Domestic abuse survivors being let down by legal aid

The National

12-05-2025

My mother and I saw the failures of Scottish legal aid first hand after fleeing more than a decade of coercive control. And at every step, women of colour face barriers made worse by a lack of cultural awareness, urgency, and empathy. Until legal aid improves not just in access but also in quality, it will continue to retraumatise those it is meant to protect.
Accessing a civil legal aid solicitor in Scotland is nearly impossible. Survivors often face complex legal battles – divorces involving property, fraud, or serving papers to abusers who have fled abroad. Few solicitors can afford to take these cases on at legal aid rates.
As the 2024 Annual Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB) report shows, legal aid firms are in steep decline, leaving survivors stranded.
We called more than 100 firms from the Law Society of Scotland and Scottish Women's Rights Centre directories. The few who answered said we might not qualify for legal aid.
Although we were destitute, the board treated a potential future claim to a remortgaged house – requiring the abuser's co-operation – as evidence of my mother's wealth.
Meanwhile, the abuser, safely abroad, weaponised expensive lawyers. We had no solicitor to respond, no safety net.
Even with a solicitor, survivors must reapply to SLAB for every court order and justify urgency each time, with no real-time support.
Solicitors often step back until funding is approved, leaving survivors – many of them non-native speakers – to navigate a complex system alone. Children are often pulled in as default interpreters. I usually find the stereotype of migrant kids doing their parents' paperwork offensive. But coercive control erodes confidence.
Despite my mother's education, years of fear and gaslighting left her unable to navigate the process alone. So I stepped in to translate.
As an adult, I could bear that burden – but in other families, the daughter filling out the legal aid form might still be in her school uniform. This lack of support not only isolates survivors, it also places a burden on children already being forced to grow up too soon.
Our first application for a civil protection order was rejected, exposing the board's lack of cultural awareness. Following Sri Lankan custom, our abuser's documents listed both his cultural and given names. The board misread this as my mother trying to divorce two men and denied our claim.
Worse, they cited the abuser's possible absence from the UK – a common issue for migrant survivors – as another reason to refuse. Despite an active police warrant, he travels freely between Sri Lanka and the UK and his whereabouts are unknown.
Scottish legal aid fails women of colour not only through access barriers but also in the quality of service provided. Once my mother was finally granted advice and assistance through legal aid, the support she received was slow, impersonal, and devoid of empathy.
During the entire course of her case, her solicitors never saw her face. Like many legal aid clients post-pandemic, our only contact was through crackling phone lines and unanswered emails.
Recounting rape and coercive control to a voice on the phone – with no warmth, no facial cues – is profoundly alienating.
The delays were staggering. Just securing a phone appointment took weeks. There was unanswered emails, gatekeeping by legal secretaries, missed calls, and repeated cancellations. When we learned a bank had repossessed and was trying to sell our family home, we begged our solicitor to get an injunction.
If the house was sold, then we would have to rely on the abuser's co-operation to claim equity. However, he had fled abroad again.
It took us nearly two months to get a phone appointment. The solicitor changed or missed the call five times. Weeks of emails – including those from Women's Aid, which stepped in on our behalf – were ignored.
Only after a senior Women's Aid practitioner intervened, citing my mother's cancer diagnosis and the impact the stress of this case was causing to her health, did the firm finally respond. By then, the house had already been sold. The solicitor didn't even know until we told her. This wasn't an isolated experience.
Many women of colour on legal aid feel deprioritised, while those who pay privately receive timely, personalised support. Legal aid clients, who are disproportionately women of colour, are left chasing solicitors who offer generic advice, disconnected from the realities of migrant survivors.
Our solicitor dismissed the cross-border complexities of our case, assuring my mother, wrongly, that the law could force her fugitive abuser to agree to a fair settlement.
When the house sale went through and our hopes of equity vanished abroad, she deflected blame, implying my mother had misunderstood her poor advice due to a language barrier. She even suggested my mother sounded confused and needed a translator.
Survivors can't even hold poor legal service to account, as doing so risks losing the only representation they have. Filing a complaint with the Scottish Legal Aid Board feels impossible when there are so few solicitors willing to take on legal aid cases in the first place.
As the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill moves through the Scottish Parliament, we have a rare chance to make civil legal aid truly work for survivors. While the bill includes important measures to prevent retraumatisation in court, many survivors never even make it that far.
Expanding legal aid eligibility and funding more firms is vital, but it only solves part of the problem. The most devastating failures come after survivors find representation – when delays, miscommunication, and impersonal service compound trauma. For women from migrant and minority communities, these failures are intensified by cultural blind spots and a lack of trauma-informed care.
Coercive control thrives on making victims feel isolated and helpless. When legal processes are cold, confusing, or dismissive, they become just another form of control. For my mother, legal aid promised protection but the system felt more like her abuser than her advocate.
Unless we rehumanise the legal aid service and rebuild it with the needs of diverse survivors at its core, victims' rights will remain theoretical. We cannot settle for paper rights and promised equities. Civil legal aid must be reformed – urgently and equitably.
The name of the writer of this piece is being withheld