Policy blog

How would you respond if someone told you “I’m being abused”?

It’s a question that we should all reflect on – because as Citizens Advice’s new research shows, those who experience domestic abuse are much more likely to tell a friend or family member than anyone else. And even for those of us who work in the domestic abuse sector, it isn’t always an easy question to answer.

But we do all need to have that answer ready – because for the 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men who experience domestic abuse at some point, it could be life-saving.

That’s why SafeLives welcomes Citizens Advice’s campaign to get people to talk about abuse. We know from our research that professionals in most cases will miss five opportunities to spot domestic abuse before the victim eventually gets the specialist help they need to stop it. This is a huge gap in the identification of abuse – one which we and other domestic abuse charities work hard to fill by helping organisations improve their response. But friends and family can help to bridge it as well, by knowing what constitutes abuse and having the confidence to talk about it.

Even in an ideal world where professionals got it right every time, there would still be room for friends and family to play their part – there are many victims of domestic abuse who simply aren’t visible to services. In situations like this, we need to think outside the box and engage whoever we can to spot the abuse and help stop it.

This is especially true when it comes to particular groups, such as BAME and older people, who are often in abusive relationships for longer and are less likely to be in contact with services. From research we know that the length of abuse is 50% greater for BAME victims at risk of serious injury or murder – compared with white British or Irish victims – and a quarter of victims aged over 60 have been in an abusive relationship for more than two decades.

These are frightening statistics which need to change. It is vital that we equip people with the knowledge of what to do and who to ask for help if they suspect someone is living with abuse, be it a neighbour, a friend or a relative. Anything which builds public understanding of domestic abuse, such as this online tool, is helpful in this regard.

Furthermore, by giving people the confidence and tools to spot abuse and do something about it in their personal interactions, we improve the odds that they will be able to transfer this awareness into their professional lives. For every person who Citizens Advice’s campaign reaches, it scores a double victory: one when they notice their friend acting oddly around her partner, another when they ask to see the domestic abuse policy at the hospital where they work.

The truth is, even though domestic abuse has been receiving more and more media coverage in recent months, there is still not enough public awareness of how we can intervene as individuals. Many of us would be paralysed with uncertainty about what we could do if a friend told us that she was being subjected to violence at home. Citizens Advice’s campaign to change that is therefore a welcome and timely addition to the fight against domestic abuse, one which we fully support.

Reading this article brought back some of my less fond memories from my work in Delhi last year. You’d be right to read it and think that the whole approach sounds chaotic. In India the response to domestic abuse is desperately inadequate, including in a number of ways highlighted by this specific story. Charities like Breakthrough, who I worked for, campaign relentlessly for all of these gaps to be filled:

• No national strategy
• A police service which takes no interest or counterproductive interest in the issue
• No sense of respective accountabilities between different agencies
• No common agreement about what an effective response to domestic abuse looks like
• No effective national scrutiny mechanisms to audit the response victims are getting

I’ve written before about the danger of us being complacent when we make comparisons with a country like India. It’s true that the prevalence of domestic abuse in the UK is undoubtedly lower. Domestic abuse is also viewed as unacceptable by the vast majority of the British population, whereas in India over 70% of both men and women consider issues like “not doing chores properly” to be reasonable grounds for a man to hit his wife. But despite those differences, we still have hard miles to do in the UK too.

Lost at sea

We had two calls to the office in quick succession this morning, almost identical, from women seeking help and desperately frustrated and anxious that they couldn’t access it. One had been asked to leave the refuge she was in and couldn’t get the council to help her move on. Another had just arrived in London with her six children and had managed to stay one night with a friend but now needed something more substantial, fast.

Both women had been told by a number of organisations that there was no help that could be offered, both were struggling to find the facts and contact details they needed from the veritable sea of unco-ordinated information that exists online.

A digital ‘front door’?

As the Home Office works on its new violence against women and girls strategy, all organisations in our sector should be thinking radical thoughts (and communicating them) about how we can keep improving this picture. Whether victims and survivors are staying or leaving, whether they do or don’t have children, support should be available to them when they need it. They should be able to find that help easily and know that they’ll get a responsive, high quality service.

The recent Citizens Advice report called, for example, for the government to put a thin ‘front door’ layer on all the information hosted online about support that victims and survivors can access. In a world where women (whether in Calcutta or Colchester) still find that responsive, high quality service too hard to find, this seems like an extremely sensible thing for the government to put into its new strategy.