Ensuring that the safety, dignity and informed consent of all women and girls accessing Rape Crisis centres is protected, is paramount to Rape Crisis England & Wales.
Our member centres are all independent and autonomous organisations, with unique commissioning arrangements, premises and communities to serve. This means that they take their own approaches to delivering their services within the framework that the Rape Crisis National Service Standards provide – this includes how they deliver services to trans and non-binary people, and the provision of women-only spaces.
However, the Independent Review of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) raised important considerations for Rape Crisis England & Wales and our member centres, particularly the Rape Crisis National Service Standards and whether these provide sufficient clarity for members to be able to deliver services which meet the needs of all survivors who need their help – including those who need to access a single sex service.
Since the publication of the review, Rape Crisis England & Wales have been looking at the findings and recommendations of the report to consider what we can do to ensure that the National Service Standards are clear enough to be able to do this, and that, where necessary, we provide guidance to ensure that our centres take account of, and balance, the differing needs of a diverse range of survivors seeking support, however they deliver their services.
We’ve already started working to gain a clear and comprehensive picture of the range of approaches our members take in this area. Once we have that, we will update our guidance as necessary, issue it to our members and share it publicly. Central to that updated guidance will be the informed consent, safety, dignity and empowerment of all the women and girls whom our centres support.
We’re also going to make the Rape Crisis National Service Standards much more prominent and accessible on our website, so that anyone who wants to know the framework that our member centres are working within can find them easily.
Our aim is to ensure that survivors of sexual violence and abuse can access support that’s right for them, and meets their needs, but the reality is that all of our members are operating in incredibly challenging financial circumstances. The level of funding available to support women and girls who have experienced sexual violence or abuse is nowhere near what’s actually needed - even to provide core services for everyone who needs them. There are 14,000 survivors currently on our waiting lists, and a third of our members are at risk of closure as a result of insufficient and precarious funding. Without support, they simply won’t be able to stay open, leaving the thousands of survivors we support each year with very little other support.
The third sector, and in particular the violence against women and girls sector, has been abandoned to contend with this issue almost entirely on its own. There has been a lack of leadership and practical support from central government and commissioning bodies, to help manage the actual or perceived conflicts of rights, needs and ethics in this area, and the polarised nature of public debate has not helped survivors, staff or services. Like every other organisation working to support women and girls who have experienced sexual violence or abuse, our members have been left in a vacuum in terms of support or guidance, and we as a national body can only do so much without legislative clarity and constructive dialogue.
Each year, our centres support on average 80,000 survivors, including children, by providing specialist and expert support to them through one-to-one counselling, advocacy, emotional support and a range of other services. The life-changing, and in some cases life-saving, support that each one of our centres provides is delivered with great care and commitment from dedicated staff teams, but centres are being put in the incredibly difficult situation of having to legislate themselves on who does or doesn’t qualify for that support.
Rape and sexual abuse are both devastating and devastatingly common. We believe that everyone who needs our help should be able to feel safe and supported and receive a service which is right for them; we also believe this needs to be at the forefront of discussions about survivors and service provision. This is why the Rape Crisis movement exists, and why Rape Crisis England & Wales is acting on the relevant findings from the report. It’s also why we will continue to relentlessly push for a level of funding and clear guidance that would mean we can provide appropriate support for every single woman and girl who needs our help.