And still we rise
Part X of Less than 2%: From Ep 3 — Beyond Trauma
These articles are based on the original podcast Less Than 2%, hosted by Jeevan Ravindran, Emma Guy, and Hera Hussain. Research, writing, and additional reporting by Aiman Javed. Edited by Sophie Brown.
You can listen to our podcast here. Read the rest of our series here.
Content warning: This article contains discussions of sexual assault, murder, transphobia, and abuse. Overall, we have tried to avoid graphic and disturbing details.
In the series so far, we’ve covered some massive problems with the existing systems of support for survivors. When the picture seems so bleak, where does one find hope? Where do survivors often find support? And how do they build communities and move towards healing?
Our journey began with the police. We saw how survivor testimony is dismissed, and how the process is re-traumatising. We considered rape culture on university campuses, where private investigators are hired for cases of sexual misconduct.
We then went with survivors to the courts and saw how trauma is not well-understood and how your identity can put you at a disadvantage. We dove into what it means to be a perfect victim. And then we walked alongside survivors who somehow end up in prison systems, which, predictably so, are not designed to help them.
It’s all a little bleak, and it can feel a little hopeless. Even in the charity sector, despite its life-changing work and committed and talented people, due to issues of systemic racism, transphobia, and more, often those with marginalised identities are left behind. And as we’ve seen with waiting lists, sometimes the sector doesn’t have sufficient resources to meet the demand for services. Despite this, many in the charity space go above and beyond and are committed to supporting all survivors, every step of the way.
Most importantly, despite of every barrier they face, survivors build their own communities, cultivate joy in their own lives, and go above and beyond to help each other out. It brings to mind Maya Angelou’s poem, Still I Rise.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Jumping through the hoops
Survivors who Hera Hussain, the Founder of Chayn, has helped over the years have frequently relied on legal aid, especially for asylum and criminal cases. Without this support, many would have been sent back to countries where their lives were in danger or never been able to pursue legal action against their abusers.
One of the friends she helped in 2012, who became the inspiration for Chayn, couldn’t have arranged money for her legal case had it not been for legal aid. “I still remember the look of utter disbelief and joy on her face when the lawyers told her they received the OK from legal aid,” Hera said.
A survivor could very well be reliant on legal aid to pursue a case against their abuser. It can also be necessary for other areas of survival, such as housing. But the way legal aid works can make it confusing and hard to access for many.
For example, survivors can only qualify for legal aid if they can show that they don’t have the means to pay on their own, which is proven by something called the legal aid means test. However, survivors can’t always show that.
Here’s a story anonymously told by a survivor, Claire, to the organisation Surviving Economic Abuse:
Claire lives with her two children in the home she jointly owns with her ex-partner. He was physically, emotionally, and psychologically abusive, and controlled all of Claire’s money. When Claire worked, the abuser took all the money she earned, forcing her to give it to him. He would give her just £5 per week to buy food, would check the receipts and examine the food. The control was so severe that the abuser would count how many slices of bread Claire and the children had eaten. Needing protection and somewhere safe to live with her children, Claire went to court and obtained a non-molestation order and an occupation order to remove the abuser from the home. Claire receives Universal Credit; however, she was not entitled to legal aid because she owns some of the equity in the home.
Although it might seem obvious that survivors should get legal aid, they often don’t qualify simply because they can’t prove that through the “right” paperwork. Sometimes aid still will be unavailable, even to those who do manage to jump through these hoops.
Some barristers simply refuse to work on legal aid. Over the past decade, the number of providers of legal aid in the UK has dropped from 4,257 to just 2,900. Most lawyers on legal aid are paid poorly, due to government cuts, which means it’s just not worth their while. For example, those working on judicial review cases were paid only about 20 pounds per hour in 2021. The last time pay was increased was during the 1990s. After years of campaigning, in March 2022, the government approved a 15% raise for almost all criminal legal aid. However, criminal barristers had voted for a 25% increase, so this is still not sufficient. Also, this raise wouldn’t help in civil proceedings, and there have been calls for that since 2021 too. Of course, survivors are not only reliant on criminal legal aid and will also often need civil legal aid. However, the government has pledged to make changes to the legal aid means test so that more people can qualify for it.
Slipping through the cracks
A survivor, due to years of constant gaslighting, questioning, and coercion from their partner, might no longer trust their own instincts or memory. Imagine that they reach out to a service, and the first thing demanded of them are documents they don’t have access to, proof that doesn’t exist, and memories they don’t trust.
That’s if they speak English and are eligible for the service in the first place.
Whether a survivor pursues a legal case or not, they deserve but often lack safe and secure housing. This is often the major reason why survivors remain vulnerable and are unable to leave abusive situations. It’s used to control and manipulate them, and so they become trapped in a cycle of abuse.
Recent figures show that homelessness caused by domestic abuse is increasingly on the rise. The show Maid on Netflix captures this when the protagonist, Alex, leaves her partner, Sean, and ends up living out of her car. But this is unsafe accommodation for her child, and someone hits their parked vehicle. Briefly, she loses child custody.
The social service worker who helps Alex get work as a maid recognises that she’s a victim of domestic violence and guides her to the shelter. Alex is even unwilling to acknowledge that what she has been through is abuse, because her partner hasn’t physically hit her. While at the shelter, Alex meets another woman, Danielle, who is also a victim of abuse.
“Before they bite, they bark. Before they hit you, they hit near you,” Danielle tells Alex, helping her recognise the emotional abuse she has faced.
Safe accommodation provided by different charities is essential. And while bed spaces in refuges in England have increased to 4,277 in recent years, this is still below the recommended number. Plus there can be limitations on access: Some will not accept those with mental health issues or substance abuse issues or even might even specifically turn away transwomen.
We just don’t know how many survivors are out there without a roof over their head.
A survivor spoke about this to The Independent in 2017, after she was persistently turned away from shelters and refuges. “They wanted six months’ worth of bank statements and a birth certificate for me and my children,” she had said. “They wanted proof that my children were mine. At one point I was even asked to provide a letter from my abuser to state that he had abused us and that we should no longer remain with him.”
It’s absurd that anyone would be asked to provide that. While shelters and refuges are trying to meet conditions of their own, it shows that focusing on meeting conditions and requirements instead of paying attention to the needs of survivors will force many to slip through the cracks, even in this sector that is supposed to help them.
Tough choices
When the violence against women’s charity, Eaves, closed down in 2015, it set off alarm bells. Founded in 1977, the organisation could no longer continue due to “high rents” and “abysmal commissioning”. In their final press release, the charity explained the problem:
Large, generic, non-specialist organisations are winning tenders, expanding, accumulating vast reserves and specialist, smaller organisations with 40+ years of history with high levels of self referrals from women (a sure sign of the value of the service to the women) — are shrinking and having to use their scarce reserves to survive.
Many smaller organisations that provide specialised services for people of colour or trans or disabled people, have closed in recent years. In 2020, it was predicted that 9 out of 10 Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) charities would close. That year there were only 18 refuges run by and for Black and racial minority women in the UK. Less than 5% of refuges were reserved for destitute women or those with no recourse to public funds. Everyone deserves culturally-sensitive care.
Ngozi Fulani, the director of Sistah Space, noted in a 2020 interview in The Guardian that the term BAME can be problematic for funding purposes.
“It puts every culture in one group and white middle-class in another,” she said. “The identity, beauty, and history of every culture is being lumped into one which is, in itself, discrimination.”
Due to this, other marginalised groups end up claiming the funding that was actually set aside for ‘Black’ communities.
At Chayn, we understand that funding is a huge challenge because we face it ourselves. We even faced these challenges with this series and our podcast. In the future, we hope to secure funding to produce further podcast episodes which dive deeper into the stories of survivors.
In our Shadow Pandemic report, we found 55% of domestic abuse services were running a service without dedicated funding in 2019–2020. Under financial pressures, smaller organisations, which bear the weight of providing support to survivors of marginalised identities, make tough choices about what they can and cannot provide, such as cutting down on counselling or shelter spaces.
According to the Charities Aid Foundation’s Charity Landscape report of 2022, finances remain the biggest challenge for voluntary sector organisations, and even larger organisations like Rape Crisis don’t have sustainable funding. A power dynamic exists between funders and charities around the world, but an interesting model is being explored in Canada. The Rights Relations Collaborative flips the dynamic and demands that funders apply to a council of indigenous women for the right to fund their work. For this, funders would have to explain how they accumulated their wealth.
The postcode lottery
Despite some amazing specialist services, many charities are under threat. And there are still huge gaps in the sector.
The End Violence Against Women’s Coalition (EVAW) produced an extensive Map of Gaps in 2007 and 2009 to examine this.
Here are some statistics they uncovered in 2009:
- Over a quarter of local authorities across Great Britain had no specialised violence against women support service.
- Due to a lack of equitable division, areas like the East of England and the South East of England were significantly underserved.
- Even where there were services, there wasn’t necessarily a diversity of them (e.g. there were fewer services for those seeking help for Female Genital Mutilation).
This state of services is often called the “postcode lottery” where some people get help simply because of where they happen to live, but many do not.
Our Shadow Pandemic report from 2021 highlights the ongoing need to address structural inequalities present within existing services (for example, pledging to be anti-racist, making services more intersectional, and engaging in long-term training). Along with the limited support for Black, Asian, and Minority ethnic survivors, there are also low levels of support for disabled and LGBTQIA+ survivors, as we’ve already mentioned.
Many services require the physical presence of the survivor as a prerequisite for providing support. Perpetrator interventions, which focus on the abuser, are few and far between. Migrant survivors and those with immigration issues are often excluded from state and non-state services, so charities especially need to be fully equipped to help them, but this reveals a major need for interpretation services and multi-language content.
The Covid-19 pandemic saw a rise in the need for access help due to survivors’ isolation. What if postcodes weren’t a barrier to getting help? And what if you could get help from your device, in your language?
That’s the idea that sparked Chayn. When Chayn was founded, it was to address a particular gap in the present services: The lack of comprehensive online information on options for survivors of marginalised identities. “My friends could not access the support available to others,” said Hera Hussain, the CEO and Founder of Chayn. ”And we wanted to create our services with survivors, so that’s why we began with a volunteer survivor-led model.”
Chayn has produced services like Bloom, with recorded video courses on topics of sexual trauma and healing, alongside a one-to-one chat service. We have guides like Manipulation is Abuse, which helps survivors identify and deal with coercive control, and Getting Better and Moving on, which breaks down complex mental health terms so that people can gain a better understanding of themselves.
“With our work, we try to directly connect people to the information they need, rather than directing them to yet another provider,” said Hera. “But we have a long way to go. And there’s so much more that we want to do.”
Tearing down barriers
Where do we go from here? Do we need to tear down the existing system and start again? Or is there a way to root out the discrimination, funding challenges, and shortfalls we see within the sector? Can we find a system that works for all survivors?
We put this question to Mridul Wadhwa, the CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis. Mridul is a trans woman of colour who has been working in the sector for a number of years, and she’s seen how things have changed, particularly for survivors of marginalised identities. She openly acknowledges that there is work to be done, because those who oppose trans rights have the loudest voices. And so the message of inclusivity needs to be bold and brave.
Due to the historically white and cis nature of the feminist movement, women of colour, trans women, and disabled women are not represented in the workforce of these organisations, which has resulted in these places not being open to these survivors either.
“I suppose the thing about barriers is that they are meant to be torn down,” Mridul said. “I am hoping that the more work we do, the more introspective we become, the more young people or young women in particular, are in within our work and volunteer force, and not just young women, but women who are much more open to change, who have been able to question their privileges in the hierarchy of who has power in our society, and recognise and acknowledge and do things to, to break down those barriers, it’s not very far away that we will see trans women in the workforce.”
Mridul feels that for the first time in history, if the barriers are broken down, the change might end up being more permanent, “if we embed the actions that we took to break down the barriers within our systems, rather than within events or singular personalities who are interested in being inclusive spaces.” A blueprint for this looks like embedding inclusivity in how our organisations actually work, for example making inclusivity central to how even team meetings are designed. This is the task of leaders anyway, said Mridul. “Breaking down and rebuilding systems of inclusion that survive beyond them and anybody else who’s in that organisation.”
The work need not start from scratch, since “what we had is not inherently bad. It is very successful,” she said. “Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of women, or millions, maybe, over the last 40–50 years of the existence of women’s services, whether in Scotland or the rest of the UK, have made a huge difference to women’s lives,” she said. “We have good evidence that what we do on an everyday basis works.”
“I think we need to check our privileges and see where we may have not done really well. And if you’re not the right person to take that work forward because you’re too static a person, then the best thing you can do is make space for someone who knows how to do it,” she said. “And that usually means people with marginalised identities or women who have thought about how it can be transformed better. So, I think maybe we should also learn when you need to give up your space or create more space at the table.”
It is disappointing to hear about the ways in which the sector is failing, but also heartening that the people we’ve interviewed and so many more are recognising these issues and trying to improve these services. Giving marginalised people a seat at the table is integral to further change.
Workers from several gender-based violence organisations launched a union with United Voices of the World in 2019. They not only demanded that their employers address the workplace bullying and harassment they have faced, but also the discrimination within the services they provide.
There are good hard-working people who want to do better, who want to shift priorities, who want to make sure that marginalised survivors are always provided for. But without systemic change, these issues will keep cropping up again and again. We need to hold ourselves accountable and do better, be better.
Holding on to hope
There is still hope. There are alternative ways for us to deal with and move on from trauma, and to keep each other afloat. To fight for each other. To protect each other. To nourish each other. Let’s hold on to that hope. Because survivors can and do live meaningful, full, and happy lives.
The family of Sohaila Abdulali, the writer and public speaker from Mumbai who we spoke with earlier in this series, stood by her as a survivor. After college, she got a job at a Boston Rape Crisis Centre, which her mother would visit every day. In her book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, she writes about her mother:
“We all looked forward to her visits. She would drive up in the afternoon after work, and climb up the blue wooden steps, knitting in one hand, pound cake in the other. She made herself comfortable on the sofa while rape victims called, battered women appeared, the phone rang with one problem after the other, and the demented cat with furious eyes raced up and down the steps. She just sat and knitted. She was there, a benign witness. It’s impossible to express what that meant to everyone there — someone who brought us cake and just sat there, knitting implacably against fear and horror and isolation. She was our witness.”
Support can look just like that. Bearing witness. Standing beside the survivor. Telling them they are not alone. Because one thing we’ve learnt at Chayn is that survivors are resilient. They make us proud everyday with their ability to help themselves. And a lot of them go above and beyond, to help others.
It’s worth remembering that a healing journey is not always linear in nature. There isn’t an end point. Getting better might even mean getting worse. That’s what Rachel Thompson, the journalist and writer we spoke to earlier in this series, experienced when she sought therapy — her anxiety increased at first. Eventually, she saw results.
“I treat myself with compassion now,” Thompson said. “The process helped me sort of establish boundaries and listen to my body and mind.”
There is no quick fix. And that’s okay. We learn to cope with our changed reality. Whether you or the survivor in your life chooses therapy or takes up yoga or makes art, just be there for each other.
“Someone just to hold your hand and listen to your story. That’s all we want. It’s not that hard,” said Abdulali.
Cultivating community and healing
Hope can also come from a sense of community such as in joining groups in-person or online, where we interact with others.
Abdulali wishes it was as easy to discuss rape as “getting mugged.” “I’m not trying to say the level of trauma is the same as a particular violation,” she said. “But I think the main thing people need is to just feel like you’re not out there on a different planet and everything is fraught.” People tend to see survivors as “completely broken” or as if “something’s wrong” with them. But what they actually need, besides medical or legal support, is the acknowledgement that what happened was wrong, she said.
“To not feel like a freak,” as she puts it.
The writer, performer, podcaster, and activist, Kelechi Okafor, also a survivor, says it best on her podcast “Say Your Mind”:
“The true softness that we desire and that we require as human beings having this human experience, as the spiritual beings that we are is community.”
At Chayn, survivors find community and meaning in sharing their stories and volunteering to help out with tasks, all of which revolve around helping others in their own journeys, at their own time, in their own ways. Being there for someone else, when maybe no one is there for us, gives us purpose.
Our volunteers, most of whom are survivors, were a big part of the work that went into this project. “Healing for me is to move forward and try to make new relationships and friendships,” said one of them. “My hope is that I’ll be able to trust again, fully and completely,” they said. Another said healing looks like not being afraid to go out in the dark and growing more comfortable talking about what happened. “I don’t feel like it’s my fault,” they said.
For Georgia, one of the survivors who we interviewed for this project, her tattoos were one of the major ways she healed. “They signify my strength. I have a lot of powerful women tattooed on my body to remind myself of how strong we are.”
We need healing, but we also need rage, and we need accountability from the systems supposed to protect us. Going one step further, we also need personal accountability. Our individual actions and attitudes can go a long way towards influencing those around us. Our friends, our family. For systemic change, we need to challenge rape myths every single day, in every single conversation, in our homes, among our friends, and in our workplaces. The patriarchy is enmeshed with our lives. And while our series focused mostly on the UK, gender-based violence remains a global issue.
So we leave you with one question:
How will you use your power for change?
This brings our series to an end. You can read Part I to X here. If you’d rather access this material in an audio format, you can listen to our podcast here.
The Less than 2% project is based on facts and real events. However, some names have been changed for legal reasons, including privacy. These articles are accompanying pieces to our podcast. Much of the original wording remains, with additional reporting and research included. We’ve given each story more room to breathe, as well as options for our listeners to interact with the material in different ways.
Our research is based on interviews with survivors, Chayn’s experience supporting survivors since 2013, news sources as well as reports from government institutions and other organisations, which have been clearly linked to and cited in our pieces for transparency.
