RASA Merseyside says it will need to make ‘drastic changes’ to its support for victims of sexual violence
RASA Merseyside says it will need to make ‘drastic changes’ to its support for victims of sexual violence
Staff at a rape crisis centre say they have been left “shocked and devastated” by government funding cuts that they claim will result in “drastic changes” to the support they offer victims of rape and sexual abuse – including children. RASA Merseyside, which has offices in Birkenhead and Bootle, supports around 600 victims of sexual violence at any one time by offering them advice, counselling and guidance through the justice system.
In recent years, the centre has been inundated with requests for support from victims of sexual abuse, with referrals increasing by 400% in the first quarter after the covid lockdown. RASA expanded its services accordingly, going from a staff of three in 2004 to 40 today. Last year, RASA took on 2,748 new clients, with nearly a quarter (23%) of referrals for children and young people who experienced sexual violence.
For the past five years, the charity’s funding has been relatively secure, but last month, staff were shocked to learn that the Ministry of Justice (MOJ), which provides the majority of its funding, is set to impose what RASA says is “real terms spending cuts”.
Speaking to the ECHO, RASA Operations Manager Lorraine Wood said: “When we got that news in December we were incredibly shocked. Everybody feels really angry, because Merseyside has got a big issue with violence against women and girls.”
In 2021, three women were killed in Merseyside in a single four day period. The following year, a series of heinous murders meant Merseyside was blighted by the worst record of women and girls killed by men in the whole country.
According to RASA, the organisation’s funding allocation from the MOJ will remain at the same level as it was in 2019 when funds were last allocated – meaning real term cuts. “In the five years, there’s obviously been a huge increase in the cost of living, with a huge impact on utility bills and everything else needed to run an organisation,” said Lorraine. “It’s effectively a 10 percent cut in our funding in real terms.”
Lorraine is also concerned about impact of the increase in employer National Insurance Contributions on charities like RASA. She explained: “We were hoping that charities like ours which are funded by the government would be exempt, but they’re not. For us at RASA, that’s £33,000 additional payment we have to find – that’s a post (staff member).”
Rape crisis centres up and down the country are reportedly facing the same funding shortfall. The ECHO understands they have been asked to report to the MOJ by the end of January on “what their new services will look like”.
RASA says it is looking at a £100,000 shortfall in its annual budget. To balance the budget, the charity says it will have to make cuts to staff and services. This includes letting go of one full time Independent Sexual Violence Advisor (ISVA), one full time children’s worker, scrapping all translation services and all external psychology and counselling for staff and volunteers.
According to Lorraine, ISVAs play a crucial role at the centre, providing support, information, practical and emotional support for people affected by sexual violence. Each ISVA has between 50 and 80 clients on her books at any one time.
Lorraine said: “It’s the clients who will suffer if we make the cuts. What do we do with them? Where do we send them to? We are the specialist service – there’s nowhere else to send them. We are already underfunded in the sense that all of our staff are up to their absolute maximum. Our waiting times are already unacceptable. Our counselling waiting list is around nine months.
“Following the cuts, that’s likely to go to 12 months as a minimum and we’re going to have to look at the service provision and look at who we offer the service to because we might have to scale that down. Realistically, it looks like we may have to close waiting lists, and we may have to reduce the service we offer.”
Lorraine told us she was particularly disappointed by the funding decision given the government’s supportive rhetoric on violence against women and girls. Earlier this year, Labour promised to halve violence against women and girls within the next decade.
In August, the Victims Minister Alex Davies-Jones personally visited the RASA offices in Birkenhead along with Police and Crime Commissioner Emily Spurrell and Birkenhead MP Alison McGovern. There, she described the problem of violence against women and girls as a “national emergency” and said she was “fed up, frustrated and infuriated” with seeing how violence against women and girls “was playing out in society and in our streets”.
For Lorraine, the government’s actions do not match its rhetoric. “They’ve put this massive pledge out there to halve violence against women and girls in the next ten years,” she said. “But for us in services like this, part of that strategy would be to adequately support agencies that support victims of crime.
“It just doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t feel right. For us it feels like the first opportunity that the new government have had to support services like ours, they’ve failed and neglected that obligation to do so.”
When questioned about the reported real-term spending cuts to RASA, a Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “This Government inherited a criminal justice system under immense pressure and a black hole in the nation’s finances. We must now make difficult decisions to ensure we can deliver the justice victims deserve, through our courts and across the system.
“By protecting our support for victims of sexual violence and domestic abuse, we are ensuring help is available to survivors of these awful crimes as they seek to rebuild their lives.”
Lorraine and her colleagues at RASA are fighting to keep their services running by asking for help from the public. They have set up a Just Giving page with the aim of raising the funds needed and have already raised over £4,000 in less than a week.
Lorraine said: “We’re aiming for £100,000 by the end of March – which would mean we wouldn’t have to make any cuts to service and that will give us a year to continue to fundraise for the following year.
“What we are asking members of the public to do is to look around them – they can be certain that somebody in their life that they love will have been impacted by rape and sexual abuse. So what we’re asking people is not to turn a blind eye to this service.”