Cuts? Women will take them on the chin

Written by Fionnuala Murphy from the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation | 11 November 10

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Government spending cuts will hit women the hardest, with the most marginalised suffering the most. Fionnuala Murphy from the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation breaks it down

On the morning of Wednesday 20 October if you Googled “women and cuts” you got ads for hair models on Gumtree and the latest special offers from Toni & Guy. By Friday of the same week that very same search would tell you that, of the £8.5 billion which the government plans to raise by cutting direct benefits to individuals, two thirds will come from women’s pockets. A lot can change in a day.

At IKWRO we help Middle Eastern women who are facing forced marriage, ‘honour killing’, female genital mutilation and domestic violence. We’re already worried that cuts in public services such as policing will result in lower levels of protection for our clients and even fewer prosecutions for the kind of crimes that affect them.

Not one person has ever been prosecuted under laws which ban FGM in this country and the Metropolitan Police have over 100 unsolved cases of ‘honour killing’ on their files. It’s pretty worrying in this context to think that Britain is about to lose 10,000 police officers. We’re even more concerned that we could lose our London Councils grant which totals £30,000 per year up to the end of 2012. With just five full-time staff and two part timers, this is not funding that we can afford to lose.

Other organisations are similarly desperate. London Councils has also withdrawn its pledge to fund three new rape crisis centres in Redbridge, Ealing and Islington. As a result the Redbridge and Islington centres may not be able to open, and women living in north and east London who need rape crisis services will still have to get themselves to either Ealing or Croydon on the other side of the city. Would you want to spend an hour and a half on the tube when you’d just been raped? Neither would I.

To read the full essay click the link below.

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