Legal aid cuts now mean it can be incredibly difficult for victims of domestic violence to get help and protection when threatened by an abusive partner – and lives are being lost as a result

“My risk level, out of 10, it’s probably 12. He’s not going to stop until he gets me. And when I say ‘get me’, I mean until he takes the breath from my body,” says Alice quietly. She’s in the same room, sitting on the same small sofa where she was sadistically raped by her former husband. Her understated manner belies the horror of the story she tells about their life together. Alice has survived more than a decade of violent domestic abuse, much of it inflicted while her very young children were at home.

Her ex-husband is now in prison. When he’s released – fairly soon – he will, Alice is convinced, find and kill her. He subjected her to numerous vicious attacks throughout their marriage.

Her ex viewed her serving him divorce papers as an outrage, she says. “I am not just his wife. I am his. I belong to him. He’s lost his ‘property’, that’s how he looks at it – and my husband doesn’t take lightly to losing. Now that the divorce has come through, I know him, and all he’s thinking is: ‘You think I’ve lost? Watch.’”

Alice has spent the 18 months since he was jailed trying to plan her escape. The restraining order that is already in place for when he comes out is pointless, she believes: she has no chance of a normal life unless she can make herself and her children completely “disappear” from the town where they’re currently living and start afresh elsewhere. So that he can’t easily track them down, they will all need new identities. But while Alice can change her own name, she faces a difficult legal process to change her children’s without their father’s consent, or at the very least, his knowledge. And that will cost far more money – her solicitor quoted a discounted rate of £100 an hour – than she will be able to find.

“I was so shocked,” she says. “Her usual rate is £150 an hour. £150! I work for £10 an hour.”

But despite the dangers acknowledged by all the professionals who have supported her during the past two years, Alice has twice been turned down for the legal aid she needs to seek the court’s protection for her family.

From April 2013, changes to eligibility for legal aid for domestic abuse victims mean that increasing numbers of [mostly] women and children are facing unnecessary risks of catastrophic harm in acute cases, or of damage to their emotional and physical wellbeing in less immediately perilous ones, according to women’s charities and family law experts.

There are two phases during which a victim will need intervention from the family court, explains Emma Scott, director of the charity Rights of Women. After a violent incident, women will typically seek injunctions such as non-molestation orders, and occupation orders that allow themselves and their children to remain in the family home. Legal aid for these protective orders is available, but is often subject to a financial contribution. This may be unaffordable to a woman on a low income. Then there’s the aftermath: divorce, the financial settlement and ensuring safe arrangements for children. This is means-tested too – “plus a victim will also need to provide proof that she has experienced domestic abuse. There’s a strict list of evidence and without one of those forms of evidence, she won’t get legal aid,” says Scott. Critically, most of these accepted proofs must be dated within the last two years.

“The big problem is the two-year rule,” says Polly Neate, CEO of domestic abuse charity Women’s Aid.

For a victim who has left their partner, she explains, “it could easily take two years or more before you’re in a place where you’re secure enough emotionally to start divorce proceedings, or have enough information to assess what contact arrangements with the perpetrator might be safe for the children.”

Alternatively, Neate says, “you might be prompted to take court action by the prospect of the perpetrator getting out of prison”. The sentence being served might be longer than two years, she points out, and by then, the evidence of domestic abuse a woman could earlier have produced would have ‘run out’.

The worst-case scenario is not a theoretical risk: on average almost two women a week – 1.85 to be precise – are killed by a partner or former partner. That figure has not changed in a decade. Children, too, are sometimes killed in domestic homicides. The risk of death is greater after a victim has ended a relationship than while she remains in it.

As a single parent who works 16 hours a week and earns £650 a month, it turns out that Alice is too well off – “by £27” she says with a mixture of bafflement and despair – to qualify for legal aid, despite being able to prove domestic abuse within the required timeframe.

That sum is what separates her from being able to instruct a solicitor to ask the family court to remove parental rights from her ex. This would, she hopes, allow her to change her children’s names without him knowing, giving them a realistic chance of anonymity. In legal terms, this is a very big ask, and she’ll need to make a compelling case. It’s not a request someone with no legal training would want to make to a judge.

The threat to Alice is acknowledged by her local police force. Before the trial, her independent domestic abuse adviser undertook extensive safety planning in case her ex walked free. Suspended sentences are hardly unknown for convicted domestic abuse perpetrators – three police and crime commissioners in the north-east of England last month handed a dossier of cases presided over by Judge George Moorhouse to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office. These, they said, demonstrated a history of leniency to domestic abusers, following his handing down of a suspended sentence to a man convicted of biting and strangling his wife, holding a knife to her throat and shooting her.

Awaiting her ex’s verdict, Alice was well aware that, with time served on remand, he could easily have been released with a community sentence: her danger was judged so great that she was, unusually, offered the chance to go into the witness protection scheme. She didn’t take it up. In her state of trauma and distress, she explains, she was simply unable to contemplate losing all contact with her parents and wider family for ever.

The risk she and the children face on his release is so grave that Alice is once again officially classified as high-risk, and social services are concerned. Because of worries for her children’s safety, the local authority may now be minded to stump up for her legal costs. But her application to the court is, in the end, a private family matter: the council is not obliged to pay. And while she waits for a decision, the clock is ticking. She and the children need to be gone before her ex gets out.

So what happens to domestic abuse victims when they don’t have legal representation? Do they turn up at court anyway?

“The strong ones do, but going to court on your own is very daunting,” says family lawyer Nicki Cozens of Slee Blackwell solicitors. “Generally, they come away from a half-hour free consultation and you don’t hear from them again. They often go back to their abusive relationship. It’s almost as if they have to get assaulted again, finally pluck up the courage to report it, and then they can tick the box that gets them legal aid.”

Cozens has come across plenty of domestic abuse victims who have not reported an assault for fear of repercussions, including having their children taken away.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barristers and solicitors demonstrating against legal aid cuts outside Parliament in March this year. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

As many lawyers warned might happen when the cuts to legal aid were announced, the family courts are now becoming clogged up. The latest figures show that, for the first time, mothers now make up more than half (53%) of all unrepresented parents coming to court to contest arrangements for children. And for a victim of domestic abuse who may have been subjected to years of violence and controlling behaviour, the likelihood of being an effective advocate on your own behalf is small.

Mum-of-two Kate has already been to court by herself to get a non-molestation and occupation order, following an assault so serious she was classified as “high risk”. “The idea of doing it on my own was petrifying,” she says. A month later she was back in front of a judge to get the injunctions confirmed – and so was her ex’s solicitor. “I didn’t know until I got to court if he’d be there too. It was scary,” she recalls.

Kate has been turned down twice for legal aid as she attempts to secure a financial settlement that will mean she and the children have enough to live on after the divorce. She can’t afford the professional expertise to scrutinise her husband’s finances, and says that without a lawyer she’d be “going into court blind – I’d feel totally disempowered”.

Getting the financial agreement right is vital, she says: “I’ll stand up there if I have absolutely no choice, but it would be pretty awful – in years to come, if the wrong decisions are made, it has a lasting effect.”

Prolonging proceedings can be a means of exerting control and an “extension of the abuse”, says Neate.

Because of victims’ inexperience and lack of knowledge of the law, explains family lawyer Peter Reynolds, “it’s easy for a lawyer with 20 years’ experience [instructed by an abuser] to end up with a result he wouldn’t have ended up with otherwise. And it isn’t just. It isn’t fair.”

Are victims and children less safe because of the legal aid reforms?

“Definitely. Unquestionably,” says Cozens. “I can think of cases where the local authority has intervened at a later stage when the violence has escalated, only to be told that the victim had attempted to get court protection earlier, and had been unable to.”

It’s now argued by Rights of Women that the restrictions on domestic abuse victims’ eligibility for legal aid are unlawful: a judicial review will be heard in the high court on 12 December. Victims’ charities want there to be a presumption that survivors of domestic abuse should be able to get legal aid at any time for civil proceedings. “And if the system isn’t going to change,” says Neate, “judges have the discretion to order that legal aid be provided and we want them to use that discretion more”.

Litigants in person are entitled to have lay assistance, even if they can’t afford a lawyer, and yet, says Mark Groves, head of operations at the National Centre for Domestic Violence, there are judges who will question a victim’s right to be accompanied into court by a trained volunteer.

Research conducted by Women’s Aid, Rights of Women and Welsh Women’s Aid showed that 60% of women take no further action if they are not eligible for legal aid – and delay in seeking the protection of a court can make a victim and her children extremely vulnerable. “It does happen that the local authority eventually recognises the risk. But … it can be too late, and children do die. That’s the reality,” Reynolds says.

In 2011, two-year-old Shania Chambers was shot dead with her mother Christine by Shania’s father, David Oakes. The murders took place the night before a court hearing at which custody of the little girl was to be decided. Seven-year-old Mary Ann Shipstone was the subject of a bitter custody battle when she was shot dead earlier this year by her father Yasser Alromisse, who arrived at his estranged wife’s home brandishing a gun. William Pemberton, 16, was shot dead with his mother Julia by her estranged husband, his father, after years of domestic abuse and death threats.

It is estimated that 130,000 children live in situations of high-risk abuse, defined as “significant and imminent risk of serious harm or death”. “Domestic abuse is a factor in the family background of two thirds of serious case reviews where a child has been killed,” says Diana Barran, chief executive of Co-ordinated Action Against Domestic Abuse. It’s when speaking of the threat to her children that sobs break through Alice’s calm demeanor. Does she believe their lives are at risk just as hers is?

“That night when he came after me, it was supposed to be a family ‘suicide’ - he had no idea they weren’t with me,” she says. She pauses, collects herself.

“He will do whatever he can through the kids,” she continues. “That’s why, if he has contact with them, or if any judge says he can see them, he is just going to use them to get to me because he will know where I am.”

Will she be safe if she gets legal aid and permission to change the children’s names, flees the area, and leaves her job and her friends behind her?

“If I’m to be completely honest with you, I don’t actually think I’ve got a future, while he’s alive,” she says. “I just think that I’m going to be on the run.”

• Names and some identifying details have been changed