Imkaan Responds: The Mental Health Act 2025 Fails Black and Minoritised Victim-Survivors of VAWG
October 2025
The Mental Health Act 2025 Fails Black and Minoritised Victim-Survivors of VAWG
The Government has just passed the Mental Health Act 2025, which fails to include any meaningful action to address the racial disparities faced by Black and minoritised victim-survivors of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) under the Mental Health Act 1983.
The 2024 Labour Party manifesto states that the “operation of the Mental Health Act (1983) discriminates against Black people”. The Government committed to modernising mental health legislation in order to deliver dignity, autonomy, and choice for all. However, despite acknowledging the racial disparities of the previous Act, the Mental Health Act 2025 continues to impose structural inequalities, social stigma and institutional neglect, and exposes the dismissive and fragmented response of both statutory and specialist services.
This failure is not an oversight, but it is a continuation of injustice. Black and minoritised victim-survivors of VAWG face mental health systems that misdiagnose, pathologise, and dismiss their trauma. The persistent racial disparities under the Mental Health Act — where Black people are far more likely to be detained, sectioned, or placed under community treatment orders — expose deep-rooted systemic racism in mental health care. For Black and minoritised victim-survivors of VAWG, this means that experiences of trauma linked to violence and abuse are too often interpreted through a lens of “risk” or “instability,” rather than recognised as legitimate responses to harm. By refusing to embed an understanding of racism and VAWG into mental health reform, the Government once again erases these women from policy and care.
Our Why Should Our Rage Be Tidy report exposed how Black and minoritised victim-survivors of VAWG face discriminatory, dismissive, and re-traumatising mental health support. In the report, we recommended that the Bill must address racial and gender inequalities faced by Black and minoritised victim-survivors of VAWG in mental healthcare. It should prioritise improved data collection, funding to Black and minoritised led ‘by and for’ organisations, and appoint a Mental Health Commissioner to ensure accountability and advocate for affected communities. Nearly a year later, the Government’s refusal to act shows a clear disregard for evidence, specialist expertise, and lived experience. In passing this legislation, it has chosen to maintain a system that punishes Black and minoritised victim-survivors of VAWG for their pain that continues to harm the very people it claims to protect.
The Government has not only failed to protect Black and minoritised victim-survivors of VAWG in policy, but also in practice. Responses to our Freedom of Information (FoI) requests from Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) also paint an alarming picture of inequality. Most are not only failing to meet their Public Sector Equality Duty, but they are also failing in their legal obligations to promote integration and reduce inequalities under the National Health Service Act 2006. Out of 41 ICBs that responded, only one had funded a specialist VAWG service led by and for Black and minoritised women between 2022 and 2025.
It is a shocking reflection of how invisible the needs of Black and minoritised victim-survivors of VAWG remain largely invisible within the mental health system. Despite evidence showing that Black and minoritised women experience disproportionate levels of violence, trauma, and barriers to accessing support, the vast majority of ICBs have failed to provide dedicated funding or tailored services. This gap demonstrates a persistent failure to address racial inequalities in the provision of mental health and VAWG support, leaving many Black and minoritised victim-survivors fof VAWG without the specialist appropriate care they urgently need.
By and for services are being forced to pick up where the government is failing, doing vital work without the sustainable funding they need. In our report, we recommend that specialist by and for services must be properly funded to deliver tailored therapeutic support rooted in intersectional understanding.
The Government’s ambition to halve VAWG can only be realised if it delivers meaningful reform to the mental health system. The forthcoming VAWG strategy presents a critical opportunity to centre Black and minoritised victims-survivors of VAWG at the centre of policy and service design, ensuring care is intersectional, holistic, and trauma-informed.
Imkaan will be publishing further data and findings from our FOI requests to ICBs to highlight the failures of mental health systems in the UK, and the disproportionate impact these failures have on Black and minoritised victims-survivors of VAWG.