Ahead of International Women’s Day, Domestic Abuse Commissioner Nicole Jacobs shares what more must be done to protect victims amid the cost-of-living crisis.
The massive increases in energy bills, mortgages, rents, food and fuel prices are having a huge impact on most people across the UK but we are hearing from domestic abuse victims and services about the enormous additional pressures that the cost of living crisis is putting on survivors and their children.
Many are being faced with an impossible choice between staying with an abuser or risking not being able to afford the basics for them and their children to survive.
In other cases, we are seeing that abusers are using concerns of financial hardship as an extra tool for coercive control. What we’re hearing is borne out by statistics from Women’s Aid which found that three quarters (73%) of women living with and having financial links with the abuser said that the cost-of-living crisis had either prevented them from leaving or made it harder for them to leave.
Survivors said they were prevented from fleeing by the stark reality of not being able to support their children (50%), getting into debt (52%), or concerns that benefits wouldn’t cover increased living costs (48%). Almost 70% of the survivors surveyed said they do not have savings of £200 or more; 67.2% could not get £500 together if they needed to and 62.0% had borrowed money from family and/or friends to cover essential needs. Research from Refuge has also found that 73% of frontline workers surveyed said that the cost-of-living crisis is increasing barriers for victims to leave a perpetrator.
These statistics build a very worrying picture and behind the data there are real people with real children who are being put in danger because they can’t afford to escape and can’t afford to support themselves if they do.
I have been calling for the government to take urgent action since the autumn by introducing four key measures which would prevent this crisis from worsening for survivors. I wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, in line with other key domestic abuse charities including Women’s Aid and Surviving Economic Abuse urging him to create a national emergency fund which was accessible to all victims across England and Wales. This fund would allow survivors to access £500 in order to support them to escape abuse –which must include migrant survivors with no recourse to public funds given the additional barriers to support they face.
I also want the Chancellor to increase funding to support survivors of economic abuse; and to ensure any package to mitigate the impact of increased energy bills covers charities and support services as well as individuals.
We are already hearing that services are seeing their costs rise exponentially and are worried about how they will keep their doors open for survivors. The combination of a high-stress role, burn-out from a brutal couple of years in response to Covid, and increasing anxiety about making ends meet has resulted in a crisis of recruitment and retention in this highly specialist sector.
Domestic abuse survivors should also be exempt from the legal aid means test.
We know that help can’t come soon enough. Most recent statistics from Surviving Economic Abuse’s (SEA) Financial Support Line with Money Advice Plus show that 67% of victim-survivors of domestic abuse are already in a negative budget or have less than £100 surplus at the end of each month.
Victim-survivors currently have an individual average debt of £20,000 – six times more than in 2020. After the winter, this is expected to be even higher, according to SEA and Money Advice Plus.
I will continue to call for the government to take the measures that I have identified along with others across the sector but if you are struggling now and need help, information about grants and schemes can be found on the Surviving Economic Abuse website and on the Citizen Advice website.
Twitter: twitter.com/CommissionerDA
Website: domesticabusecommissioner.uk/