Racism and other intersecting barriers to accessing safety and support

Communities like ours need to work actively to provide safe spaces for women who have experienced domestic/sexual violence often in addition to immigration abuse, harmful practices such as FGM, sexual exploitation, forced marriage, trafficking and HBV/A perpetrated through varying cultural and social lenses by intimate partners, family members and or community members. A safe space may be a specialist service, or a respectful and anti-racist organisation providing help around domestic abuse. A safe space is often needed to address other barriers, particularly for women who are destitute and homeless, or living in unstable or unsafe housing without support networks. Safe spaces are needed by migrant women who also have complex immigration issues, no recourse to public funds, face racial discrimination and harassment, hate crime and economic exploitation. Being trauma informed also means properly listening to and hearing women’s and girls’ lived experience, in all its diverse, cultural and unique aspects, and shaping our understanding of safe spaces accordingly.