Fifteen years ago, when Lynn fled her abusive partner with her six-month-old baby, she was housed in a homeless shelter because there was no space at a women’s refuge. When she arrived, staff asked her where her possessions were, allotted her a single knife, fork and spoon and begrudgingly dragged a dirty cot out of the garage. The cot was crawling with spiders and riddled with their eggs. Crying, Lynn taped bin bags over the infested mattress to lay her child down.

But she was lucky. Ten days later, a space at a women’s refuge became available. The first question she asked on arrival was: “I don’t suppose you’ve got any sanitary towels?”

Lynn’s partner was well-off, but he had complete control over her finances and she had left with nothing. Refuge staff provided her with essential items. They helped her apply for benefits. They found her a GP and arranged for a health visitor to see her baby. When she had to leave the security of the refuge to attend a solicitor’s appointment, somebody went with her. In the 11 weeks she waited for her benefits to start, they loaned her cash for supplies for her baby and fetched her surplus food from a local supermarket.

“They took it all: the tears; the temper tantrums; the ins and outs of our lives – we downloaded on to them every day,” she says. “It goes way beyond just the accommodation. It’s the support that actually makes most of the difference.”

What would Lynn have done if a refuge place hadn’t become available? She doesn’t hesitate: “I’d have gone back.”

Today, Lynn’s story might have been different.

Jen recently fled her partner after he raped and abused her, but there was no refuge space available for her, despite the fact she was at high risk and had two young children. When she applied to the council, “they gave me a form and said they wouldn’t consider us homeless unless we could prove it”, she says. But it hadn’t been safe to salvage anything when she had left. “My children didn’t even have shoes on their feet. We were literally running for our lives.” Without identity documents or bank statements, she was left in limbo.

Due to a lack of space in refuges, some women are being housed in mixed hostels, alongside men with substance abuse issues. Photograph: Britta Pedersen/EPA

Eventually, with the help of an independent domestic violence adviser from Women’s Aid and a crime reference number from the police, a different council placed Jen and her children in a mixed-sex hostel. She describes the place as “squalid, horrific and traumatising”. There were rats and mice. The front door had no lock and was open 24 hours a day. More often than not, there was only cold water. And, perhaps worst of all, there “seemed no vetting process of who it was appropriate to house with who. So there were lots of men walking around with tags and obvious alcohol or substance abuse issues.” Given the prevalence of domestic violence, Jen was painfully aware that it was highly likely she might be living with men who had themselves been perpetrators.

“We were intimidated and threatened,” she says. “It’s incredibly traumatising and absolutely impossible to recover in that situation. I frequently thought that I would be better off returning to my abuser, because at least that abuse was predictable. At least I’d be able to cook for my children and wash their clothes. At least they would have beds.”

Summoning extraordinary strength, Jen started a campaign to expose the horrendous conditions in the mixed hostel. As a result, she was placed in a women’s hostel, where living standards were considerably better, but no specialist support was available. Dependent on food banks, still recovering from physical and mental trauma, and with no access to money, she repeatedly reapplied to a refuge, but there were simply no spaces available.

Eventually, she was awarded a small one-bedroom flat out of the borough, away from her support network and what services she had managed to access. The single bedroom was just big enough for a bunk bed for her children, so she slept on the sofa, in a room so damp that she had to paint the walls six times to cover the mould. After the ceiling collapsed and the council refused to take responsibility for the state of the flat, Jen found herself sofa surfing once more, her children in tow. “I don’t feel like any of those places housed us,” she says. “I feel like I’ve been homeless for more than two years. It puts me at enormous risk of being exploited by someone else, because I’m desperate to get stability for myself or my children.”

Jen’s experience is a window into the crisis facing the women’s sector. The government has made a great fanfare of its upcoming domestic abuse bill, which will provide much-needed progress on ratification of the Istanbul convention, a groundbreaking legal framework for ending violence against women and girls. The bill promises to extend prosecution of crimes committed overseas, with extraterritorial jurisdiction to bring to justice men who carry out crimes such as domestic abuse, forced marriage and so-called “honour” killings abroad. But separate government proposals have recently emerged that would remove the funding for short-term supported housing from the welfare system, which could have a devastating impact. It would mean women fleeing abusive partners will not be able to pay for their accommodation using housing benefit, which makes up 53% of funding for refuges. Women’s Aid has warned that if the proposed changes go ahead, four in 10 refuges will have to close their doors for good.

Katie Ghose of Women’s Aid: ‘It’s a lottery when it comes to getting support.’ Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Chief executive Katie Ghose says: “The aims of this welcome legislation risk being completely undermined by the proposals around refuge funding. [Over the past few decades] funding has been squeezed and has become more short-term, patchy and variable. It’s less of a postcode lottery and now an actual lottery when it comes to the support on hand for survivors. It’s a huge burden for these life-saving services to be scrabbling around for pennies when they want to be spending every minute of their time with survivors and children, helping them to move on and rebuild their lives.”

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, local authorities across England have cut their spending on domestic violence refuges by nearly a quarter since 2010. As the government devolves responsibility for funding to local authorities, women’s refuges providing specialist care, in particular those catering for BAME women and survivors with complex needs, find themselves at risk of closure, competing for funding against cheaper, generic providers such as housing associations. According to Women’s Aid, 17% of specialist women’s refuges were forced to close between 2010 and 2014. Yet the difference in the support provided to survivors is enormous, as Lynn and Jen discovered.

Accommodating varied and complicated needs is essential in the struggle against domestic violence. As Mirela Sula recently reported in this paper, “migrant women, women of colour and women with low incomes are often at higher risk of domestic abuse”, yet they are often less likely to seek or receive support. Meanwhile, domestic violence is particularly likely to start or worsen during pregnancy, with one-fifth of women in the charity Refuge’s services either pregnant or having recently given birth. So the specialist support refuges provide is not an optional add-on but an absolute necessity.

Clare Phillipson, the director of Wearside Women in Need Women’s Aid refuge in Sunderland, describes a desperate fight for survival. Her team has already had to close one refuge and axe a drop-in and outreach service, despite demand for their services increasing exponentially. If the proposed funding changes go ahead, she says it would obliterate 90% of the services they provide. “People die if they don’t get safety and support. They are murdered. Others are seriously harmed and hurt. People commit suicide, children are left traumatised for life. You’re juggling all that and trying desperately to prioritise, while at the same time wondering whether you’ll have a service in a month’s time. Is that cheque going to come in? Will that funding come through?”

On Tuesday, Women’s Aid will hand a petition to 10 Downing Street calling on the government to urgently reconsider its proposed funding changes. The decision is literally a matter of life and death.

“The murder of women; the abuse of women; the terrorising of children: it’s so entrenched in the fabric of our culture that it’s not seen as exceptional,” Phillipson says. “And women who are experiencing it are blamed. Refuges are seen as disposable and not vital services. Tell that to the woman at 2am who has run from her house in her pyjamas with her children and knows that they’ll die if she doesn’t get them to safety. You tell her that refuges don’t matter.”

The names of the women have been changed to protect their anonymity