Immediate Domestic Abuse Support
This page explains how we provide immediate support to survivors of domestic abuse. If you are in immediate danger, contact 999 to speak with the police or other emergency services.
If you live in the Leeds area and need urgent mental health support contact 0800 183 1485 to speak to the single point of access team or visit Leeds York PFT.
If you don’t live in Leeds and are experiencing domestic abuse, you can call the National Domestic Abuse Helpline on: 0808 2000 247
Call Our Helpline
Available 24/7
Online Chat With Us
Available Monday to Friday 1pm – 4pm, apart from bank holidays.
How we can support you
Access & Assessment Team
The first point of contact within Leeds Women’s Aid is the Access and Assessment Team. We are here to provide immediate support via our helpline, webchat and email in order to help you to access relevant domestic abuse support within our service or to be signposted to the appropriate service.
Our Access and Assessment Team treat others with empathy and respect. In return, we expect our staff to be treated with the same. We understand that people can sometimes act out of character when facing distressing circumstances, especially after experiencing trauma. This can occasionally result in unacceptable behaviour, such as aggression and abuse. While we aim to listen to and support all our service users as best we can, our staff should also be able to do their jobs without being treated badly. In order to protect our staff’s welfare, there may be times when we need to take steps to manage and challenge such unacceptable behaviour.
How to access the services
You can get in touch with us in the following ways:
24-hour helpline
Our helpline is a 24-hour, 7-day a week service where you can call anonymously to talk about your options, receive some emotional support, or seek advice if you are worried about someone else.
Helpline workers will provide a trauma-informed response that is empathetic and they will listen to you in your time of need. The team will ask questions about what’s happened to you in order to establish risk and provide you with the best and most relevant support at that time.
If needed, the team can make ongoing referrals with your consent, to external services or take self-referrals into Leeds Women’s Aid services.
The demand for our helpline can mean we can’t always answer calls on the first try. If this happens when you call, please either leave us a message with contact details and a time that’s safe to call you back or get in touch with us again. We are here for you and want to help.
Online Chat
Our online chat is available Monday to Friday 1pm – 4pm (apart from bank holidays) and you can leave a message outside of those hours and workers will respond via email when the chat is online. Please note that out of hours, the online chat service displays as a ‘Help’ box at the bottom of the screen, you can click this button to leave us a message.
We understand that making a phone call can be difficult, especially if you live with your abuser. You can speak to a worker through this service and access the same support as you would through the helpline number.
The online chat is also a confidential service, and your information would not be shared with other agencies, unless there was an immediate risk to you or your direct family.
Our email support is run through our partner Leeds Domestic Violence Service, the email address is: [email protected]
If you contact us via email, please be aware this is not an immediate response but we aim to get back to you within 2 working days.