Very powerful article on the threat to women's refuges

[hackmum]

Do read these. It's extraordinary - particularly the history of women's refuges and how the authorities used to treat cases of domestic violence.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jun/11/i-could-have-ended-up-dead-why-womens-refuges-face-a-fatal-new-threat

Thanks hackmum

I was just coming on here to start the same thread.

Horrifying.

Awful reading. Are the Sisters Uncut mentioned there this group, or another?

This is horrific:

According to Women’s Aid, 60% of all referrals to refuges were declined in 2016/17, usually owing to a lack of space, with figures suggesting that rate is even higher for BME women

Heartless.

I wonder what else is going to be removed from the welfare state?

I saw this. Horrendous

Brilliant article.

How can the gov justify cuts when they are so underfunded as it is. And I can't understand why they are stopping them from accepting housing benefit. Seems a deliberate attempt to get rid of the shelters.

Awful.

What possible excuse could there be for this abuse?

As hotdog says it seems deliberate. They were trying to mess around with their "dwelling" status before I think but I thought they'd had a rethink.

Is it even saving the government any money? I would have thought that the majority of women would have to claim housing benefit even if they move into other accommodation rather than the shelter.

Of course it will save the government money.

If the abused woman can not find somewhere to stay, there is no housing benefit to pay. I would guess that many abused women will return to their abuser's house at this point.

It is cheaper for the government to have families living together even dangerously abusive ones

I suspect it will be part of the universal credit debacle, where your benefits are wrapped into one tidy sum and paid to one person in your household. But yes, the government is cracking down on financial abuse . I sometimes collect items for our local refuge and they are operating on the absolute bare minimum as it is. They don’t have anything spare and I know they are turning women away. Horrible.

In the comments to that article is a big statement from Refuge welcoming the Bill and the transition from housing benefit to direct funding. Maybe it's become so difficult to use benefits for anything that direct funding is better.

Good point Babies. I suspect you're right.

My understanding is that the proposal is to devolve accommodation costs for all supported housing from HB to Local Authorities and I am against this proposal.
They devolved Supporting People funding for housing related 'counselling' and support from the DCLG to Local Authorities some years ago and the upshot of that has been that the LA's have put the delivery of specialist domestic violence services out to tender. Locally, we've been lucky in that the organisation that won the bid is a local specialist dv service but the same can't be said for other areas. Some LA's have chosen bid winners on a cost weighted basis so refuge organisations that have years of specialist expertise in delivering holistic support to women and children have been pushed out and forced to close in favour of bums in beds organisations that offer little or no support at all.

I can see the same thing happening if/when accommodation costs are devolved to LAs. Refuges will be competing with all the other organisations providing housing for vulnerable groups - the pot will never be enough to cover all the costs. There is likely to be little or no recognition of the fact that refuge rents are necessarily high due to the high turnover of residents and the repairs and replacements costs refuges have to cover as a result. It will become financially unviable for small, local, specialist providers to continue to operate so those organisations - usually set up by women, for women decades ago - will cease to exist and the large bums in beds organisations will take over.

We at at great risk of losing even more specialist women's frontline services if this proposal goes through.

This happened in NSW Australia a few years ago when the refuge services were put out to tender as general homelessness service - resulted in decimation of specialist refugees and staff- big religious charities won most of business - the justification being that the state government only wanted a small number of big providers to deal with.

Most feminist refuge employees wouldn't work for religious charities so were left jobless. All that expertise and space lost overnight - of course it's been an absolute disaster for women - refuge run by men, women being charged, housed with General homeless etc all overseen by a handmaiden. The MRAs in power know how to fuck women over by administrative abuse led by one of their women (the same one who only last week voted against safe zones outside abortion clinics because free speech should prevail over women's safety. She also thinks basically women made their bed and should lie in it)

The religious charities had no expertise in running refuges and are still not preferred by victims who had/have no choice. Of course the religious charities have vested interests other than women's safety.

5 years on and quietly some of the specialism is creeping back in but so much ground was lost to never be regained- even the oldest
refuge closed it's doors.

So depressing and short sighted.