Over the Last Fifteen Years Or So I Have Worked Alongside the Specialist Violence Against

This paper is based on a presentation to a seminar, hosted by University of Sunderland - Navigating Commissioners’ Criteria for Public Funding: opportunities for partnership not competition in March 2017. The seminar was the last in a long series which has provided a neutral space for providers, commissioners, students, activists and academics to learn from each other, share ideas and best practice and network. Spaces like this are really important and there are fewer of them than there were. This is something I will come back to.

Over the last fifteen years or so I have worked alongside the specialist violence against women and girls sector, most often as a funder, but also more recently for the North East End Violence against Women and Girls Network. What follows is a personal view, informed by my observations of a sector that I value greatly. I’m going focus on three main areas in this article.

• I’m going to explain why I think that the specialist violence against women and girl’s sector is facing an unprecedented crisis.
• I’m going to say why I think we should be bothered about that.
• And, whilst I’m not going to present any solutions, I’m going to suggest some questions that we might need to ask ourselves before it’s too late.

I’m focusing onthe specialist Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) voluntary sector organisations – they don’t have to be small, but they generally are, and the key word is specialist.Because it’s the specialist organisations that don’t just provide services but get involved in public policy, campaign for change, raise concerns and keep pushing the agenda forward.

I’m talking general trends and big picture stuff here – we will all be able to think of examples of:local statutory partnerships that protect the funding to specialist services;or small specialists that win contracts; or big non-specialists that engage in institutional advocacy.There will always be examples that buck the trend – but I’m going to suggest that they are the exceptions that prove the rule. And, of course, the specialist VAWG sector is not the only part of the voluntary sector that is under pressure – but we know that it has been hit particularly hard.

My contention is that we are at a critical point in the history of the specialist VAWG sector. Before we talk about why, I think it’s worth thinking briefly about that history. Many VAWG orgs began in the 1970’s, they were set up around kitchen tables, a product of grass-roots feminism, often led by survivors and focusing on advocacy and campaigning, as well as some limited services. At this point a huge amount of time and energy had to go into convincing statutory authorities and wider society that issues such as domestic abuse should be of public concern.

More specialist organisations set up in the 1980’s, using regeneration funding, and we started to see the beginnings of a national network (albeit patchy) of what we now see as essential services for victims and survivors of violence and abuse – women’s aid refuges, rape crisis centres etc. All still operating on a shoestring.

In the 1990’s we start to see VAWG appear on the radar of a handful of statutory agencies – in large part because of the campaigning and institutional advocacy undertaken by the VAWG specialist sector. Funding starts to become available, the sector grows – a little, and increasingly takes on the more formal role of service provider.

In the first decade of this century we really started to see some change, with VAWG becoming a priority for criminal justice agencies and some local authorities. An increasing amount of statutory and voluntary sector funding flows into the sector – which in turnbegins to attract the attention of some bigger, non-specialist providers, notably large housing associations and victim’s charities. Towards the end of this decade competitive tendering starts to be used, just in time to coincide, in the current decade, with austerity and public sector funding cuts. This has proven to be a toxic combination.

And now, because of severe budget pressures and their own over-stretched commissioning capacity, we see local statutory partnerships rolling up all their VAWG-focused funding streams into one big package. When these goout to tender, they areoften awarded to a big non-specialist agency because the smaller specialist VAWG agency didn’t have the capacity to compete. Of course, there are always specific local circumstances that affect local decisions but let’s be very clear - the national trend is overwhelmingly that the small specialists are losing out. And because the funding streams are all getting cut anyway, the commissioned service is (nearly always) a reduction of what was previously provided.

So where does that leave us? I see a specialist VAWG sector under the most enormous pressure, with services closing, and those that aren’t closing losing staff and either working with fewer women, or not offering the range of services that they know is needed.We tend to notice the organisations that close completely – in the North East in the last year alone we have lost Newcastle Women’s Aid and Derwentside Domestic Abuse Service. Wearside Women in Need is currently under threat of total wipe-out, although they’ll not go down without a fight. But we should also be concerned about the services that are struggling on with ever-decreasing amounts of funding. Many of them won’t be able to do this indefinitely – something will have to give and we will see more closures.

In the meantime, need isn’t going down – in fact it’s going up. Just as specialist VAWG services are being cut, and all the statutory services that also support victims and survivors (the police, the social workers, the health visitors, the housing officers) are also being cut, domestic abuse is increasing. Walby’s work on the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that, whilst domestic abuse fell steadily during the last decade, and other violent crime has continued to fall into this decade, domestic abuse has started to rise again since 2010. What a surprise - just as austerity policies started to bite.

And then we add to this the enormous increase in adults and children reporting abuse and exploitation, post Saville, Rotherham, Rochdale etc, putting the most enormous pressure on sexual violence services. Many police forces now say up to a third of their resources are directed to dealing with violence and abuse. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen a comparative increase in resources for the specialist sector who are often key to helping people both negotiate the criminal justice system and recover from their experience in the longer term.

So, we have need going up; mainstream local statutory services being cut to the bone;specialist VAWG services closing and non-specialist agencies winning contracts to provide often a minimum level of service.Public sector funding has been decimated, with no realistic prospect of a change to the current policy of austerity in the near future. And whilst levels of charitable funding have remained more or less constant so far, this is tiny compared to the amount of public funding which have been lost, and cannot even begin to fill the gaps.My worry is that we will look back at this decade as the one where we lost our national network of specialist VAWG organisations and, once they are gone, it will be much harder to replace them.

But why should we care specifically about the specialist VAWG sector in all this? Maybe it’s had its day? Shouldn’t every agency be dealing with violence and abuse these days? Isn’t it a more efficient use of scarce resources to commission the big non-specialists and let them get on with it? Well I’ve got at least ten reasons why we should care about losing our specialist VAWG sector – you may have some more.

1. The specialist sector provides good quality, person-centred provision that responds to the complex needs of victims and survivors of violence and abuse. Whilst some non-specialist providers do a good job, we hear too many stories, for example, of non-specialist refuges where:

• you can’t be referred after 2pm,
• or they won’t take women with no recourse to public funds,
• or you have to make an appointment two days in advance to see your key worker,
• or there are no workers available at night or over weekends,
• or you can only stay for a maximum of 13 weeks.

This is not what is meant by refuge provision in the specialist sector.

1. Much of the innovation in this field began in the specialist voluntary sector:

• MARACs were developed by Standing Together – a small charity in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham – building on practice from Duluth;
• IDVA’s were developed by the Cardiff Women’s Safety Unit.
• More recently ground-breaking work by Middlesbrough’s My Sister’s Place is influencing practice around the country on work with women who are repeatedly referred to MARAC.

1. There is value in consistency of provision and the worth of trusted providers to service users should not be under-estimated. The constant change of providers decimates trust within communities – specialist services may receive up to 50% of referrals through word of mouth, family and friends – “they helped me so why not give it a try” – that trust is so important when dealing with people in a vulnerable state and can’t be replaced by hubs and referral pathways.

1. The specialist sector has always led the way in identifying unmet need and gaps in provision, whether that’s the need for rape crisis services in an area with no provision, or for a better response to LGB and/or T victims of domestic abuse. The impetus to recognise and address issues such as forced marriage,honour-based violence and FGM has always come from specialist Black and Minority Ethnic VAWG organisations– those same BME organisations that have been disproportionately hardest hit by the current cuts.

1. Women with lived experience are involved in every aspect of a specialist sector organisation from volunteering, to contributing to consultations, to sitting on management committees, to doing the work. And organisations see amplifying their voices as a critical part of what they are there to do – even if they don’t get paid to do it – it’s in their DNA.

1. Reaching the women who face additional barriers in getting help, for example women from BME communities, or those who have no recourse to public funds. Whether its WWIN’s specialist refuge for BME women or the Angelou Centre’s new refuge for the same group – it has always been the specialist sector that has responded to the needs to the most vulnerable and excluded women.And whilst only a minority of women who have been raped report to the police, many of them find their way to rape crisis and other specialist services – how else will we hear their voices without those essential services?

1. There is rarely any dedicated funding for prevention workand yet it is the specialist VAWG organisations who still find time to work in their local schools and communities, developing education programmes and contributing to local awareness-raising campaigns.

1. And don’t forget the sectors ability to bring in other resources, whether its national funding, or business sponsorship or the value that volunteers contribute – if you are a local authority commissioner there can beenormous added value in that capacity.

1. But I think even more important than all the rest is the campaigning work, the institutional advocacy – both at a local and a national level – that is most vital.

• Who sits of the criminal justice scrutiny panels to help those agencies do a better job?
• Who comes to local partnership meetings and raises issues about changes to local practice and provision?
• Who submits evidence to national campaigns – like the recent campaign to improve the experience of victims in the family courts?

Nine times out of ten it’s the specialist services – even though they don’t get paid for it and they’ve hardly any capacity, and their chief executive spends all weekend writing funding applications – they do it anyway because they know it’s important if you want to change things and keep moving forward.

1. And last but by no means least, although some specialist services also work with men, they remind us that this is still a gendered issue. When some bright spark in local or national government cherry picks some data and decides that men and women are equally violent and abusive, it’s the specialist sector that helps us to holdthem to account. Who reminds us that, whilst men and boys can also be victims, the nature and prevalence of violence and abuse against women and girls means this is an issue that can only be effectively tackled when we understand it through a gender lens.

So there are a few reasons why we should care that we are losing our specialist VAWG services, but what can we do about it? With no magic wand and no prospect of any major change in current financial climate I’m afraid all I have are a few questions for specific sectors, and a plea to all.

First the plea – I hear funders, commissioners and others complaining that the VAWG sector isn’t very good at working in partnership. I fundamentally disagree. In my experience they have always been very good at it – probably far better than most statutory agencies – try getting a couple of local councils to collaborate, or two government departments, and see how easy that is. However, the specialist sector is being asked to both collaborate and compete at the same time, with and against the same agencies. We are always being told the sector needs to be more business-like – but just imagine asking M&S and Next to collaborate. So why do we expect this contortion act from the specialist VAWG sector?Now for the questions.

For local commissioners – think about the landscape that you want.Do you really want to be left with a few, big providers whomight employ good people but whose main organisational concernis where the next contract is coming from? Or do you want local partners who are as committed as you are to driving change in your area?If you do want to keep them then resist the drive towards ever-bigger contracts. There are mechanisms that can support you to do that and lots of advice available - you have a choice.The gender equality duty does not mean you have to commission gender neutral services. And you can still, on occasion, make good old-fashioned grants – contrary to popular belief they haven’t been banned.

For funders – if you really want VAWG organisations to work in partnership or to form consortia, then: resource it properly; be realistic about the true costs (it will cost more, not less than supporting the individual agencies) and don’t see it as a mechanism to reduce demand on your grant programmes - because it won’t. Recognise that consortia and partnership working won’t solve everything – it’s not a magic wand. And maybe think about what it is that you really value about the specialist VAWG organisations that you support – is it the service provision or is it the policy, development or campaigning work they do? Do your funding programmes support that work?

For the large, non-specialist organisations, please think carefully before you compete with established specialist providers. Will you really be able to bring all that they currently offer? Just because you can compete, doesn’t necessarily mean you always should. And if you already provide specialist VAWG services, do your staff contribute to local and national institutional advocacy initiatives? Do they provide evidence to local and national consultations about your service users’ experiences? As an organisation do you play your part, not just providing services, but contributing to wider public debates on VAWG issues?

For the VAWG specialist sector, what are your priorities?What is critical about what you bring to the equation that no-one else does? If it’s to provide a voice for survivors and to ensure more and better services, is the best way to do that to continue being a provider? If the answer to that question for your organisation is “yes” then I apologise for teaching granny to suck eggs and suggest that you continue to do all the things you have been doing over the last seven years i.e.

• Taking a long hard look at your costs and working out how you are going to be competitive in the future. You might need to get bigger – size is an issue. You might need to merge or go into partnership with another organisation(s). You could look for a social enterprise activity that you can use to generate some of your own funds. That’s not possible for every VAWG specialist but some have managed it (notably Preston Road Women’s Centre)
• Consider ways you could change your practice – see more people over a shorter period, make more use of group work, make more use of volunteers – and still keep the quality of what you do. If that feels like a line you don’t want to cross, remember there will be another organisation that will come along sooner or later who will cross that line – and they will probably win the contract.

And, whilst many commissioners will recognise the value of women-only services, they also have responsibility for commissioning services for the (much smaller) group of male victims. If you can’t find a way of meeting all the need around violence or abuse in your area, either through a formal partnership with a different agency or developing a satellite service, at some point another organisation is going to come along and say that they can.