A farcical way to fund women’s services

The Home Office (UK) is running a pilot participatory budgeting scheme to fund projects responding to violence against women and girls.  More information from a local student newspaper here.

Against the backdrop of huge funding cuts to this sector, asking the public to vote by text to allocate only £3,000 to successful projects is trivialising.  Also, given the extent of rape culture, (e.g. this, with a trigger warning for victim blaming) how can we put these issues to the vote?

“…how are these charities to appeal for votes? Are they expected to describe their work in gory detail, to ‘sex it up’ to attract attention? Will they minimise their involvement in those forms of abuse which attract less public sympathy?”

It’s great that the government came up with an extra bit of money for VAW issues, presumably by cutting something equally important somewhere else, but do they really have to allocate it using this farcical scheme?