Refuge uncovers evidence of endemic financial abuse

Last year, we conducted a survey of our service users in which 89% of respondents told us that economic abuse was a common part of their experience of domestic violence. Financial abuse includes controlling techniques like taking all of a woman’s money, strictly limiting what she is allowed to spend, putting debt in her name and refusing her access to benefit entitlements. 41% of respondents identified this economic abuse as having a negative impact on their emotional health.

We are now calling on Government to recognise and address economic abuse within its work on equality, financial exclusion, child poverty and domestic violence, and to ensure that welfare benefits are fast-tracked for women who have experienced domestic violence. As part of this work, Refuge met with Harriet Harman QC MP, Minister for Women, in January to discuss policy developments in the domestic violence sector and to share with her our work on economic abuse.

As announced in our last newsletter, we have launched a financial guide containing practical
advice for women on how to prepare financially to leave an abusive partner, how to access safe
accommodation and how to take control of their finances in the long term. In doing so, it aims to
increase women’s awareness of the financial support available to them so that they can live their lives free from violence. ‘You can afford to leave’, funded by HBOS Foundation, is availableavailable from our website: www.refuge.org.uk.

Lights are on, but nobody's in at the Home Office

This is a desperate plea for someone to switch off the electricity at the Home Office. Why? Because it will stop the light bulb on top of Jacqui Smith's head from going off every time one of her nincompoop, Baldrick-esque, what I can only imagine to be graduate scheme policy makers comes up with a cunning plan.

The latest plan; make a database of men who have been violent towards women.

The idea has been ridiculed by Refuge, the leading charity which pretty much offers what it says on the tin to women and children victims of domestic violence. Their chief exec, Sandra Horley branded it as a "gimmick" and a "useless initiative". She also accused the government of hypocrisy by trying to talk tough when it was actually doing very little.

Now call me bi-polar on this one but I think that Horley's response was both funny and deadly serious. Funny because I can only imagine the pent up rage Smith must be feeling by having her big International Woman's Day initiative dismissed so strongly. Her parade was washed away to sea in fact it was rained on so heavily and that makes me laugh. It makes me laugh because I am past rage myself on how this government comes up with hollow and poorly thought through ideas which never materialise or never solve the problems they set out to. In fact they seem to create not only fresh but worse problems that those that already existed; FSA, Human Rights Act, Access to Information are good examples.

This database would always be incomplete because the vast majority of violent men are never reported. The list would extinguish the rights of men who have spent convictions and would presumably exclude violent women (so much for sexual equality). There would be issues about who would have access to the information contained on the list and in what capacity it could be accessed; girlfriend, neighbour, employer, bank etc.

What really makes me wonder about the intelligence and perhaps sanity of those coming up with ideas in the home office is that they have a handful of charities who are working in this area already yet they haven't forged proper working partnerships to try ideas from people who are actually on the ground working in that specific area. Why? I can only assume that the ego involved here is so big as to think that someone who hasn't been elected to a position of power couldn't possibly have anything valid to contribute the the running of the country. That bloody well makes me mad!!!