Born to be specialist, forced to be generic: DVA and the invisible role of small specialist by and for services

This article explores how hostile immigration policies and No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) restrictions shift the responsibility of supporting Black and Minoritised survivors of domestic violence and abuse (DVA) onto small specialist by and for organisations. Based on ethnographically informed qualitative research in Nottingham with survivors, frontline practitioners and local authority stakeholders, the article shows how these organisations provide emergency accommodation, subsistence, safeguarding and immigration-related support that would normally fall within statutory services, despite lacking comparable funding and recognition. The findings also demonstrate that the increasing demand for crisis intervention limits organisations’ ability to sustain the culturally specific, preventative and community-based support for which they were originally created. The article argues that organisational ‘smallness’ should be understood not simply as a matter of size, but as a structural position produced through hostile immigration governance, unequal commissioning practices and welfare retrenchment. In doing so, it highlights the indispensable yet under-recognised role of small specialist organisations within domestic violence and abuse support systems.