Why Should Our Rage Be Tidy?
Minoritised Survivors' Experiences of Mental Health in the context of Violence Abuse
Black and minoritised women across the UK are enduring a mental health crisis driven by violence, trauma, systemic failures, and structural injustice. Our latest report with Prof. Ravi Thiara (University of Warwick) and Women & Girls Network (WGN) explores intersection and life-altering consequences of mental ill-health and trauma experienced by racially minoritised women, due to violence and abuse.
Women accessing
mental health support are
3 times more likely
to have experienced domestic
violence abuse in the last year
Black and minoritised women across the UK are being failed by systemic neglect and a lack of specialist trauma informed care, leaving their needs unmet, their voices unheard and their mental health disregarded and devalued.
Our latest report ‘Why Should Our Rage Be Tidy?’ uncovers the compounded effects of domestic and sexual violence and mental health struggles for Black and minoritised survivors. Grounded in insights and accounts from survivor activists, as well as practitioners in the field of VAWG and mental health, and specialist women’s and ‘by and for’ Black and minoritised-led organisations, the report centres the lived experiences of women navigating intersecting realities of violence, racism, and mental health crises.
The report highlights trauma amplified by structural inequalities, social stigma and institutional neglect; and exposes the dismissive and fragmented response of both statutory and specialist services. It urges a radical reimagining of VAWG and mental health systems, to dismantle systemic racism, amplify survivor voices, and prioritise intersectional healing.
Parliamentary Event
Highlights from the Why Should Our Rage Be Tidy? parliamentary event - where lived experiences and expert analysis championed the fight for systemic change.
“Accessing mental health services has itself caused mental health issues, like feelings of isolation and weariness of who I can trust, having to explain myself a million times over. All of that I feel like it triggers stuff in you or it creates a new mental health issue and that is ironic. I'm trying to seek help and you're causing me more stress”.
“I just want to teach myself to go back to how I was before I disclosed anything to any organisation, the police the social worker. I want to pull myself back to where I was because that time I was still able to manage my life, but now I feel in disarray. I'm this, I'm that, I'm on medication for different things. I don't have any control over my life. I feel like I'm dead. I'm afraid of my own shadow. I feel scared in the night, when I see my reflection I jump. Sometimes I'm bursting into tears in the house and the kids are saying mummy what's wrong. I'm constantly crying. I'm not myself anymore”.
A survivor describes the devastating impact of a system that retraumatises, instead of supports.
The need for this research?
The systems that claim to support Black and minoritised women have failed us. With their biases and blind spots, they were never built for us. They are Eurocentric, judgmental, and dismissive of our needs. They silence us, stereotype us, and fail to see us as we truly are.
As a result, they fuel a mental health crisis that pushes Black and minortised women and girls further into isolation, neglect, insecurity, erosion of self-worth, the burden of coping alone, embarrassment, shame, and the devastating disconnect from even recognising the violence, abuse, or ill-health they’ve experienced - leaving us without the support or understanding we need. The mental health of Black and minoritised women and girls is compounded by misdiagnosis, racial stereotyping, and a lack of specialist trauma informed care,.
This report, born from the urgent need to expose these deep flaws within the UK systems, demands that Black and minoritised women’s right to heal is recognised and upheld. It uncovers the intersecting challenges these women face, not only from domestic and sexual violence, but also from compounding social issues such as immigration restrictions, discrimination, poverty, isolation, and health inequalities.
This is the culmination of a long and often unseen fight led by survivor activists who refuse to let these injustices be swept aside.
The right to heal is non-negotiable
“They gaslight you and they make you think that you are the mad one when actually it's your services... they're all trying to tell you, you are the problem. It's like, no, you are the problem because you're not seeing me right. You're not seeing me as a human. I'm crying. I'm on my knees, I'm asking for help and it's like, you're still looking at me like, Oh, well, get yourself together”.
A survivor speaks about systemic racism and dehumanisation in services.
-
Black and minoritised women often face stigma, misdiagnosis, and a profound lack of empathy within healthcare and support systems. These systems frequently ignore the root trauma - often caused by VAWG - and instead focus on labels, perpetuating a cycle of marginalisation and disbelief.
-
The intersecting impacts of race and gender amplify the effects of trauma. This makes specialist trauma informed ‘by and for’ support absolutely essential, yet it remains largely absent within mainstream services, leaving many survivors without the tailored care they desperately need.
-
Survivors have identified both helpful and harmful experiences along their healing journeys. Helpful pathways often include specialist ‘by and for’ counselling and peer support, and services that acknowledge their unique lived experiences. Harmful experiences, however, include retraumatising encounters with service providers who dismiss their needs, reinforce negative stereotypes, or fail to provide adequate care for intersecting issues such as immigration status, poverty, and racial discrimination.
-
Despite the challenges, minoritised women have continually resisted and challenged harmful labels and stigma associated with their trauma. Through activism, solidarity, and creating their own support networks, survivors have taken control of their healing journeys, carving out spaces where they can be seen and heard as they truly are.
-
The mental health system is deeply fragmented, with under-resourced services and long wait times creating a barrier to consistent, trauma-informed care. Survivors often struggle to navigate this disjointed system, which leaves them without the healing support they require.
-
Many minoritised women have found support in grassroots organisations and community-led initiatives, where empathy, specialist and trauma enforced support, and holistic care are often present. However, these informal networks are insufficiently resourced and cannot replace the need for systemic change in formal support structures.
-
Legal, healthcare, and social systems fail to provide adequate support, denying survivors access to justice, safety, and healing. There is an urgent need for reforms that ensure services are accessible, trauma informed, and intersectional. Survivors demand a shift towards trauma-informed care, longer-term support, and a holistic approach to healing that takes into account the unique experiences of Black and minoritised women.
Our report exposes the multilayered impacts of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) on Black and minoritised women and the mental health fallout, exacerbated by systemic failures.
Some of our key findings include:
The hidden cost of neglect
A Charter for Change:
‘Resisting the System’
7 Demands
for Dignity,
from Survivor
Activists
Alongside our report, we are releasing a Charter for Change, crafted by survivor-activists, calling for holistic, racially aware, survivor-centred, and trauma-informed support that truly meets the needs of Black and minoritised women.
This Charter is an unapologetic call to the system, by those it has failed, demanding better care; and the recognition that violence against Black and minoritised women is not just a personal experience but a structural, societal failure.
This essential resource provides a pathway to urgently needed system-wide transformation, outlining what true solidarity, respect, and justice should look like for Black and minoritised survivors.
Voices of resistance and resilience
“We do hold it together, hold it together, hold it together. And when we're older and things start to go wrong, we start to present... Everyone thinks everyone's okay because they're not banging their head against the wall. But there is a lot of help that is needed in our community with the whole mental health thing”.
“I realised from counselling, that I have so much anger and pain, frustration and just feeling unsupported. I didn't make that connection, until I let go of the pain... I think the reason why the depression affected me so much was because I thought I forgave but I didn't forgive, and when I finally linked it in the counselling sessions, that's when slowly but surely everything, the bad moods, the negative thoughts, made sense. Now I am opening up to a new world where I can actually talk about my feelings without feeling embarrassed whereas I always felt that it was my responsibility to be strong”
“These services in themselves, they perpetuate abuse. You have no control. You are labelled, you know, especially the BPD … you’re automatically looked at in a certain way and looked at negatively and judged ... You're less likely to go to court, you're less likely to be taken seriously. People are told not to believe people who have that. The one diagnosis that they're throwing out like sweets. Sweets, literally. So that really concerns me about the health services and how women ... there's a word ... pathologise ... how women are being pathologised ... that’s exactly me... so quick to do that to women ... and not looking at what’s happening to people. That's why I believe the whole of mental health services is wrong ... if someone's been abused they don't have a mental illness”.
“At the time I didn't realise that I was clinically depressed... I didn't seek help because I didn't realise I had mental health issues and that's how crazy it sounds... I think when people are deeply depressed they don't even know. I didn't know that there was something wrong with me personally”.
“GPs are not very good at picking up the causes, the root issues and instead prescribe things that are short-term... move onto the next one … like a plaster. Nothing that was preventative practice or proactive”
“Her answer to everything was medication and medication isn't going to help trauma. It will cover it up for a little bit, the deeply rooted issues. I felt like I presented with deep rooted issues.
“They don't see me as a whole person, I've not had that support … when it comes to domestic violence”.
“Black mental health is not really talked about, even my own. We don't know it's real and when it does hit us we are like what's wrong with us, like we are not human. When it happened to me I was like how can this happen to me, I'm Black ... sort of like we are immune to it. So when we get older it's strange to us because we don’t know where to turn, and we are often embarrassed”.
“You also need a hug. You also need a place to cry. You also need validation that what happened to you was real. And I think that is something that's very much lacking ... We don't have that space to be soft ... We are humans and we're never seen as that”.
“The stigma of people knowing, that I think has a lot to do with how you see yourself and what's happened, the judgement, the embarrassment that you allowed it to happen... I moved away from my abusive partner so to the community, I'm not good enough to mingle with them ... Nobody wants to associate with you. Their husbands see you as a bad influence, so nobody wants to work with you. That's what I'm going through, like you're not supposed to report your abuser. Culturally, it's not allowed”.
Truths from the frontline
‘By and for’ specialist services cannot be the only lifeline
Black and minoritised survivors echoed that the first time they felt truly seen, safe, and supported, was after connecting with specialist ‘by and for’ Black and minoritised VAWG organisations. But these services cannot carry the weight of systemic failure alone.
“When I was in a safer environment it's like the floodgates were open. It's a different type of crying. It's a new realm of feelings and I’m safe finally around people who are not going to question that I did wrong, people who are not going to get me to tell the story a million times over in the exact same words. I was finally safe and that's what the difference was for me”.
“It was a space where I could speak about things that I had never spoken about, what was going on in my head I could share that with another human. It was being kept private and I felt that just by letting it out, expressing myself, expressing my feelings, that's how my emotional management started. The journey before that was just suffering and dying inside”.
“My support worker, she's almost like a bullet proof vest for me. I do still feel the heaviness, the weight of this process at times, but she feels it first and she can dilute it. She can prepare me for what's coming. … It is important to have her there to almost be the front of house for the visitors coming and you can prepare yourself in the back ..”.
Stop Treating Survival as a Disorder
Our recommendations for change:
This report goes beyond exposing injustice and offers concrete recommendations for policy and practice. We have laid out clear recommendations to transform support pathways, calling for trauma-informed, culturally responsive care that respects the unique challenges and strengths of Black and minoritised survivors - instead of just medicating trauma, pathologising trauma, and neglecting systemic inequalities.
The report outlines essential changes to improve mental health support for Black and minoritised women survivors of violence. It calls for:
-
National and local health systems, including NHS, Home Office, and Department for Health and Social Care, must urgently reform health pathways. This involves building strategic collaborations with minoritised-led VAWG organisations like Imkaan to regularly review and improve commissioning approaches, address health system inequalities, track barriers to access, and amplify the voices of Black and minoritised survivors.
Additionally, local health systems (ICSs and ICBs) should work with specialist 'by and for' VAWG organisations to ensure trauma-informed, equitable, and intersectional care that meets the needs of survivors.
-
Current training falls short. Healthcare systems must transform how they understand and address trauma for Black and minoritised survivors, ensuring all staff receive comprehensive VAWG-specific, intersectional training to provide compassionate, survivor-centred care, and avoid re-traumatisation.
This training must be developed and delivered by Black and minoritised-led VAWG organisations, embedding expertise into NHS strategies to prevent re-traumatisation and improve outcomes for minoritised survivors facing systemic inequalities.
-
The health system must move away from racialised, biased responses and from over-medicalising trauma with diagnoses like Borderline Personality Disorder; and instead adopt survivor-centred, relational, and strengths-based care that avoids racialised victim-blaming stereotypes and recognises the trauma that survivors experience. This requires embedding anti-racist mental health frameworks into the Mental Health Bill, addressing racial and gender disparities in care, and ensuring Black and minoritised women have access to early intervention and preventative, holistic care and support. Ensuring that our communities can access preventative care and early intervention is essential for healing and long-term mental health.
Additionally, reforms must address the racial profiling, over-policing, and retraumatisation that minoritised survivors face within mental health care, with Black and minoritised-led VAWG groups directly involved in shaping policies and joint strategies to ensure equitable, trauma-informed responses from health services and the criminal justice system.
-
The health system must implement anti-racist frameworks, such as the Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF), across mental health trusts to ensure equitable care for minoritised communities. Survivors of violence and abuse must be actively involved in shaping national and local health strategies to create policies that reflect their lived experiences and address their needs.
Additionally, statutory bodies must allocate resources to train frontline workers - including those in healthcare, social services, and law enforcement - on the intersectionality of race, gender, and violence, ensuring compassionate, trauma-informed care.
Addressing societal and community pressures that compound trauma is equally vital, creating accessible, non-judgmental pathways that respect survivor agency and promote healing.
Expanding therapeutic frameworks to include the impacts of racial trauma will address the Eurocentric limitations currently embedded in mental health support for minoritised communities.
-
Funders and health systems must support specialist Black and minoritised-led VAWG organisations in enabling meaningful, long-term survivor participation in training development, service design, and policymaking. Survivors bring essential expertise rooted in lived experience, which should inform services beyond tokenistic or exploitative involvement. By funding mentoring, educational, and skills-building programmes, these organisations can empower survivors to create systemic change while ensuring their involvement supports healing, independence, and resistance.
-
NHS workforce strategies must address barriers preventing Black and minoritised communities from entering and thriving in therapeutic roles. This includes targeted workforce development initiatives, funding for training, and creating pathways to specialist supervision. Black and minoritised professionals must also have opportunities to step into leadership roles, ensuring representation at all levels. By fostering diversity, the mental health workforce can better reflect and serve Black and minoritised survivors, enabling more equitable and culturally responsive care.
-
Health systems and research bodies must prioritise the lived experiences of minoritised survivors in data collection and research. Accurate, context-sensitive insights - developed in collaboration with Black and minoritised-led organisations - are vital to identifying and addressing health inequalities. Redefining research frameworks to reflect survivors’ experiences of violence and systemic oppression will create meaningful, actionable knowledge to guide care and policy.
-
We urgently need increased, sustainable funding for specialist ‘by and for’ Black and minoritised-led VAWG organisations. These organisations provide culturally appropriate, trauma-informed services that are rooted in the lived realities of minoritised survivors, addressing the gaps left by mainstream services. Their unique understanding of structural discrimination, intersectionality, and community-specific needs enables us to deliver more effective, holistic support that statutory services consistently fail to provide.
Approaches to recovery must expand beyond Eurocentric, one-size-fits-all models like generic NHS talking therapies, which often pathologise survivors rather than validating their trauma. Specialist organisations draw on diverse knowledge systems and lived experiences, offering multifaceted programmes that address not only mental health but also systemic barriers like immigration issues, housing, and economic stability.
Without adequate and long-term funding, these organisations will continue to be undervalued, leaving survivors without access to the life-changing support they need. Investment in these services is not just about sustaining their work but recognising their indispensable role in challenging systemic racism and providing survivor-led, rights-based advocacy. -
Stronger government leadership is essential in addressing the systemic barriers faced by minoritised survivors. Policies and responses must be intersectional and grounded in the lived experiences of these women. This includes holding public bodies accountable for delivering culturally competent and trauma-informed services, ensuring minoritised survivors are at the heart of policy design and implementation.
These recommendations are designed to address the root causes of harm and provide comprehensive, survivor-centred support that respects and preserves the identities and experiences of Black and minoritised women. They seek to offer pathways to healing that do not erase their identity but instead honour their lived realities.
Our aim is to build a health and social care system that not only acknowledges systemic inequalities but actively works to dismantle them. The government must prioritise the well-being of survivors with the same urgency and dignity as it does other aspects of justice, creating a future where Black and minoritised survivors can heal, thrive, and live with dignity and respect.
“The main thing is to fight with the fear and say all the time - I will do it, I will do it.
You have to have trust in yourself ... you can fight for yourself, you are stronger than you think”.
“Say no and stand for yourself, do not allow yourself to reach a point where you are dying for somebody else's mistakes. Prioritise yourself, it's not a sin to prioritise yourself, it's not a bad thing to put yourself first as long as you are not putting yourself first to destroy others...if it reaches a point where you cannot hold it, speak to somebody...Try and find somebody that you can trust and speak to, somebody somewhere out there will hear you”.
A Survivor shares a powerful message about self-prioritization, setting boundaries,
and seeking support in the face of adversity.
Let’s get loud about whats happening! 📢
Please show your support for Black and minoritised women and the importance of their mental health by sharing our report on social media. Only when we all speak up, can we drive the change that’s so desperately needed.
If you’re on X (formerly Twitter) we have a ready-made tweet and graphic that you can post, in a few clicks!
For any media requests about this report, please contact us at info@imkaan.org.uk
Specialist support is available if you have been affected by these issues
-
Support for Black & minoritised women
You are not alone. Our ‘Get Help’ page lists organisations across the UK that specialise in helping women + girls from Black or minoritised communities who have experienced violence & abuse.
-
Women and Girls Network (Co-author)
Women and Girls Network (WGN) is a free specialist service run by women, for women and girls in London, who have been affected by all forms of violence and abuse. They provide holistic support for survivors.
-
The University of Warwick
The University of Warwick is a leading institution driving meaningful change through transformative research and impact services. Prof. Ravi Thiara has been a prominent leader in research & writings on VAWG for many years.