First, there’s the the 3.6million women fighting for state pension equality, who were not mentioned in the budget – they continue to fight for compensation over historic rises to the state pension age, which has primarily affected the retirement finances of 1950s-born women. Second, the two-child cap on benefits didn’t get a mention, meaning that this Cameron-era rule is here to stay.
And third, simmering underneath all of this, is Labour’s pledge to halve violence against women and girls – a promise that was headline-making in Keir Starmer‘s leadership campaign.
We’ve all read the horrifying stories of women’s rape and murder at the hands of violent men. Men who, if they get to court, try to declare themselves powerless over their own desires – as if this affliction happens at random, as if women ever offend at anything like the same rate. And perhaps we’ve been trained to be resigned to it all. But the government made a commitment, the first of its kind in the UK.
And that commitment means cash. Rape Crisis CEO Ciara Bergman today said: “Our network of specialist and community-based Rape Crisis centres have been struggling with acute and chronic underfunding for decades,” adding: “We cannot even contemplate taking a seat at the table unless we know we can keep our doors open and our lights on.”
Meanwhile, domestic violence charity Women’s Aid had requested £516million in funding to support specialist domestic abuse services. But the only mention of domestic violence in the budget is in reference to specially-trained officers in police control rooms. A good thing, but not the vast funding needed.
“We cannot even contemplate taking a seat at the table unless we know we can keep our doors open and our lights on.”
Male violence against women and girls shouldn’t have to exist, but it does. It also shouldn’t have to be framed as an economic problem in order to get a government to fix it, but it is.
There’s the missed days of education and work due to trauma and stress. The NHS appointments for swabs, STI tests, abortions, stitches, broken arms, smashed-in faces. The housing of women who are no longer safe to live with the man who harmed her. The PTSD obscuring women’s ability to function on a day-to-day. Police, courts and prisons’ time and money spent on trying to, and in so many cases, failing to, address these crimes. Domestic violence was estimated by the former government’s Domestic Abuse Commissioner to cost the UK economy £78 billion as of 2023. Sexual violence cost, in 2017, an estimated £8.46 billion a year, say the Women’s Budget Group. The UK is effectively paying for a violence epidemic, and it’ll have to invest in ending it, too.
And yet the Home Office, the department leading the work to tackle violence against women and girls, faces cuts from £6billion to £5.2billion. Where will these cuts fall? Upon extra training for police into how to resolve domestic violence? On civil servants doing research into patterns of offending?
The devil’s in the detail; Reeves’s only mentions of women in her budget speech were in reference to her own role. While we can hope Labour will do better than its predecessors and that feminists thrive within its ranks, you can never be certain.
I get it, the financial black hole that the Conservatives left the incoming government is bigger than expected – and I sympathise with anyone trying to balance the books in favour of the little guy (and gal). But ultimately, when financial times get tough, women’s rights are too often seen as extras, like putting the icing on the cake when the flour isn’t in yet. It’s a shame they don’t come baked in.
