A refuge provided safety for me and my family, others are not so lucky now

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/07/refuge-sisters-uncut-domestic-violence

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On May Day, hundreds of women from the activist group Sisters Uncut gathered outside London’s City Hall to protest at cuts to domestic violence services for women. They then marched to London Councils’ offices in Southwark Street, where they staged a rooftop occupation, hanging banners that read, “They cut, we bleed”. In the streets below, they brought traffic to a halt, dancing, chanting and letting off colourful flares. With two women a week currently murdered by a partner or ex-partner in the UK and refuges crippled by cuts and free market forces turning women and their children away, the activism Sisters Uncut engages in is crucial.

Women’s Aid warned the coalition that aspects of the 2012 Welfare Reform Act and universal credit would decimate the refuge network but it pushed ahead anyway. Three years on, women fleeing abuse in their own homes find the safety net the state once provided has been pulled from under them. Nearly a third of referrals to UK refuges in 2013-14 were turned away because of lack of space. Domestic abuse can affect all women, cutting across race, class and age, but it is specialist refuges for the most marginalised, at-risk women with complex needs – transgender, black and minority ethnic refugees, asylum seekers – that have suffered the most drastic cuts, with 32 refuges shutting down between 2010 and 2014. This is unacceptable.

A refuge is not a utopia. I know this because I lived in one as a pre-teen, with my mother and younger brother. We were there for more than a year before the council rehoused us. It was cramped and noisy, the air thick with the smell of soiled nappies and screaming babies. I had my first period there. It is strange and deeply unsettling to experience this passage of puberty in a place that is not home – a precarious, temporary, in between place filled with other traumatised strangers.

Refuge is a basic right, a crucial last resort for women who can no longer endure the violence that pervades their homes. It’s the safe haven women and their children flee to when they have been forced by domestic abuse to forfeit the familiar – homes, families, jobs, friends, schools – for the unknown. A refuge means one small room, communal bathroom and kitchen facilities, housework rotas, case workers, legal aid lawyers, an exhausting battle to access benefits and a place on social housing waiting lists. Worse than all this is the ever-present fear that the men these women have fled from will track down these secret safe houses. But all this is worth it because for many, a refuge is the difference between life and death.

I know what it is to rely on the safety of a refuge. It’s this recourse that Sisters Uncut is fighting to protect. Strange synchronicity then that these inspiring activists should make national news headlines the same week the royal princess is born. Over a decade ago, her late grandmother, Princess Diana, paid a surprise, non-publicised visit to our refuge, turning up in an unmarked car to gatecrash the women’s weekly group therapy session. My mum had rolled into the therapy room after breakfast unaware – branflakes in her teeth, greasy hair, braless and wearing a dressing gown two sizes too small, boobs and belly spilling out while Diana sat there in a navy blue blazer and tastefully understated jewellery, listening to the women’s stories.

To some of the women, Diana’s visit was proof that wealth and privilege were no divide. She was one of us. To others, the visit was self-serving. She was leaving the refuge on her own terms, in a bulletproof car, armed security in tow – going back to her castle while we hunkered down in temporary accommodation.

These days, things are worse for at-risk women. If my mum turned up on the doorstep of our refuge now, us children in tow and all our worldly goods packed into a handful of laundry bags and bin liners, it is possible we’d be turned away, forced to pay for cramped B&B accommodation or sleep under a bridge.

Writing about my time in the refuge is a psychological trigger but seeing the Sisters’ radical protest has filled me with bittersweet courage. They are filling the streets, scaling our buildings. The next government to take power must listen to them.

• This article was amended to correct the location of the Sisters Uncut May Day protest to the London Councils’ office in Southwark Street, rather than Southwark council’s offices