Politicians ‘peacock’ over single-sex spaces – so why do they ignore vulnerable women on mixed-sex wards?

I am rarely surprised when there is a new breaking story about routine levels of sexual violence in institutions. However, in reading the findings of the joint investigation between The Independent and Sky News, I find myself aghast at the sheer scale and mishandling of sexual abuse and violence in our nation’s mental health facilities.

I have worked for decades with women who suffer from severe and enduring mental health crises. Women with serious substance misuse illnesses. Women who have self-harmed to the point that there isn’t an inch of their skin that I can see that isn’t tattooed with ligature marks. Every single one of the women I have known who ended up so ill with their mental health that they would be clinically monitored or institutionalised were made sick from abuses and violence they had suffered at the hands of men in their lives or institutions they had relied on.

If any institution should be acutely aware of the needs of this group – the need for safety, security and protection from harm – it should be those places intended to help people recover from such trauma. Much like abuses highlighted in our children’s care system, it is both harrowing and surprising to hear that 20,000 allegations of sexual assaults in 10 years could be the reality.

That 500 sexual assaults have been reported on mixed-sex wards is shocking, but what should shock us even more is that vulnerable people would be housed in such a way. There is no way on earth that I would think it appropriate for a woman so overtaken by trauma that she is left without the ability to function outside of a hospital to be placed in a ward where a man sleeps next to her. For all the government’s peacocking over single-sex spaces, they allow these conditions to continue.

The stories of allegations being ignored are perhaps the least surprising part of this investigation. It is hard enough for women without mental health issues to have their stories of sexual violence believed by institutions, with the current rate of successful rape charges sitting below 2 per cent. Imagine how difficult it must be for those with additional needs to have their stories heard; not to mention the number of abusers who try to use mental health stigma against their victims when exposed.

Considering how often abuse and trauma play a factor in the history of those who end up institutionalised for their mental health, you might think that every mental health trust in the country would have commissioned specialist abuse-based trauma services. You would think that specialist rape crisis organisations or domestic abuse organisations would already be working in partnership with mental health trusts to offer services. You might think that women who had suffered abuse would be routinely offered women’s-only substance abuse services, or that there were already women’s-only trauma units up and down the country. You would be very wrong.

There are, for example, only two places in the country that I have encountered where women with what professionals call a “toxic trio” of mental health issues, interpersonal abuse and substance misuse can be housed with their children in order to recover.

Knowing how lacking our current mental health infrastructure is for victims of abuse, and how overlooked women’s health has been in this area, you would think I would not be surprised to hear of such wide-scale levels of abuse and violence occurring within these institutions. Yet I am. I am because they should know better than other universal services than to ignore vulnerable people. They should all be trained in the vulnerabilities of their client group. Their standards should certainly be higher than those of the local GP.

The government must immediately outline what they will do in response to this crisis. At the very least, they must tell us how they will ensure safe single-sex spaces for the nation’s most vulnerable women and men – if they do not, then we will know that when it comes to these issues, they are all talk and no action.

Jess Phillips is Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley