Poppy Project: Support for Women-Centred Services

On Monday 11th April we, the undersigned, were both highly disappointed and extremely concerned to learn that after eight years of carrying out vital, specialist services for women who have been trafficked into prostitution or domestic servitude, London-based charity Eaves will not have its Poppy Project contract renewed.
 
Since 2003 the Poppy project as run by Eaves has been providing vital accommodation and support for trafficked women across the UK. Eaves is a specialist organisation which fully understands gender inequality and works according to feminist values, challenging this inequality and providing a safe space for trafficked women who have been exploited and abused, often sexually. As a member of the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), a broad-based national coalition representing over 7 million individuals and organisations across the UK, Eaves actively campaigns for violence against women to be understood as a cause and consequence of women's inequality. Eaves and EVAW are not alone recognising the links between women’s inequality, trafficking and sexual exploitation – international organisations like the United Nations also recognise this fully.
 
Accordingly, the desperate need for a specialist, gender specific service for trafficked women cannot be overstated. Trafficking for sexual exploitation and domestic servitude disproportionately affects women, and those who are trafficked into prostitution face systematic physical and psychological abuse, violence, rape, and torture. Women trafficked into domestic servitude, too, face this same treatment.

Overwhelmingly, the perpetrators of these acts are men, who direct their violence at women simply because they are women. It should be very clear, then, that women who escape from these situations of torture and abuse have very specific needs that require women-centred and women-led services: it is an uncomplicated question of providing safety, support, dignity and humanity to women who have suffered horrifically at the hands of men.
 
In awarding the contract to run Poppy Project services to the Salvation Army, a generic service provider with lacking specialist skills, training or recognition of trafficking for domestic servitude and sexual exploitation as a gendered issue, the Government is surely failing in its duty to address violence against women as upheld internationally by the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Such a blatant negation of the value and importance of women-centred services is not only disappointing – it is dangerous.

We want an explanation from the MoJ as to why a non-specialist service-provider was awarded the Poppy Project contract, and we want confirmation that trafficked women will not suffer as a result. Further, we want the MoJ to recognise the services that women-led organisations provide, and to affirm its understanding of trafficking for sexual exploitation as violence against women issue.