From Pillar to Post: Understanding the Victimisation of Women and Children who Experience Domestic Violence in an Age of Austerity

Abstract

The dismantling of the welfare state across the United Kingdom (and indeed a number of other Western industrialised democracies, such as Canada and the United States) and the reductions to welfare provisions and entitlements are having a detrimental impact on women's equality and safety. Towers and Walby argue that the recent cuts to welfare provision in the United Kingdom, particularly for women's services, could lead to increased levels of violence for women and girls. This paper makes the argument that female victims of domestic abuse experience violence on two levels: first, at the intimate/personal level through their relationship with an abuser and, second, at a structural level, through the state failing to provide adequate protection and provision for women who have experienced violence in intimate relationships. Using a specific example of post-violence community services delivered to both the children of women who have experienced domestic violence and the women themselves, this paper draws on empirical research carried out in 2010–2011 with London-based third-sector and public sector organisations delivering the Against Violence and Abuse Project ‘Community Group Programme’. We argue that the lack of services for women involved in, or exiting, a violent relationship can amount to state-sanctioned violence, if funding is withheld, or indeed, stretched to breaking point.

Gendering the crisis: austerity and the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil

“…Governance reforms are often harder to oppose and overturn (Bohoslavsky & Rulli, 2020 ; Elomäki, 2019 ; Girón & Correa, 2016 ; MacLeavy, 2011 ; Murphy, 2015 ; Rubio-Marín, 2016 ; Sanders et al, 2019 ; Tepe-Belfrage & Steans, 2016 ) Social reproduction Austerity relies on shifting public provision of reproductive work to the private sphere. Pension cuts and postponing retirement age are likely to increase women’s family workload by reducing the availability of grandparents for childcare (Daskalaki et al, 2020 ; Gálvez & Rodríguez-Modroño, 2016 ; Power & Hall, 2018 ; Tarrant, 2018 ) Gender-based violence Reductions to welfare provisions and entitlements impact women's equality and safety (Sanders-McDonagh et al, 2016 ) …”

The contradictory possibilities of engaging men and boys in the prevention of men’s violence against women in the UK

“…For all of the interviewees, one of the defining issues facing the prevention of men's violence against women in the UK was a paucity of resources, in relation to broader attacks on the women's movement. Connections were made here to the ongoing neoliberal austerity project since 2010, which has included severe cuts to local government funding (Sanders-McDonagh, Neville and Nolas, 2016). This has had a devastating effect on violence against women services, as articulated by Ben: "Women's services...have been hit particularly hard, in recent years so, I mean it has to be a much higher priority also in terms of, well, government or other funding.…”

Austerity in a disadvantaged West Midlands neighbourhood: Everyday experiences of families and family support professionals

“…Nonetheless, these core services face severe pressures. An estimated 24% fewer elderly people receive care than in 2011 (Cooper and Whyte, 2017: 21); reductions in family support services have increased demand for emergency child protection (Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), 2017); while cuts to domestic abuse services have left victims at increased risk (Sanders-McDonagh et al, 2016). Meanwhile, significant changes to the welfare system have seen the removal or reorganisation of key benefits, and intensified welfare conditionalities with harsh sanctions for non-compliance (Fletcher and Wright, 2017; Hamnett, 2013).…”

“…This reframing of poverty as a consequence of ‘anti-social choices made by individuals’ (Wiggan, 2012: 387) is highly stigmatising, and is a central tactic of the neoliberal austerity project’s amplification and activation of stigma ‘to procure consent for punitive policies directed at those living at the bottom of the class structure’ (Slater, 2018: 891). Austerity, then, may be understood as institutional violence, not only in terms of diminished health, increased mortality and the removal of social protections against physical harm (Sanders-McDonagh et al, 2016), but through its influence on the ‘psychic life’ (Mills, 2018: 302) of those whom its legitimising narratives construct as abject: ‘the ordinary and mundane violence that make up the lived experience of austerity; the lived experience of feeling humiliated, anxious and vilified’ (Cooper and Whyte, 2017: 23).…”