should be available ¹. This means that many survivors, when they decide to take the step of seeking refuge, find there are no suitable spaces available for them at that time.

Local authority commissioning

Local authority domestic abuse funding used to primarily take the form of direct grants. Today though, it is usually delivered through a commissioning process, whereby organisations bid for funding contracts to provide services. Commissioning is designed to provide ‘value for money’ but in reality, depleted local authority budgets can mean cost cutting is prioritised above the effectiveness of services and the outcomes of service users. Smaller organisations are at a disadvantage in the tendering process when competing against larger organisations, and the experience and expertise of specialist domestic abuse services is often overlooked in commissioning decisions that focus on cost above all else. Research has shown that specialist ‘by and for’ domestic abuse services for Black and minoritised women, with their crucial expertise in supporting women who face racism and structural inequality, have been disproportionately impacted by cuts and competitive tendering processes².

New statutory duty

As part of the domestic abuse bill currently going through parliament, the government plans to introduce a new legal duty on local authorities to fund  ‘safe accommodation’ for survivors of domestic abuse and their children, creating a new statutory system for the funding of refuges and other services within the community. If it is delivered effectively, the new duty presents a real opportunity to achieve a secure future for refuge services. Ahead of the duty coming into force, Women’s Aid set out to determine the extent to which refuge provision in England is currently funded through a local authority commissioning and to explore the position of refuge services operating outside of a commissioning process, all of which will need to be carefully considered under the new system.

Significant proportion of refuge services are not commissioned

Fragile funding landscape reveals that the commissioned refuge sector is currently supported by a significant number of services that receive no statutory funding. More than 1 in 5 refuge services running in November 2020 (60 out of 269 refuge services) were not commissioned by the local authority and were surviving on emergency government funding pots, charitable grants, trusts and other fundraising activities. These other funding streams can be insecure and time-consuming to source, leaving non-commissioned services in a precarious position and unable to plan for the future. When these other funding sources fall short, services can be forced to dip in to their reserves to continue running their services.

Fragile funding landscape shows that 18.5% of all refuge spaces in England in November 2020 were not funded through local authority commissioning. As mentioned earlier, there is already a significant shortfall in the number of spaces but without the non-commissioned spaces, this shortfall would increase from 24.5% to 42.5%. If these non-commissioned spaces were to disappear, it would become even more difficult for survivors to find a suitable refuge placement.

Lower levels of commissioned funding for ‘by and for’ services

Non-commissioned services make a substantial contribution to the domestic abuse sector, particularly ‘by and for’ specialist services for Black and minoritised women which are far less likely to have statutory funding. Fragile funding landscape shows that non-commissioned services ran 57.5% of all refuge spaces in specialist ‘by and for’ services, compared to the overall 18.5% of all refuge spaces in England that were non-commissioned.

Commissioned services

For those refuge services which are local authority commissioned, their contracts provide a degree of certainty in that an amount of funding is guaranteed for the service for a defined length of time. As we’ve seen, most local authorities made real-time cuts to their domestic abuse contracts and this means the level of commissioned funding is often insufficient to cover the full costs of delivering the service. We found that less than one in five commissioned refuge services were able to pay for support staff salaries, training and staff related expenses in 2019/20 without having to secure additional funds. Commissioned services often don’t get full cost recovery from their contracts and have to ‘top up’ this funding through other means, relying on the same emergency government funding pots and charity fundraising methods that non-commissioned services depend on to continue their services.

Opportunity for change

It is clear that existing funding arrangements for refuge services are inadequate. Currently a significant number of non-commissioned refuge services are propping up statutory provision and commissioned services are often having to source additional funds to supplement their contracted funding. While the new duty is a welcome step forward in securing a sustainable funding settlement, it is vital that the value of all specialist domestic abuse service providers, including non-commissioned services and in particular, specialist ‘by and for’ services for Black and minoritised women, is considered. Once funding for the new duty comes in, local authorities must be reaching out to these non-commissioned services to ensure they are part of the new local funding and partnership arrangements.

Members tell us they have concerns that once the duty is in place, the alternative funding that non-commissioned refuge services rely on will become more difficult to source. These services will likely still need their alternative funders to continue to invest in their life-saving support, meaning it is essential these other funding streams are still available. Women’s Aid would like to see more funders offering core funding, and less rigidity surrounding funding timelines, to ensure that organisations do not have to change their work to meet funder restrictions, or face a cliff edge when funding comes to an end. For specialist services to meet the needs of all survivors who need their help, it is vital they are supported with sufficient and sustainable funding. Detailed recommendations are set out in full in Fragile funding landscape: the extent of local authority commissioning in the domestic abuse refuge sector in England 2020

¹ Council of Europe (2008): “…safe accommodation in specialised women’s shelters, available in every region, with one family place per 10,000 head of population.” (p. 51)

² Imkaan (2016) Capital losses: the state of the specialist BME ending violence against women and girls sector in London. London: Imkaan

Back to Safe Blog

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Increasingly over recent years questions of research ethics and governance have been considered within the framework of Research Integrity. For many in academic contexts this means expanding our thoughts about what is ethical in research to what is also ethical in the research environment, including researcher safety, authorship, integrity, and accountability.

By Dr Emma Williamson

Within the field of gender-based violence (GBV) research, these questions of integrity have been at the forefront of the development of GBV as an academic discipline for decades. As such, many of us working in this area also have a keen interest in research ethics, collaborative research approaches, and what are now called ‘impact’ activities.

It is in this context that a number of academic researchers from across the UK were invited to a meeting hosted by the four Women’s Aid federations of the UK – Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2018.

Each of these federations has a long history of providing support for those experiencing domestic violence and abuse in all its forms. Each federation has engaged, over recent decades, in context specific research and policy engagement to challenge the intersecting structural inequalities which impact on domestic violence and abuse. As such, as both producers and users of academic research, often working collaboratively with academic researchers and policy makers, this was a unique opportunity to bring together those with an interest in ensuring that when we conduct research in this field we do so with integrity.

Essentially, the meeting in 2018 sought to establish what was good practice in terms of ethical research in this field, not a simple or straight forward question. Following that first meeting it was decided that a Research Integrity Framework (RIF) would be a good way to address these issues and a draft RIF was developed. That framework, focusing specifically on domestic violence and abuse (DVA) research then formed the basis of two years of development to a document which we believe addresses some of the basic principles in our area of ethical research.

Our approach in the RIF was to base the document on five clear pillars which are S.T.E.E.R:

• Safety
• Transparency/accountability
• Equality, human rights and Social Justice
• Engagement
• Research ethics

Within each of these pillars we have tried to capture good practice in research which recognises some of the tensions between collecting data to improve lives of victims-survivors of abuse, and the risks associated with such research. We have moved beyond simple thoughts of research ethics to consider how Social Justice is envisaged in research collaborations. How approaches to research and the collection and use of data can support or hinder notions of equality or human rights.

As a collaborative team, led by the four UK Women’s Aid federations, we are delighted that the framework is now being launched. Alongside the current framework – which we consider as a working document which can develop further over time and with broader engagement – we have a comprehensive dissemination strategy. We are seeking to engage researchers and research bodies to endorse the framework as a way to strengthen the integrity of research in this field.  We are engaging with individual researchers, research groups, Journals, commissioners who use research, and NGO’s who both conduct and use research.

If you wish to endorse this RIF DVA then please contact e.williamson@bristol.ac.uk

Alongside the four Women’s Aid Federations, the development team also included the following academic partners:  Professor John Devaney[i], Dr Emma Williamson[ii],  Dr. Maria Pentaraki[iii], Professor Nicky Stanley[iv], Professor Chérie Armour[v], Dr Claire Houghton[vi], Dr Nancy Lombard[vii].

References

[i] Centenary Chair and Head of Social Work, University of Edinburgh.

[ii] Reader in Gender Based Violence, Centre for Gender and Violence Research, University of Bristol.

[iii] Lecturer in Social Work, School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work, Queen’s University Belfast.

[iv] Co-Director, Connect Centre for International Research on Interpersonal Violence and Harm, University of Central Lancashire.

[v] Professor of Psychological Trauma & Mental Health, School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast.

[vi] Lecturer in Social Policy and Qualitative Research, University of Edinburgh.

[vii] Reader in Sociology and Social Policy, Department of Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University.

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