On average, a woman will attempt to leave a violent partner seven times before finally breaking away. Barbara tried several dozen times. But each time, her abusive husband found her, often assisted by the authorities she had fled to for help in the first place.

It was the 1970s, and domestic abuse was thought of as exactly that: domestic. “We don’t have anything to do with that,” she was told by the police during one attempt to escape. Another time, when she was in a psychiatric hospital, buckling under the weight of the abuse, the Salvation Army told her husband where to find her. On a different occasion, a social worker asked her to wait while they got the police to escort her back to him, “in case he wants to hit you”.

Those were the days before women’s refuges. But while attitudes towards domestic violence may have changed, many women are finding themselves in a place not dissimilar to that which Barbara found herself in almost 60 years ago – being brutally beaten, but unable to escape.

Barbara met her husband at a party in a pub in 1967. “He was kind and gentle. Straightforwardly lovely,” she says. She was 21 and, by her own admission, “very, very naive”.

She remembers their early days together fondly: “We were footloose and fancy free.” They moved to London briefly, without any money or a place to stay. It was, she says, “one of the happiest times of our relationship”. He was sober then, so “there was no fear of violence”. They had about 11p, “a small loaf of bread and a bit of cheese. That was a king’s banquet to us.”

A crowded refuge in Chiswick, 1974. Photograph: Corbis via Getty

It was after they moved back to Scotland, while Barbara was pregnant with their first child, Fiona, that he began to hit her. “Once everything started, I grew up with a vengeance,” she says. Barbara, now in her 70s, doesn’t remember the first time he was violent towards her: “There were so many I can’t remember what the first was. There was one time when he tried choking me, that was quite early on. Luckily there was an unopened bottle of Whitbread’s on the bed and I belted him with it.”

Violence always followed drinking. “If anyone offered him a spirit, that was it.” Things escalated and, although Barbara’s memory of the chronology is hazy, the following years were punctuated by extreme violence. “If he came home from the pub, I would smile, welcoming him, and he would go: ‘What are you laughing at?’ I’d probably get a hit, then.” She missed her brother’s wedding because he had beaten her that morning. “I wasn’t going to go with black eyes.”

Her daughter Fiona’s earliest memory is of a caravan holiday with her father and uncle, who was also routinely violent. They were fighting. One of them had a knife. “In among the scuffle,” she says, “they knocked my baby brother off a bench and he landed face down.” She remembers his silence. “I’m nearly 50 now. I don’t know how a two or three-year-old could have thought that someone had died, but I did.” It was around that time that Fiona was first given tranquilisers – even as a two-year-old, she was wary enough of her father to fight sleep until she knew he was asleep too.

“My experience of domestic violence,” she says, “was a woman covered in blood, slumped on the floor, sometimes unconscious. Children beside themselves. And my dad disappearing again.”

Barbara had a difficult birth with her second child. After a caesarean, she remembers a swelling, and stitches coming loose. “I just watched my stomach opening up. It made coping with [the baby] very difficult.” Her husband wanted sex almost straight away when she came out of hospital, she says. “He threw me at the front door and all kind of things. It was not a nice time.”

When her second child was six months old, Barbara’s mother gave her the bus fare to go down to London with her children. They ended up staying in a hostel, and it was there they heard about a place that had opened up for women fleeing domestic violence. It was 1972, and the world’s first women’s refuge had opened in Chiswick the previous year. Barbara doesn’t remember much about it, but she does remember being shocked. “It was something that would stun you. It was totally different to anything that you would see nowadays.”

Sandra Horley, who is now the chief executive of Refuge, currently the largest single provider of domestic abuse refuge services in the country, worked there from 1983. “Nothing had existed like it before,” she says. “Women and children just flocked to our doors in their hundreds.” It was, she says, chaotic. “Very distressed women, women with black eyes, broken bones … they were all very traumatised and had been emotionally abused, controlled, blamed by their families and friends, because it was a taboo subject then.”

Horley has several lifetimes’ worth of stories about the women who sought help there – the woman who kept fainting on arrival because, it turned out, she had a fractured skull, the women with cigarette burns all over their bodies. But, she says, domestic violence is more than that: it is about “the systematic, purposeful pattern of behaviour designed to control. You don’t have to hit a woman to abuse her.”

She remembers how 150 women and children would sleep head-to-toe on mattresses, “squeezed like sardines” in this eight-bedroom, rat- and cockroach-infested Victorian house. A very far cry from the renovated refuges they run today, she is quick to point out. “Dilapidated is an understatement. It was straight out of Dickens.” But, she says, the women who knocked on the doors in the dead of night told her “over and over and over again that it was far better being in the refuge in that state than being beaten at home”.

It was here that Barbara managed to find a cot for her baby and a mattress on the floor for her and Fiona. “In the morning, you picked it up, put it against the wall, folded your bedding and it became a space for kids to play.”

There was no official support, beyond Refuge’s founder Erin Pizzey, now a controversial figure thanks in part to comments she has made stating that men are as much victims of domestic abuse as women. “There were no counsellors,” says Barbara. “We had Erin, who helped us; we would talk to her about problems, she was still trying to work things out.” Despite this, Barbara’s time in the refuge was a relatively happy one, full of camaraderie. “I felt secure. People rallied around to help.” She remembers a time when they heard a noise out in the backyard. Someone phoned the police. “They went into the garden and it was a cat. We had a laugh about that.

“Everyone knew where everybody had come from, we were all in the same place in our lives.” She remembers one woman who went back to her husband. “We all thought she shouldn’t, and she came back and she had lost an eye.”

Refuge founder Erin Pizzey in London in 1978. Photograph: Corbis via Getty

After six months at the refuge, Barbara went back to Scotland. It was years until she managed to free herself for good – realising she couldn’t run any more. In 1979, she managed to get a harassment order and, in 1980, when her husband went to prison for manslaughter after killing a man in a brawl, she got a divorce and took out more injunctions against him. “I don’t know what it is, but they have a hold on you,” she says. “It has to be the right time to break that hold and get away.”

“People used to tell us we should be nicer to Dad,” says Fiona. “Our next-door neighbour, who could hear the violence – council houses have thin walls – used to say, ‘Your mum’s asking for it.’”

While Horley stresses that not all women want to go to a refuge – they have community-based services for those cases – many do. Yet refuges are facing unprecedented cuts: “There aren’t enough spaces to meet demand. Finding one is like finding gold dust, sometimes,” she says. Local authorities across England have cut their spending on refuges by nearly a quarter since 2010, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. In March of this year, 65% of councils responding to freedom of information requests by the Guardian confirmed they had cut funding in real terms over the past seven years. Since 2011, Refuge has seen funding for its safe-houses slashed, on average, by a third.

All of this is against the background of what Refuge calls the “single biggest threat to the future of refuges”: government proposals, published last October, to remove refuges from the welfare system, meaning vulnerable women will not be able to pay for placements using housing benefits. Currently, more than 50% of refuge funding comes from those benefits.

If the proposals, due to come into force in 2020, go ahead, Refuge is warning that four out of 10 refuges will have to close. According to Women’s Aid, 60% of all referrals to refuges were declined in 2016/17, usually owing to a lack of space, with figures suggesting that rate is even higher for BME women. The upshot is women are being left without the support they need at what can be the most fraught part of their journey – the time they try to flee.

It is ironic, given the funding crisis presented by the government’s proposals, that a new piece of legislation, spearheaded by Theresa May as part of her “longstanding commitment to end domestic abuse”, will provide a new statutory definition that includes economic as well as other non-physical abuse. It will also allow, according to May, for “tougher sentences in cases involving children, and will better protect victims with new domestic abuse protection orders”.

While charities working with victims welcome these efforts – Women’s Aid is calling it a “once in a generation opportunity” – Horley says the legislation is in danger of ignoring the fundamental cause of violence against women and girls, “which is gender inequality and discrimination”. She hopes the bill, due to be brought forward in draft form later this parliamentary year, will do more to recognise the gendered nature of domestic abuse – of the 6,000 survivors Refuge supports daily, about 3,500 are children, 2,500 are women and 100 are men. “Inequality and violence against women are two sides of the same coin,” she says. “One in four women will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime and many more will experience other forms of abuse because they are women.”

The proposals in the bill will “only be as good as their implementation”, she says. “We’re going to need funding to implement an infrastructure of services if we’re really going to end violence against women.” Sisters Uncut, a feminist direct-action group for domestic violence services, puts its perspective a little more bluntly: the bill, they say, is a “dangerous distraction from the real state of the domestic violence sector in the UK”, and that the government should be focusing on “refinancing refuges, reinstating legal aid and providing desperately needed housing for domestic violence survivors”.

Barbara cannot be sure what would have happened were it not for her time in the refuge, but knows it could have been a lot worse. “I could have ended up dead, I suppose … I don’t know how I would have managed.” Fiona doesn’t remember the refuge, but she knows it was a lifeline. “People seem to think women should somehow get themselves out of these situations, but even now, it seems nigh-on impossible … People still need help.”