Safety Cannot Stop at the Refuge Door: Domestic Abuse, Trans Survivors and the Role of Housing

Last Sunday Bridget Phillipson the Women's & Equalities minister commented about not allowing trans women into women's refuges risk reducing an extraordinarily complex issue to a question about who can and cannot enter one particular type of building.

I come to this debate with more than a passing interest.

I spent many years of my career overseeing a national LGBT domestic abuse service. During that time, I saw the number of points of contact with the service grow from the low hundreds to nearly 10,000.

That experience taught me something that should be obvious but still too often gets overlooked in political debates about domestic abuse:

LGBT+ people experience domestic abuse, and they need services designed to reach and support them.

For many LGBT survivors, simply having a generic domestic abuse service somewhere in the system is not enough. There can be additional barriers around disclosure, fear of discrimination, previous experiences of services, isolation from family, threats of being outed, abuse connected specifically to sexuality or gender identity, and uncertainty about whether a service will understand or welcome them.

That is why specialist provision matters.

And it is why this debate cannot end with a politician saying that a trans woman would not be admitted to a women's refuge.

The next sentence has to be:

So where will they go?

Trans people experience domestic abuse too

The evidence reinforces what I saw professionally.

SafeLives' analysis of trans victims and survivors accessing domestic-abuse services found high levels of multiple forms of abuse, including controlling behaviour, physical abuse and significant housing needs.

Galop's research has similarly highlighted the barriers LGBT+ survivors can experience when attempting to access help, including fears that services will not understand their identity or will treat them badly.

So these are not hypothetical people created for a political argument about gender.

They are people being controlled, assaulted, financially abused, threatened and made homeless.

Some will need somewhere safe tonight.

Women's refuges matter, but they aren't the only answer

There is an important distinction to make.

Supporting trans survivors does not require us to dismiss the particular needs of women fleeing male violence.

Nor does it require every refuge to operate in precisely the same way.

There are circumstances under equality law in which single-sex services can lawfully be provided where the relevant statutory tests are satisfied.

But recognising that does not remove our responsibility towards somebody who cannot access that service.

In fact, it makes the responsibility to provide a meaningful alternative even more important.

Exclusion from one service cannot become exclusion from safety.

Housing providers could transform this conversation

This is where I believe housing associations and local authorities have an enormous opportunity.

Refuges are essential, but refuge accommodation does not have to be the only model.

Housing providers can make available secure, confidential, self-contained dispersed properties, with specialist domestic-abuse support delivered through outreach or floating support.

Instead of asking whether every survivor fits within an existing communal refuge model, we could ask:

What accommodation and support package will make this particular survivor safe?

A housing association provides the secure property.

A domestic-abuse organisation provides specialist safeguarding and advocacy.

An LGBT organisation provides specialist, identity-informed support where appropriate.

IDVAs and other professionals provide floating support within the community.

And the survivor has somewhere safe to live without requiring every refuge to meet every possible need.

We should be commissioning LGBT domestic-abuse services

There is a wider lesson here too.

My own experience of watching contact with an LGBT domestic-abuse service increase from the low hundreds to nearly 10,000 demonstrated the importance of visibility.

When communities know a service exists for them, when they believe they will be understood and when professionals know where to refer people, previously hidden need begins to become visible.

That matters when commissioners look at apparently small numbers and conclude there is insufficient demand for specialist provision.

Low recorded demand does not necessarily mean low need.

Sometimes it means people do not believe there is anywhere safe to disclose what is happening to them.

We therefore need properly commissioned LGBT domestic-abuse provision alongside mainstream services, not occasional projects dependent upon short-term funding.

And housing providers should be part of that commissioning conversation.

A different model of safe accommodation

Imagine if larger housing providers allocated a small number of confidential properties across their stock specifically for survivors for whom conventional refuge accommodation is inappropriate or unavailable.

That could include LGBT and trans survivors, but the principle is much wider.

Dispersed accommodation may also be appropriate for some disabled survivors whose accessibility requirements cannot be met within existing refuge buildings, people with pets, some male survivors, people with older children and survivors whose circumstances make communal accommodation difficult.

This isn't about creating a hierarchy of deserving victims.

It is about recognising that domestic-abuse survivors are not a homogeneous group.

Different people require different solutions.

Don't close the door and walk away

This is ultimately what concerns me about the political debate surrounding trans people and refuges.

It is remarkably easy to make a statement about who should not be admitted somewhere.

Providing the alternative is considerably harder.

If government believes particular women's refuges should operate on a single-sex basis, then it also needs to answer a practical question:

What happens to the trans survivor fleeing domestic abuse tonight?

Not theoretically.

Not eventually.

Tonight.

Where is the property?

Who takes the referral?

Who conducts the risk assessment?

Who provides the specialist support?

Who pays for it?

And does the survivor know that service exists?

Those are the questions policymakers, commissioners and housing providers should be answering.

Safety should be the objective

We need to stop framing this as though protecting women and protecting trans people are mutually exclusive objectives.

Women fleeing male violence deserve specialist, safe services.

LGBT people experiencing domestic abuse deserve specialist, safe services.

Trans people experiencing domestic abuse deserve specialist, safe services.

Sometimes those services will look different.

That is perfectly legitimate.

What isn't acceptable is allowing an argument about the doorway into one particular service to distract us from whether there is another doorway available at all.

After years working around LGBT domestic abuse, one thing became very clear to me:

If you create services people trust, people come forward.

The challenge for government, commissioners and housing providers is therefore not simply deciding who can enter a refuge.

It is building a domestic-abuse system with enough different doors that everyone fleeing abuse can find one that opens.