Hanging by a thread
Part IX 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, and abuse. Overall, we have tried to avoid graphic and disturbing details.
“Being able to hear the difficulty that other survivors had in disclosing meant that I was able to forgive myself for not telling anybody, because it’s not normal to tell. I was able to stop beating myself up. It saved my life, meeting other survivors.”
In a 2015 report by The Guardian about charities that were closing down, that’s how 64-year-old Lynne from Hampshire described the value of the third sector. The difference between life and death — that’s what support can mean for survivors.
Unlike some other countries Chayn works in, the UK has a large sector fighting violence against women, often called the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sector. A lot of incredibly valuable work has been done by these charities and their staff. They’ve shown amazing resilience and innovation in adapting to changing circumstances during the Covid-19 pandemic. With many survivors trapped in their homes with abusers, it became all the more important to move in-person services onto the phone or online.
A report about the Shadow Pandemic, which Chayn produced with 10 other organisations within the sector, found that in one organisation staff working hours increased on average by four hours per-day, with managers working 50% extra hours at the start of the pandemic. That’s the kind of commitment people bring to this sector, but unfortunately, it also leads to burn out for many.
There’s no question that the help offered by charities is crucial for survivors. Written resources allow individuals to identify and cope with what happened. At a time when they may not be able to confide in anyone else in the world, survivors call on 24/7 helplines or log into live chats run by support workers. Here, they have a non-judgemental space to process their difficult emotions and consider their options.
There are also long-term mental health services including individual support, group therapy, and workshops. Such therapy can even help people overcome their PTSD. Through different techniques like yoga, meditation, or art therapy, charities help survivors ground themselves, and heal. And through discussions on topics like body dysmorphia, intimacy, and more, they help them form new relationships with their bodies. There’s practical support too, in the form of financial aid, food, refuges, and shelters. Support which saves lives on a daily basis. Many organisations also provide pre-trial support services for survivors considering legal proceedings.
Specific organisations also provide support for young people, children, men, Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic women, and LGBTQIA+ survivors. Many charities do significant policy work and campaigning to address systemic issues within the public sector and demand change. Some collaborate with public authorities, like the NHS, to reach even more people. While some sexual violence and domestic abuse charities have tried to make all their services inclusive, others still have a long way to go.
IDVAs and ISVAs: An essential need
Many survivors access critical support through Independent Domestic Violence Advisors (IDVA) and Independent Sexual Violence Advisors (ISVA) who are trained to provide one-on-one support to survivors. They’re also called advocates in other countries, and they are often employed by charities.
IDVAs and ISVAs can help a survivor in navigating different services and offer emotional support and guidance. They can be a lifeline, especially for migrants or asylum seekers, with limited support circles in the UK. With their vital help, people can make informed decisions about legal procedures: they can accompany the survivor to file a police report, and all information about the survivors’ complaints can be sent through these advisors if the survivor requests it. They work tirelessly to prioritise the safety and needs of survivors.
In many of the countries Chayn works in, there isn’t enough funding for civil society to access such support, leaving survivors more vulnerable and exposed to legal complications. And even when a survivor doesn’t want legal justice or doesn’t get it, there is healing that occurs when survivors feel seen and heard. Through such support, they could come to the very important realisation that the sexual abuse was not their fault.
Unwelcome
From racism to transphobia to ableism, there are still several gaps and issues in the sector. And many struggle to access the help they need as a result. Some do not feel welcome in the spaces intended to protect them. Here are just a few headlines from recent years:
Leading UK domestic violence charity hit with racism allegations from staff
Domestic abuse charity loses £5M in funding because it is not gender-neutral
When the magazine Third Sector released its report on diversity in charities in 2020, they said not much had changed in the last three years. At that time, Kirsty McNeil, an executive director at Save the Children, described this as a “moral licensing” problem.
“People feel that they do a good thing for a living, so if they do it in a bad way, it gets cancelled out,” she’d said. “That’s a problem for the whole charity sector — but my word, it is more acute if your literal job is saving people’s lives.”
Charities for survivors very much function in the area of saving lives, but there’s something fundamentally wrong with how discrimination is tackled within the sector. Survivors are frequently treated differently based on the same tickbox identity politics that make up a “perfect victim.” According to their race, immigration status, religion, gender identity, disability or other factors, they struggle to access the support they need. Concerns of racism, transphobia, and ableism, both within the workforce and in the services provided by them, have repeatedly been raised.
A million miles away
So how does the sector deal with racism? Several VAWG organisations in the UK signed a charter of Anti-Racism in 2021. They formed an Anti-Racism working group and workshops were held. But beyond that, what has been the impact? How much real change are we seeing?
As a woman of colour in the sector, in Sangeetha Navaratnam-Blair’s experience, the question of inclusivity for survivors of colour, migrants, disabled or trans survivors, is often the last step of any initiative. They are not counted to begin with. Even when there is acknowledgement of the limitations of a service, changes aren’t made to fix things.
“What we need to see more is, understand that it’s not just an add on. It’s not just the thing you can say at the end of the day of training, or even a one session, where you say, ‘Oh, these are some of the differences’,” she said. “Well, how do we therefore support this? Or how do we actually make a difference for those women?”
Despite her own experiences in the sector being mostly positive, with bosses who were also women of colour, Navaratnam-Blair said there is still much going wrong. Of course, there are good and bad people in the sector and there is always room for any service to grow and learn. But considering that the crux of the sector is to support those who haven’t found acceptance in larger society, it becomes all the more important that charity leaders work in “the right way.” Yet, they are ignoring people’s identities, experiences, and backgrounds, which is “just another layer above the level of sad and frustration,” she said. “It shouldn’t be a million miles away.”
“It’s not about resources or funding, not about how many people work at the centre, and therefore how often a line is covered or whatever,” said Navaratnam-Blair. “It’s something that’s just about our own work, that we could do better.” The issue isn’t always that nobody has noticed this need, but instead that no one prioritises it or bothers addressing it.
Being anti-racist has only recently, after the wave of Black Lives Matter protests and their news coverage, become part of the agenda of mainstream organisations. Though smaller organisations have been organising against racism for decades, and “have pushed against so much and have had to put up with so much,” said Navaratnam-Blair. It’s “deeply upsetting” that even now, it seems that larger organisations are “not really listening properly” to those with more experience in the field.
Turned away
In 2020, The Guardian revealed that women’s refuges in the UK turned away migrant women, even when they did have capacity, because these survivors couldn’t speak in English. One of them, a mother carrying a baby, was turned away by every refuge she sought out. The police had to put her up in a hotel, until eventually the ‘right’ refuge was found.
Certain migrant survivors, depending on their visas, will have no recourse to public funds, which excludes them from critical public and most third sector services including state benefits. The Southall Black Sisters, an organisation supporting migrant and racialised survivors, says that “without access to housing benefit and basic welfare benefits, in practice it is difficult for women to access refuge accommodation.”
They can still receive legal aid if they are destitute, as well as accommodation in refuges for survivors — but it’s incredibly hard. So, migrant survivors are left with very few options, and are often at the mercy of friends and relatives who may well be connected to their perpetrator, or local councils and charities who may not have the resources or knowledge to help them.
The 2020 report Locked in Abuse, Locked out of Safety by the charity Safety4Sisters documents the stories of migrant women who have experienced gender-based violence, have no recourse to public funds, and are then denied services.
“In one case, a support worker in a domestic abuse service reported to us that they are unable to take on outreach support for a woman with NRPF [no recourse to public funds] as their funders ‘do not allow it’” the report states. “This is incredibly alarming — that the wholesale dismissal of the safety of many migrant women is potentially written into commissioner-service provider contracts.”
Adding fuel to fire
Recently, there’s been a rise in news reports about how trans survivors are treated within the sector. Trans people are twice as likely as cisgender people to be a victim of crime, according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS). In 2020, 28% of trans people experienced crime compared to 14% of cis people. Some 2,799 hate crimes against trans people were recorded by the Home Office in the year ending March 2021, an increase of 3% from the previous year. However, when trans survivors of sexual violence try to access support within the third sector, they often face systemic discrimination.
A 2021 investigation by gal-dem politics editor, Moya Lothian-McLean, found that trans-specific policies are not drawn up, those managing helplines are told to “hang up if the survivor sounds like a man,” and excuses are made about not having enough training to support trans-people. This pushes trans people away from services and stigmatises them as survivors — making it more difficult for them to get help.
Myths about trans people and trans bodies abound in the sector and fuel the cycle of discrimination. Ruairi White, Project Manager at the National Survivor User Network and formerly a coordinator of the LGBTQIA+ helpline Switchboard, and Kitty Gardner, a Training Officer at the sexual violence charity Survivors’ Network, came together during the pandemic to set up a support group for trans, non-binary, and intersex survivors.
In their opinion, the biggest myth in the sector is that trans people perpetrate sexual violence, rather than being victims themselves. The idea persists that trans people seeking support from providing services “are actually more likely to be dangerous,” said White, when instead they are “looking for support like any other person.”
According to Gardner, the focus should be on the sexual violence the trans community disproportionately faces, and the ways in which their vulnerability limits their access to support. The idea that trans women pose a danger to cis women is “absolutely ludicrous,” she said. There’s a further myth: that trans women are taking up a lot of space in support services and cis women are being left behind. “We know that that’s not the case at all,” said Gardner.
As White and Gardner pointed out, trans women are perceived as aggressors or suspects, when they are more often survivors of sexual violence themselves, simply because they don’t fit the ‘ideal victim’ stereotype. For trans survivors who are also sex workers, they can face additional challenges in accessing support.
Another overlooked aspect of the sector is how non-binary survivors are treated. Such experiences are described in a report released by White and Gardner after their year-long group came to a close:
“I think also services need to understand that non-binary isn’t some ‘women-adjacent’ gender category, and when services claim to offer support to e.g. “women and non-binary people”, they need to understand that non-binary might include people who are very masculine, who were assigned male at birth, or who don’t align themselves with womanhood or with femininity.”
“I decided to join the group because I’m a non-binary survivor of sexual abuse. While I could have attended [rape crisis centre] groups for women (because I’m still perceived as female), I didn’t want to keep pushing myself into a painful closet just to receive support. If I can’t be authentic in my identity, then I can’t fully heal, because all of these intersect and I can’t pretend that they don’t.”
A lack of understanding pushes many non-binary survivors away from mainstream services, and often even LGBTQIA+ specific services can still be gendered. Though LGBTQIA+ people experienced more domestic abuse in the pandemic, only 20% of them actually sought support from mainstream services — which makes specialist services like White and Gardner’s all the more important. You can read the trans-inclusion statement of Survivors’ Network here.
Together, they created a rare space where survivors were treated as “experts in themselves and their understanding of their experiences.” White sees this as a way of handing back power to those who have had it snatched from them. Traditional services identify people based on particular characteristics and then refer them forward.
But for survivor leadership, self-identification and trans-identity and experiences, it’s important to keep in mind how those are “intimately tied to those feminist questions of empowerment,” said White. “When you go into a service, and you say, ‘I’m a non binary, trans, masculine person, that’s who I am, and I want to be treated in that way,’ you’re essentially exerting a control over your situation.”
We take a survivor-centred approach at Chayn. Though we’re not a trans-specific service and have designed our offerings around women (which includes trans women), we are open to people of all genders. We’ve come under fire for saying trans women are women and welcoming them into our services. In 2018, Chayn received hundreds of tweets of criticism and abuse from accounts that were upset at our inclusion policy. The transphobia has become even more prominent in recent years, contributing to an already toxic atmosphere for trans people.
Access denied
Another marginalised group who struggle to access equitable support is disabled survivors, whose specific accessibility needs may not be catered to by mainstream services. They also face issues of coercion and control that make it difficult to seek support. This is not dissimilar to larger society’s treatment of disabled survivors, as we saw when we spoke to Jasmin Thien, earlier in this series.
A 2017 report by the domestic violence charity SafeLives found that disabled women are twice as likely to experience domestic violence compared to non-disabled women. When it comes to disclosing this violence, the London-based organisation Stay Safe East, run by and for Deaf and disabled survivors, highlights in their 2021 response to the Home Office’s VAWG strategy that many survivors may not recognise the abuse they experience. The perpetrator may be someone they live with, like a carer — who has the power to make decisions such as withdrawing or withholding medication, or cutting off the survivor from their support network. Deaf survivors face additional barriers as there is a lack of consistent interpreters. Stay Safe East is pushing for British Sign Language (BSL) to be recognised as an official language in England and Wales, which would open more doors for support.
Stay Safe East received feedback from IDVAs they had trained, as well as from their own Independent Disability and Domestic Violence Advocates, which suggested that “social care professionals do not know how to approach domestic abuse against Deaf and disabled women.” They also said disabled women were rarely offered the support of an advocate. When they were referred to Adult Safeguarding, a system meant to protect vulnerable adults, they were often denied access to advice, re-housing, and organisations that understand their culture, faith, and sexuality and support their identity as disabled women.
Here’s a statement by Stay Safe East:
“Disabled survivors are not generally recognised as multifaceted beings, with cultural identities, ethnicities, sexualities etc. Instead, we are seen simply as ‘the disabled’, one-dimensional. Seeing disabled people as gender-neutral is especially problematic when trying to discuss violence against Deaf and disabled women and girls, where a reluctance to take a gendered approach risks obscuring the intrinsic link between disability and gender.“
The failure to take an intersectional approach means many services also do not account for the circumstances of disabled survivors. Stay Safe East highlights a number of these, including that they are less likely to be living independently as adults, and more likely to be living in care settings. Specifically disabled women are more likely to be living in poverty than non-disabled women and disabled men, and are expected to conform to more traditional gender roles than non-disabled women.
Having considered the issues of racism, transphobia, and ableism, one must acknowledge that charities specifically for LGBTQIA+ or Black and minority ethnic or disabled survivors do exist. But these small specialised operations can’t be held responsible for extending support to all survivors of marginalised identities either, who should be welcome to access mainstream services.
Waiting on the waiting lists
When we think about mainstream services, a support system that immediately comes to mind is Rape Crisis centres, the first umbrella organisation to provide sexual violence services in the UK. Operating independently of the government, these centres have a long history, dating back to the Rape Crisis movement in the 1970s, which focused on establishing crisis centres as well as changing legislation. Though the movement began in the US, it eventually made its way to the UK.
On Rape Crisis’s 40th anniversary, journalist and novelist Kira Cochrane wrote about the centres in The Guardian. It all began with awareness raising groups focusing on the experiences of rape victims in the UK. Each centre has its own unique history. The one in South Essex was formed when a group of women first met in a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament group. After facing harassment on a group outing, they formed a Rape Crisis centre in 1984, by which time there was already one in London.
Soon, the calls started pouring in and they realised survivors wanted to meet them in-person.
“They counselled these women on the stairs, in the garden, in their cars,” Cochrane writes.
Today, survivors face numerous challenges when they approach Rape Crisis. In a video shared in 2019, the survivor Fern shared how she was raped by a man when she was travelling. When she reached out to Rape Crisis, however, she was told their waiting list was closed.
“It was all starting to feel like I wasn’t able to cope anymore,” she said.
Luckily, Fern’s employer was able to help her access private therapy support. But she recognised that she wasn’t the only one to be turned away.
Survivors experience this on a daily basis, and much more. Fern started a petition, called No Survivor Turned Away, demanding that the government provide stable funding for Rape Crisis, so that no one else faces what she went through. At the time, there were 44 Rape Crisis centres. Now, 3 years later, there are only 40 centres across England and Wales.
It’s simply not enough.
In 2020, Rape Crisis reported that there are more than 6000 survivors on its waiting list. By 2021, that number jumped to 10,000. These people are being deprived of essential support to deal with their trauma.
Jessica, one of the survivors you read about earlier in this series, faced a two-month wait at the first charity she approached for help. When she did connect with them, she realised it wasn’t the service she needed.
“They offered the option to talk confidentially to someone who had some training,” she told us. “But it wasn’t really therapy, it was just if you had a hard time talking about your experience.”
At another charity, she faced yet another wait of two months, before she got access to counselling. The therapist offered her an appointment for the next week, if she agreed to be a subject for a dissertation, which significantly speeded up the process. After 10 sessions of exposure therapy, which were very painful, Jessica noticed the difference.
“I just immediately stopped having nightmares and panic attacks. So I’m now really evangelical about therapy.”
However, she recognises that it’s not always possible for people to access therapy due to the high costs, no matter how much they might want it.
Georgia, another survivor we’ve heard from earlier in this series, had a similar experience, though her wait was even longer at one and a half years. The trauma counselling she finally got through Rape Crisis Scotland, was via phone due to COVID-19.
Though Rape Crisis is clearly in crisis, that doesn’t diminish its necessity. And we see this in the testimony of survivors like Georgia. In gratitude and in recognition of the lack of funding, she began a club night in Edinburgh for queer, femme, and non-binary individuals, called Femmergy, which fundraises for Rape Crisis Scotland.
And she gets emotional while talking about her trauma counsellor, who turned her situation around. “This person that I spoke to for like an hour on the phone every week, could change my entire perspective of myself, rebuilt up my self worth, made me realise that I am so much more than what happened to me.”
“I had this realisation brought to the front of my mind of: ‘I’m not my assault. It’s not me. It’s not anything to do with me or any of the other victims who survived. It’s nothing to do with any of us. It’s not our fault. And it’s not our defining feature.’”
In Part X, we’ll explore how survivors cultivate joy and hope in their lives. 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.
