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19 March 2008

Money is not enough

Support services for victims of sexual violence need an urgent injection of political will as well a

By Vivienne Hayes

It has been almost 12 months since the “Crisis in Rape Crisis” came to public attention.

In March 2007, Rape Crisis centres across England and Wales waited anxiously to hear about their applications to the Victims Fund, Whitehall’s sexual violence grant scheme. The one year funding was due to start in April, but wasn’t released until Summer, and even then only 18 of the 38 centres received Victims Fund money. The Compact Advocacy Group took up the issue of late notification and payments and short-term funding. The Government, it argued, had failed to comply with its own Compact standards and was placing centres at risk.

However, apart from Compact non-compliance, the Victims Fund fiasco exposed a far more serious issue – Rape Crisis centres, en masse, were facing financial meltdown.

Research by the Women’s Resource Centre and Rape Crisis (England and Wales) launched this week has revealed the extent of the funding crisis. The study found that, in the last five years, one in five centres in England and Wales has been forced to close its doors. Of the remainder, 69 percent reported that their current level of funding was unsustainable. The constant and ongoing struggle to find adequate resources is impacting heavily on their ability to continue to provide essential services to survivors of sexual violence.

It is conservatively estimated that 80,000 women experience rape every year in the UK and the impact of sexual violence can be long-lasting and profound, affecting survivors’ physical and mental health, relationships, work, families and communities. In this context, Rape Crisis centres play a vital role; providing women and girls with advice, counselling, advocacy and long-term support. Rape Crisis centres cannot meet the extremely high demand for their services – the total number of average days on waiting lists was 1,929 days (5.3 years).

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The combined annual income of centres in England and Wales was just over £3.5 million. In 2004-05 the Government spent twice this amount each week on advertising and public relations. The median annual income for centres was £81,598, only marginally more than the cost, to the state, of one rape.

The Government’s current focus on reducing the unacceptably low rape conviction rate is to be welcomed, as are Sexual Assault Referral Centres (SARCs), which are designed to ensure high quality criminal justice responses to survivors of sexual assault, including forensic examinations and medical care. However, whilst SARCs play an essential role, they can only ever be a part of the solution.

Rape Crisis centres are independent of the government and the criminal justice system and, unlike SARCs, provide long-term support and women-only spaces to survivors with recent and/or historic experiences, including adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The majority of women who accessed Rape Crisis centres last year presented with experiences of sexual violence that happened in the past.

Securing a criminal conviction is not the only outcome that survivors of sexual violence say they want or need. In fact, only 10-15 percent of survivors want to report to the police. What is urgently needed is “parallel justice”, which concentrates on both criminal justice and social justice. There must be a focus on the support needs of survivors of sexual violence, alongside the need to hold perpetrators of such crimes to account, and this is where adequate and sustainable funding to Rape Crisis centres is essential.

In the research, Rape Crisis centres gave examples of statutory agencies refusing to fund them because they were women-only, or pressuring them to deliver services to men. The government acknowledges that “sexual violence and childhood sexual abuse are two of the most serious and damaging crimes in our society”, and that sexual violence is “both a cause and consequence of gender inequality”, with most perpetrators of sexual violence being male, and most victims being female. Yet many funders’ cannot understand why women-only services are needed, even though evidence shows that many women will not use mixed-sex services.

In 2006, the Women’s Resource Centre launched the “why women?” campaign to highlight the funding crisis affecting women’s voluntary and community organisations, such as Rape Crisis centres. Experienced, professional and much-needed women’s organisations, with decades of experience, are closing down because of lack of funding. Exacerbating this is the insidious creep of the government’s gender-neutral policies which insist that there was no need for women’s organisations – despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Over the last 12 months, the issue of the Rape Crisis funding crisis has been passed from pillar to post, neither Whitehall nor local government want to take responsibility for funding centres. We cannot wait another year for the Government to get its act together. Unless there is an urgent injection of political will to address the issue – on top of the £1 million in emergency funding provided to Rape Crisis on Tuesday – more centres will be forced to close their essential, and often life saving, services to women and children.

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