I could spout on and on about all the things wrong with the Legal Aid reforms set out in the Green Paper published last month (and indeed I already have), but in fact Polly Curtis has already done it for me, in this recent article in The Guardian – she is of course absolutely right about the disproportionate effect on women that these reforms will have, both because they are more often victims of non-physical forms of domestic abuse and because they are more often financially vulnerable, whereas a higher proportion of men will be able to afford to pay for lawyers where legal aid will not be available than would be the case for women. The government’s opining that it is necessary “to restrict the definition of domestic violence to one that could be demonstrated through “clear, objective evidence”” rather begs the question of whether or not it is appropriate at all to attempt to use such a concept as criteria for eligibility for legal aid in the first place. In order to protect one needs to adopt an expansive and flexible definition of abuse, for the worst abuse is often the least visible and the hardest to articulate.