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	Austerity cuts in U.K. raise risks for Women by Katrin Benhold International Herald Tribune & agencies United Kingdom   London — “In many ways, the women’s sector is a model of the Big Society we wish to build.” Thus spoke Theresa May, the British home secretary and one of only five women in the 23-strong cabinet, praising the work of domestic violence charities at the Women’s Aid annual conference back in July 2010.   “Where the voluntary sector does such excellent work, like in the provision of refuges and rape crisis centers,” she said, “the government ensures the funding it provides is on a stable, long-term basis, ending the culture of charities having to survive hand-to-mouth, facing the threat of imminent closure.”   Two years and two austerity budgets later, 40 percent of groups working with victims of domestic and sexual violence have been forced to reduce staff and 28 percent have had to cut back services amid funding cuts from the local authorities of sometimes 100 percent, according to a survey of 37 organizations by the University of Worcester.   Even Refuge, the oldest and most prominent of Britain’s shelter organizations, which opened the world’s first safe house in 1971 and supports 1,600 women and children on a given day, has warned that funding cuts across half of its services may force it to close down in the absence of substantial private donations.   For many in the sector, the Big Society — the Conservative Party’s flagship Big Idea to rebuild social cohesion by getting more people involved in community work — has become synonymous with a cash-strapped government looking for an excuse to save money.   “In my entire career I’ve never been more concerned about our survival,” said Sandra Horley, who has been chief executive of Refuge for the best part of three decades. “This is Britain in 2012: Do we want to live in a world where women and children are beaten in their own home and funding for services to protect them is being withdrawn?”   At a time when billions of pounds in public services are being cut and about 730,000 public-sector jobs are being eliminated across Britain, women are bearing the burden of austerity on several levels: They account for two-thirds of public-sector employees and, as primary child-care-givers and retirees who live longer than their male counterparts, are twice as reliant on benefits as men, according to the Women’s Budget Group, an independent organization that has been analyzing the gender implications of British budgets since the 1990s.   But as austerity is slowly working its way through the less-visible layers of British society, women are also hurting where they are the most vulnerable.   Ms. Horley put it starkly: “Women could find themselves in a dilemma: stay at home and risk being killed, or flee with their children to sleep on the streets.”   On an average day last year, 320 women were turned away from shelters because there were no beds for them, about 9 percent of those seeking refuge, according to Women’s Aid, a charity supporting a network of about 500 domestic and sexual violence services.   At Eaves , a domestic violence charity based in London, this number is no abstract statistic.   “This happens on a daily basis,” said Jennifer Garcia Bree, a social worker at Eaves’s Scarlet Center in the south of the capital. “These women come to us, and we try our best, but there just aren’t enough resources. We have to tell them go on a night bus or to the emergency room where you can stay warm.”   It used to take one to two days to find someone a bed, Ms. Garcia Bree said. Now it can take one or two weeks. Sometimes that’s too long. Women who decide to leave an abusive home are usually at a very high risk, she said.   But women’s groups said that steep budget cuts imposed on the local authorities, a major source of funding, were taking their toll. Funding from the local authorities has been reduced by 31 percent, a recently published report by two charities, Trust for London and Northern Rock Foundation, showed.   “As we speak, women’s organizations are being forced to close and or turning women away due to insufficient resources,” said Vivienne Hayes, chief of the Women’s Resource Center , which represents 350 small charities and community groups. According to a survey by the center, one in five women’s groups have already been forced to shut down, and one in four of those remaining fear for their survival.   In many ways 2012 is a critical year, said Teresa Parker, publicity manager at Women’s Aid. The cuts have been eating away at the system for a while, “but it’s only now that we’re seeing many services folding,” she said. “Everyone has been tapping into other resources, but many are running out of options.”   The gradual erosion of government funding has made the sector ever more reliant on voluntary income, but fund-raising for domestic abuse victims remains tricky: In a sign of how much of a social taboo the issue remains, more than twice as much money is given to the Donkey Sanctuary as to Refuge and Women’s Aid, the two largest British domestic violence charities, combined.   And yet, official estimates suggest there were 400,000 incidents of domestic violence in Britain last year, killing two women every week in England and Wales. The total number of women and children who sought state support after suffering domestic violence came to 19,000 in 2008-9, according to the first nationwide quantitative assessment, published last week by London Metropolitan University. Sixty percent of them ended up in a shelter.   The human misery aside, saving on funding for groups that toil to minimize domestic violence is a “false economy,” Ms. Horley said. Domestic violence costs British taxpayers about £16 billion a year in health, legal, medical and housing services, she said.   There is a broader calculation for politicians as they ponder ways to ward off rating agencies and appeal to women in the process: Policies that make it harder for women to combine work and family life risk reducing the number of people in the work force and the number of taxpayers, ultimately hurting the country’s economic prospects.   Put another way: Austerity can end up costing a country more than saving it money.   * The Guardian is featuring a series of short films by Peter Gordon, chronicling the hard lives of those stricken by austerity in the UK, see link below. Visit the related web page
	What can we learn from successful campaigns on budget transparency and accountability? by Duncan Green Oxfam - From Poverty to Power   What can we learn from successful campaigns on budget transparency and accountability?   Over the last couple of years, the International Budget Partnership has published a set of fascinating case studies of campaigns on issues of government accountability, budget transparency and access to information. What conclusions do they draw (see end of post for links to the case studies).   As always, good case studies endorse some of your thinking, but also add some new ideas and insights (at least for me). The common ground is that multi-pronged approaches and alliances have more impact. Successful campaigns often work across multiple layers of government (village, district, state, federal), using multiple strategies (research and insider advocacy, street protest, media). The most effective alliances often bring together unusual suspects (eg radical grassroots CSOs and nerdy thinktanks in the Mexico subsidies campaign).   Combined insider/outsider strategies identify and work with allies within the target institutions, and keep the pressure up from outside via ‘popular mobilization’ (pop mob in the awful Oxfam jargon). Reasonably rigorous research (suitably laced with killer facts) is often essential to building credibility with policy makers, and getting them to put up with public criticism from the campaign (India NREGA study).   Good power analysis is essential (e.g. recognizing that the real blockers of NREGA were those with informal power, not those formally responsible for spending decisions, or targeting the home district of the minister because then he will sit up and take notice). Good campaigns respond to unexpected events and opportunities, such as public scandals (Commonwealth Games corruption in the Indian Dalit campaign), or changes in key individuals (new ministers etc).   Litigation is often central to transparency work, especially when there is an implementation gap – governments failing to implement policies or laws (eg Pakistan earthquake or South Africa child support studies)   National and international NGOs can play an important role in helping civil society organizations learn from each other, both within the country and across borders (eg bringing in US environmental organizations in the Mexico subsidies campaign).   Don’t assume that states can deliver what you are demanding - campaigns often have to tackle supply as well as demand, eg training up public officials (eg in NREGA study from India)   So much for confirming received wisdom, at least on this blog. Onto the new ideas, which included:   The role of CSOs and/or key individuals in convening academic fora to generate an intellectual head of steam on a particular issue (eg Mexico subsidy campaign)   Training and support to the media to enable them to use all the information and analysis generated by the campaigns and laws (transparency is not enough if no-one knows how to use the info)   The fulcrum for a campaign can be quite technical (e.g. ‘budget code 789’ in India, urging the government to identify specific spending on Dalits)   Institutional inertia is strong – they often revert to type after the campaign ends.   Training and supporting ministers/officials in sympathetic ministries to take on internal opponents (typically, Finance) (e.g. South Africa, where research strengthened the hand of internal opponents of the Treasury).   This kind of research, conducted with hindsight via interviews with those involved, has its weaknesses – attributing changes to particular campaigns can be tricky, and hindsight tends to airbrush out the role of random events, serendipity etc and make everything seem a bit more deliberate than it actually was. But a thought-provoking set of case studies nonetheless. Visit the related web page
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