Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre Recovery Funding (360G-CR-4908544)

COVID19 -We are asking Comic Relief to help us better meet the increased need for our specialist trauma-informed support for women affected by sexual violence/harm during lockdown and/or who have not been able to access support during lockdown for reasons of safety (being locked down with a perpetrator of gender-based violence), confidentiality (lack of confidential spaces within shared households), and childcare. Like many services working with women and children affected by gender-based violence, we are extremely concerned about the significant risks to women?s safety, health and well-being resultant from lockdown measures, and strongly anticipate a significant surge in demand for our services following the lifting of lockdown restrictions. Given existing capacity challenges already facing Edinburgh Rape Crisis Service pre- COVID-19, including a 12 month waiting list, we are also very concerned about our organisational capacity to meet this increased need. In March 2020, prior to the escalation of COVID-19, our trauma-informed support project was already experiencing an unprecedented level of demand. The waiting period for our Edinburgh service alone had increased to a year, with 181 survivors (68% of the 265 survivors currently waiting to access one of ERCC?s support services) being required to wait up to 12 months to access individual support (148 survivors waiting) or group support (33 survivors waiting). A quarter of survivors waiting to access individual support are assessed as having multiple and complex needs, and being at increased risk of self-harm, substance misuse, additional mental health problems, and/or suicide. Over the past four years referrals to our Edinburgh service have increased by 45%. In 2019-20, this service received 61% of all referrals to ERCC. Our Edinburgh service is delivered by 3.17 FTE frontline counselling support workers and the need for our support thereby far outweighs the capacity we have to provide support at the point survivors need it. As a consequence we required to close our Edinburgh service to new referrals from June to October 2019 for 4 months. After re-opening our waiting list in October 2019 our Edinburgh adult service received 212 new referrals for individual support up to 31 March 2020, averaging at 35 per month. In 2018-19, across 12 months we received 379 referrals, averaging at 31 per month.In addition, a further 30 survivors will wait up to six months to access support from our outreach services in East Lothian and Midlothian, and our SIA project, an outreach service for BME survivors affected by additional barriers to accessing rape crisis support such as safety, shame and ?honour?. We are thereby asking Comic Relief to fund two additional 28 hour Counselling Support Worker posts for a period of six months to help us respond in a timely way to the increased level of need for our vital support, particularly as lockdown restrictions are lifted. The evidence of need we have for this strongly anticipated increase in demand for our support post-lockdown is detailed further in 2.2 below.