Government consultation on domestic abuse refuges

[LazySundayMornings]

The government is consulting on accommodation-based services for victims of domestic abuse and their children and want to hear from a range of people, including victims and survivors. I'm still working my way through the document to see what the implications are but wanted to share it and encourage women - especially those with personal experience of these services - to respond.

www.gov.uk/government/consultations/support-for-victims-of-domestic-abuse-in-safe-accommodation

I've only read the intro and it seems quite technical and dry. If they want input from service users they need to make it more engaging to ordinary women who don't care about organisational structure but do care about timely access to somewhere safe that provides space for recovery.

The government want to impose a statutory duty on local authorities to provide accommodation-based domestic abuse services to all victims. That sounds good in theory but I wonder what it will mean in practice for the amount and type of services available. That will mostly come down to funding I imagine but it could also mean fundamental change for women's organisations. I'll be interested to see what they make of this.

This bit looks promising, it's from Annex B: Priorities for Domestic Abuse Services:

• Do you understand the law under the Equality Act for single sex provisions (18), how best to offer support to individual transgender victims who may seek support, and are you aware of services that you might refer a transgender victim onto if a service did not feel able to offer provision?

18 Some service providers offer trans inclusive services, while others ensure that if they are not able to do so, trans people are offered alternative provisions. Under the Equality Act 2010, single or separate sex service providers are permitted to provide a different service for trans people or even exclude trans people from single and separate sex provisions where proportionate, for example if they can show that the trans person’s presence would prevent effective delivery of the service to the rest of their customers or clients. These service providers can include domestic violence or rape crisis services.
Please see www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/notes/division/3/16/20/7 (points 739 and 740)

Ooo, that is encouraging. Can a member of the public who's never used such services respond?

Bump.

Sounds promising as it is confirming that excluding transwomen from women's services is acceptable under EA2010 😊 it's just for England tho 😕

Always worth responding- it’s a lot to ask everyone using services at the moment to wade through a massive document like this and have the headspace to do so you could make that point, then give your own views.

Seriously though in what real actual ways are they making it easy for women who use these services to respond?

I struggled through the very wordy & complex survey, only wrote a comment in Q29 about keeping men out of women's refuges - by all means have separate trans refuges, I don't care but don't put men in with women - and the whole thing disappeared.

Suspicious?