Northern Ireland's first Women's Aid group#
Belfast Women's Aid was founded in 1975, the first Women's Aid group in Northern Ireland. With the groups set up in Derry and Coleraine two years later, it formed the Northern Ireland Women's Aid Federation in 1978, now Women's Aid Federation Northern Ireland, which remains its umbrella body. It describes its way of working as for women, with women and by women.
Today Belfast & Lisburn Women's Aid offers emergency accommodation, outreach for women still living at home, specialist counselling, group work, personal development training and children's services. It is also contracted by the Department of Justice to support female victims of human trafficking and modern slavery in Northern Ireland, and it works with GP practices through the IRIS programme.
Phone, email or webchat, on weekdays#
Its get help page gives three ways in, each staffed during weekday office hours, 9am to 5pm: phone, email and a webchat. You can talk to a worker at its Support and Resource Centre in Belfast, in your own home or at a safe place in your community. Evenings and weekends are covered by Northern Ireland's Domestic and Sexual Abuse Helpline, open round the clock by phone, email, webchat or text for anyone aged 16 or over.
Its Be Safe Online page is frank that clearing your history only goes so far, explains what browsers and spyware can record, and says a computer the other person never touches, at a library or a friend's house, is the only certain choice. A leave site button on every page goes straight to Google.
Three refuges, and how to ask for a place#
You can refer yourself to a refuge directly, by contacting the Support and Resource Centre in office hours or the 24-hour helpline in the evenings and at weekends. Agencies such as the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, the PSNI and social services also refer women. The charity has three refuges across Belfast and Lisburn; kitchens and living areas are shared, each refuge has wheelchair-friendly rooms, and children have a child worker and a playroom. You can stay as long as you need, whether a few days or until you are rehoused.
The One Stop Shop#
The One Stop Shop is a morning drop-in, with no appointment, for women experiencing financial, emotional, sexual or physical abuse or coercive control from a current or former partner. It gives free, confidential legal, benefits, housing and safety advice. Sessions run at several places in Belfast, Lisburn and Downpatrick, plus a monthly drop-in at the Shankill Shared Women's Centre, and the page lists the dates months ahead. It is the natural place to ask a legal question, including one about a change of name.
Two routes to a new name in Northern Ireland#
The charity publishes nothing on names. Northern Ireland offers two main routes. If your birth or adoption was registered there, GRONI, Northern Ireland's register office, will record a new forename or surname for £35, according to nidirect. A deed poll is the other route, and the one open to every resident wherever they were born; GOV.UK's wording lets you draft it yourself without paying. Our Northern Ireland page weighs one against the other and explains that licences there are issued by the DVA, not DVLA. Children's names follow another rule: every person who holds parental responsibility for the child has to agree, and if one will not, a court rules (children's names in Northern Ireland).
Its children's team works across Belfast, Lisburn and South Down, from pregnancy into adulthood, with one-to-one support from age three and peer groups from eight.
This page describes what Belfast & Lisburn Women's Aid publishes on its own website, read on 26 October 2026. The charity has not reviewed it, and listing a charity here does not mean it recommends this handbook or any deed poll service.
