Eleanor Donne, Essex Socialist Party

Labour Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood has vowed to treat violence against women and girls as a “national emergency”, as she announced her ‘Plan for Change’. It is an emergency. Every year around 85 people, overwhelmingly women, are killed by their current or ex-partner. NHS figures from 2023 indicate that one in three pregnant women experiences domestic abuse. Over 105,000 children live in homes where there is high risk of domestic abuse.

Yet Labour’s plan aims only to halve the rates of such violence and gives themselves ten years to do so. Meanwhile, the government’s self-imposed ‘fiscal rules’, i.e. forced austerity, mean that women’s refuges and outreach services are still chronically underfunded and constantly at risk of closure. Women’s Aid reports that, in 2024, almost one in four women in need of one couldn’t get a suitable refuge place, and were subject to further abuse whilst waiting. Some were forced to sleep rough. Farah Nazeer of Women’s Aid said: “What the sector desperately needs is resources for frontline survivor services which support women and children at a time when they most need it”.

It’s shameful that, 15 months into a Labour government, refuge services are still struggling. Domestic abuse survivors in refuges can’t move on to a stable home because of a chronic shortage of genuinely affordable housing. Labour councils have failed over decades to build council homes in their areas and to mount a fight for the resources they need. Now in power, the Labour government’s housing pledges are focused on private ownership, with ‘affordable’ housing a tiny and expendable element. The Tory benefit cap and two-child benefit limit, kept in place by Starmer’s Labour, and poverty wages make it more difficult for women to leave a violent relationship.

Sexual assault and rape are notoriously under-reported crimes. No wonder, when disgusting misogyny and racism within the police force have been exposed yet again (see ‘BBC documentary exposes racist, sexist Met police’). A new Police and Crime Performance Unit at the Home Office will apparently work to ensure they are ‘rooting out those who are not fit to serve’. But we need a genuinely accountable police service, subject to democratic control by local communities.

The Socialist Party says:

  • Fully fund refuges and domestic violence services, councils should set no-cuts needs-based budgets. A mass campaign, mobilising working-class people can win the resources we need from the Labour government
  • We need council houses now. Rents should be controlled and insecure tenancies ended
  • Build a united struggle for zero tolerance of sexism and sexual harassment in workplaces, schools and colleges
  • Fight for democratic community and trade union control of the police and criminal justice system
  • Build a new mass workers’ party. To bring an end to the inequality and division of capitalism, we need the socialist transformation of society