It’s 45 years since Scottish Women’s Aid was established at a time when men could beat and rape their partners with impunity.
The women who founded it were pioneers, derided as harridan bra burners and men haters and they faced aggression from the public, the police and politicians.
They fought with such tenacity for women and children suffering intimate terrorism in their homes and it was an uphill battle but they created a cultural shift.
There are still those who deem abuse of a woman, as “just a domestic” but thankfully far less than before.
Founders I spoke to talk of bolting into homes with women and grabbing their. belongings, of crying at the funerals of women who had been killed.
All these years later, two women are killed by their male partner every week, so yes, there has been progress but not enough.
Throughout this pandemic it’s Women’s Aid which has been on the frontline of an epidemic of domestic abuse.
Victims whose lives were already confined, found the little breathing space they had squeezed even further as they were locked down with stir crazy abusers.
As a social media campaign from Glasgow Women’s Aid has pointed out its #stilllockdown for victims long after “freedom day” dawns for the rest of us.
For many of the charity’s services there was an increase in demand of more than 40 per cent during the pandemic but Women’s Aid handled it all with aplomb, as always.
But for three of the services in North Lanarkshire, who were supporting victims in the worst of times, financial gloom was added to the mix.
Although their services had been consistently praised by the Care Inspectorate and the women who leaned on them, they found themselves in a brutal tendering process fighting to keep more than £1.4million of funding from North Lanarkshire Council.
It is mystifying as to why the council would force the overstretched service into this financial dogfight during such a frenetic period.
They were treated like builders battling for a new school contract. What makes Women’s Aid so special is impossible to summarise on a tender application.
This is a movement of women, a sisterhood which has pulled victims to freedom, given them a roof, empowered and supported them until the they no longer needed to.
When a woman is being abused, she goes to Women’s Aid because she trusts their proven record. She is right to have such faith.
And is North Lanarkshire just the start of the erosion of this vital organisation?
Women’s Aid have seen 81 per cent of their services face cash cuts, in this country of ours which boasts a zero tolerance of domestic abuse.
The council is behind a new domestic abuse support service called Aura. It says Aura’s services are gender neutral, and that it will better serve the male victims of domestic violence.
Nine in 10 of victims of domestic violence are women and the perpetrators are men – fact.
In the many years I have been writing about women who have been psychological and physically abused, I am guanteed to get at least a handful of emails from men who demand to know why I am not writing about male victims.
These are not male victims of domestic abuse but blokes who see themselves as marginalised by an imaginary ghoul of
fundamentalist feminism.
I generally send links of articles I have written on male victims but that is as far as I will indulge in their whataboutery.
Domestic violence is not gender neutral, its horrors are felt disproportionately by women and it requires a service provided by women, for women.
There are services just for men and that is as it should be too.
There is absolutely no justification for these services to be unisex because domestic abuse is not.
Our binmen getting rubbish treatment
Unions have told binmen to stay at home if they are ‘pinged’ despite a new exemption, raising fears that rubbish will pile up on the streets.
The unions, Unison and the GMB argue that if the workers are pinged, its for good reason and they shouldn’t be putting their health at risk if they have come into contact with the virus.
If the budgets of councils hadn’t been obliterated, the cleansing departments of Britain wouldn’t be so understaffed and this wouldn’t be an issue. The government last week gave exemptions from self isolation to binmen but surely such exemptions in a pandemic are only going to make others less inclined to follow the rules.
As soon as Sir Iain Duncan Smith popped up to comment, we were reminded that ship sailed at the last election and Westminster is already chokka with nasties who make us itch. Smith, the former Tory leader, is livid at audacity of the binmen putting their health before keeping Briatin’s streets tidy. Any binman would happily come out of self isolation if they got a chance to dispose of that particular rubbish.
