To think there's not much help for women suffering domestic abuse?

[ChicaChow]

Just the title really.

Before having witnessed two of my closest friends and a family member go through DV I thought there was a lot of help for victims of DV to leave. But actually it's really pitful!

I believed, as do many others that you could just ring women's aid and they'd assist you. You'd either have help to leave right away into a refuge or have someone allocated to help you make plans to leave. But the truth seems to be

1. You ring women's aid and it's engaged constantly. Literally for days at a time sometimes. The chatlines can also take days to respond. Likely due to being massively under resourced.

1. Many DV organisations won't work with victims if they are still in the relationship. My local council will only help once you've actually left the relationship. Surely you need the organisation to actually be helped to make the plans to leave?

1. You don't get legal aid unless your on certain benefits and very low income. My best friend has had to take out a credit card after leaving with NOTHING and sleeping in her car as she has a job. She can't claim benefits as her income is too high. She can't get a council property or assistance with accomodation because her name is on the mortgage of the house she fled from. Her wages were paid into her abusive ex's account. So she slept in her car until payday. She has terrible credit due to her abusive ex running up debts in her name. So had to take out payday loans to get a private rent and now a credit card for legal fees.

1. If you do flee DV with just the clothes on your back then there's a high chance you'll be put in a dodgy B+B and not a refuge as women's refuges are oversubscribed, you may even be put of area.

1. When you do leave, if you go to the police, without hard evidence of your abuser attacking you like a video, it's basically just your word against there's. Then with no prosecution, you can't use it in court to protect your kids from them. Many victims are closely controlled and monitored. My friend said there was no way on earth she could have recorded him being abusive. He had full access to all devices and money. He read through every text, went through her phone regularly and she had 0 access to funds without his permission. She couldn't spy a secret camera as he'd see the transaction. She couldn't take out cash to buy a spy camera in person if she even found a shop that sold one, as he would question why she withdrew money and want a receipt. How can you collate evidence when every inch of your life is being monitored?

1. On the note of children. No matter how horrendous and abusive your ex is, even if you do have video footage of them abusing you and s conviction, the abuser will always have access to the kids. Unless there is concrete evidence of them directly abusing the kids and proving they are a risk to them, they will have access. Even if you can prove a risk, they'll just say supervised access. The supervising person may even be an enabling family member of the abuser like the abusers own parent who the victim doesn't trust.

There is so much more. But I am horrified at the injustice to women and children in this country. One of my friends told me her life is harder now than it was living with her abuser. She has been alienated from family and friends of decades who've taken the side of the abuser or don't 'want to take sides'. She's lost her home she spent blood, sweat and tears on. She's financially ruined with horrific credit and no chance in owning once this is all over. Worst of all, her kids who were her reason for leaving (to keep them safe and from witnessing the violence), have to be sent to the abusive man unsupervised without her there to protect them. If the kids themselves say anything or speak out, she's accused of parental alienation.

I'm a social worker (in a different field) and am horrified by my recent experiences with friends and family. It's nothing like what our training says there is available to support.
I am at a loss as to what women are suppose to do!

Am I being unreasonable to think it's all lip service and actually women and children are unprotected?

OP, who is foolish enough to pay their salary into someone else's account? Literally giving independence away. That has opportunity for abuse written all over it.

In 2005 we helped someone who had done exactly that, to leave. Helped them open an account, get everything together to make the leap. But it was a man who was suffering coercive control (before it was a crime) by his wife. She had him explaining every mile on his car's mileometer by that point. Giving him £4.20 a day. Controlling which sandwich he could buy for lunch.

It is those basic mistakes that must be avoided.

Please do not describe being a victim of financial abuse as being ‘foolish’.

I always find it weird in DV. That they say the woman is unsafe and not safeguarding children if she doesn't leave and they would take the kids from her over that risk..
But then give the kids to stay alone with the abuser...

Make that make sense...

@Loadsapandas No-one voted for men to be able to abuse their partners (or vice versa).

On average it takes seven attempts for a woman to leave an abusive partner.
The analogy for a woman who appears not to act in what the outside world sees as her best interests is of a frog being boiled slowly. By the time things are undeniably awful she can feel she has no agency to change her situation, no power to manage her life, no friends or family to help. She believes she will lose the DC and be labelled crazy by her abusive partner.
Please set up a regular donation to your local branch of Women’s Aid, volunteer as a helpline worker. No volunteers, no money and there is no service to offer those who need it

Do you have any understanding of how DV works?

Who would be foolish enough to stay with someone who hits them? Or controls them? Or sexually assaulted them? Or swears and screams at them? Or stops them seeing family and friends?

That's the whole issue. The psychological abuse and distortion comes well before anything physical and is the root cause of why victims stay.

You seem to have a very limited understanding of this.

I can't imagine going to a DV worker for support to leave to be told 'how are you foolish enough to have all wages paid into the abusers account?'

Really helpful that.

There is not enough support for women or men suffering from domestic abuse. Men’s service in our area is once a month and does not have access to the free solicitors etc that are available at the women’s drop in. There are no refuge’s at all for men. Even with extensive evidence and the new laws to protect against non physical forms of abuse there are very few prosecutions. There needs to be more support in place for all victims of abuse and family courts absolutely are part of the problem and allow post separation abuse to continue where there are children involved.

As a family, what support can/do you offer to bridge the gaps left by an overstretched and under-resourced system?

Many of the services the OP mentions (apart from police and social services) have no statutory obligation to be funded, so rely on discretionary funding or charity. Given the squeeze on public funding to local authorities since 2010, no wonder they are under-resourced.

I didn’t say we did.

Although through lack of funding for victims resulting in more children raised in abusive households, we probably will continue to see greater rates of DV in the following generations as it’ll be all they know.

@Edingril did you read my previous post. The law via the family courts, makes it illegal for a mother to protect her children from an abuser if the abuser is the father of the children.

That is fact. Not a bias. But fact.

Yep basically spot on OP. I will say for balance that my experience with women’s aid in the area I lived in at the time was exceptionally helpful other than having to wait a few weeks before I left as there was no space in the refuge closest to me at the time. The most terrifying time of my life honestly. The waiting lists got even longer and I was in refuge with my kids for 9 months, partly due to taking ages for the council to agree it was safe for us to stay in the local area but mostly due to the ongoing housing shortage that is everywhere. This causes the waiting list to increase. They can send you to another refuge in a different location but of course they usually all have their own struggles too. It’s a mess and needs more money pumped into it as this is a societal issue that will never go away.

The staff in my refuge were great- very supportive and linked in with every other local service. But they were and still are chronically under resourced and under funded. And the way the system now works for housing in refuge is messed up. You needed to be unemployed or you’d be liable to pay the full rent which was £500 a week for each individual woman as a flat fee no matter whether she was there alone or with her children in a single room. The “rent” was paid from housing benefit but covered all utilities and other bills and the staff’s wages. I imagine that’s why your friend wasn’t helped with housing in a refuge.

Excellent advice Meadowfinch

Family court won't help either.. it's contact at all and any cost with an abuser.. so therefore the children will have contact without their protective factor (ie mum) and they become more vulnerable.
In my experience, I was in many ways worse off after leaving and there has been times when I'd wished I'd just stayed as at least I knew what I was dealing with. I left the home, not entitled to much financial help due to having "trapped capital" within the marital home, a court ordered childcare arrangement around his shift pattern which has caused me to have to become part time and spend more money on wraparound care due to the adhoc shift pattern, and less time to protect my children.
I am now more controlled by him than when I was his wife but just more so via the children.. any opportunity to punish me, report me, cause stress, he will take. I also have to communicate with him more due to the court order and arranging handovers and being expected to co-parent, as court ordered by family court.

Women's Aid were amazing but extremely limited in what they could do.. same as social care especially once a court ordered childcare arrangement is in place.

If I could have my time again, I'd stay to protect my children. But in that case social care would punish me by removing the children no doubt due to failing to safeguard them. It's a no win situation, but at least I could assess the risk to me and my children on a daily basis and act accordingly. I just assumed fleeing DV would involve a lot more help and support.

This is one reason I hope never of have to return to the UK where my abusive ex lives. I just know I wouldn't get the help I need if he ever kicked off again.

I have been through similar and lost my home, my friends and my job as I moved hundreds of miles away to avoid the violence that I knew would follow when I left.

In my view, it's not more funding that's required, just a better understanding of what these women are going through and offering them real help that is not necessarily financial.

For a start, the courts need to take into account the reason for the break-up when they decide on custody arrangements. I was fortunate enough that my ex was stupid enough to be aggressive towards my solicitor in the court room and so he was only granted supervised access once a month. If he had been given 50:50 or even every other weekend unsupervised, I seriously would have taken the kids, changed our names and found some way to have gone abroad and started again to avoid him.

I was fortunate to have a career that meant I could start again anywhere, but I still needed a lot of moral support to give me the strength and courage to leave and get through the court system. The first year was complete hell but it was worth it in the end.

The fear of their children spending time unsupervised with their abusive ex's stops women leaving violent relationships.

Unless you've lived in constant fear you could be excused for thinking women return to abusers for stupid reasons.
The threat is he will track her down and kill her. Nothing the police or other agencies do can remove that threat.

This entirely.

Every single point that you've mentioned, every single thing that doesn't exist in my home country.
I really find people in general very unwilling to help themselves here.
Every single point you mentioned is some form of help. An air BnB, housing, WA, police, social services etc - imagine if all that did not exist ? Now that is what being abandoned is.

All of this. In my experience you are completely On your own. Ignore the misogynist who infests these posts

In a way I was lucky as my ex was so bad that there was a legal order in place that he could only have supervised contact ( supervised by social work), if I let him have contact, I knew there was a good chance my dc would be removed. This period of no contact let me break the "trauma bonds" and I could see clearly and break free. I now work in a related area and I see how professionals / policies deal with domestic abuse and quite frankly it would have not worked for me.

There’s no help. When I finally fled my first marriage, with no kids but pets, I got zero help. I tried to apply for grants to help me get back on my feet but they were all turned down. I couldn’t get a hostel place as there was no way in hell that I would leave my pets behind. Womens Aid even said they couldn’t help me as I had pets and to get in touch when I found them somewhere to go. I left behind everything else other than my car and a few clothes.

The only help I got was from the Crisis Team, because my ex husband was under them so I emailed them for help getting out. They were amazing. Other than that everyone washed their hands of me. It was terrifying.

Unless you’ve been through it, or know someone who’s been through it, you just don’t know what it’s like. I remember begging one charity for help, but they wouldn’t because I had a few Amazon purchases on my bank account. I tried to explain I had left my whole life behind and had to buy things in order to exist.

It does get better. When I talk about it now it’s like I’m talking about a television programme. One of my friends mentioned the other day about what I went through and how strong I was. No one has mentioned it for years, she’s no idea what they meant that people remember.

Yanbu
There is no help.

tell me you don't understand DA without telling me you don't understand DA. Someone who is deeply enmeshed in an abusive relationship has little to no say or agency in their own life any more. It creeps up on you so gradually you don't know until it's too late. It's incomprehensible to those who haven't been there but those of us who have and remember the fear and control know that it is a horrific situation to be in and you fear for your life. How many people who say they'd stand up to him, tell him no, just walk away would do that if a knife wielding maniac approached them in a quiet area after dark? Truth is you'd hand over your bag and hope to survive. It's no different if that maniac is your partner, you go into survival mode and do what you have to to get through including dealing with the fact that a clean break is unlikely if you have kids. I got really lucky and my ex decided to cut his losses and move onto his next victim. Neither me nor our child have seen him in years. I feel so much for those who don't get that severance and definitely more help and protection needs to be in place.

My dd has been through this
But she's on benefits so it could be more things are available to her . I don't know what it's like from the situation of not wrong entitled to legal aid . I think local councils often don't do what they are meant to . When someone flees DV the council MUST put the person into emgency accommodation. Once the person is safe then things will be looked into a bit more .

Dd has been lucky that she's had support but recently when dd has been in danger the council did not do what they should have done and the lied several times. It took 3 MARAC meetings . 2 emgency housing panel meetings. And a MAPPA meeting The risk was/is under life in danger . The housing officer just kept lying. Not following things through not taking advice, not returning calling, ignoring etc etc. This had been going on since August. And it took threats from dd DV advocate and contacting manager etc . For this housing officer to do what she's meant to.

When DV happens the children are also classed as victims. The mum gets told by social services. you must stay away from him. You have to show you can protect your children. If not you risk your children being removed... also social services dad can have unsupervised visits the children can sleep over etc.

What rages me the most, is the woman is told she isn't safeguarding the child by letting them witness abuse, and gets threatened with having the child removed. Nobody ever says the man isn't safeguarding the child by being an abuser.