Sisters Uncut has branches around the UK taking direct action for domestic violence survivors.

They have taken on local councils as they gate keep access to social housing and cut domestic violence services, with a recent action in London occupying Holloway Prison for a week. Edinburgh Sisters Uncut started with an open meeting earlier this year and is fundraising towards meeting space and for specific help for one of their members.

Read their statement below:

We all live in a world of gendered violence and patriarchal domination. Activist spaces, like all others, tend to replicate these practices because they are the norm. If we are to create safe, productive spaces in which to organise, resist and live, we need to foreground a culture of transformative justice and accountability, both in our organising groups and everyday life.

Transformative and reparatory justice are liberatory approaches and responses to harm and violence. If such approaches are worked on, committed to, and form the backbone of our organising and struggle, they can offer necessary transpositions from state systems and carceral logics which so often fail to deliver ‘justice’ and in a way that is useful, prefigurative, collective and timely.

Supporting people who have experienced trauma, gaslighting, emotional and physical harm is deeply connected to transformative and accountable processes. So too is demonstrating care and solidarity with those impacted by toxic and abusive cultures which are so routine across different societies and which can be reproduced in all manner of spaces and communities.

Awareness alone is not enough. Building accountable spaces and communities requires work - to consciously and collaboratively come together to understand patriarchy, gendered violence and all the dynamics and rhythms these established relations bring, as well as labouring together to form processes and practices to deal with harm, and to develop a politics of care that will be foundational for our mutual liberation.

The burden of taking a lead on these issues should also not fall heaviest on those who have survived sexual and gendered assault - those at the brunt end of violence and abuse must not be expected to tackle this violence while dealing with their own trauma. Survivors need to be centred - not as a moral duty, but as an organising necessity. A politics where survivors' needs are discarded as superfluous, fail to be considered, or where they are devalued, derailed and washed over is self-defeating, and it’s bullshit.

We are crowdfunding in support of these basic principles - to help Edinburgh Sisters Uncut continue the work they are doing, together with offering one individual in particular a gesture of support during an incredibly difficult and fraught period.

This fundraiser is a call for solidarity with those who have survived gendered violence and those who are working to challenge and resist this violence. The money raised by this fundraiser will be divided between Edinburgh Sisters Uncut and one of their members, who have agreed to a 70:30 split.

70% of the money raised will go to Edinburgh Sisters Uncut as a group, and will be used to help this under-resourced organisation afford adequate meeting spaces and other resources for their activities and actions.

30% of the money raised will be donated to a member of Edinburgh Sisters Uncut who is a survivor of gendered violence. Her case has been publicly discussed over the past few months in ways that have been both helpful and traumatic. The money will give this person resources and opportunities for the respite they require to help them heal from their experiences.

Please donate and support this work.

#CentreSurvivors #TransformativeJustice