By Sue McKellar, Participation Lead at Scottish Women’s Aid
Women’s Aid was built on participation, right from the first refuge space being made because a woman experiencing abuse said she needed to be in a safe place. The only difference between then and now is then we didn’t call it participation, it’s just what we did. We knew instinctively it made sense to ask those who needed help, what kind of help was best for them.
When I was a refuge worker and a new family moved into the space, I would never go shopping for new toys or household items without asking them what they needed first. And yet, it was standard practice to attend meetings with funders or service leads without having a practice ‘shopping list’ given to me by the same families. 15 years ago, when I first joined Women’s Aid, it was certainly not acceptable to turn up to any external meeting with a survivor and support them to present their views.
Luckily, in the past few years I’ve noticed a real difference in the opportunities we have to include survivors alongside us when discussing practices and essentially at the core of our own internal model of working.
We are managing to bring our original way of working, where survivors sat at the table alongside paid workers, but we are adapting to safely navigate the ever-increasing demands we face.
All across Scotland, local Women’s Aid groups are engaging in creative and imaginative participation work with survivors of all ages. Some groups have advisory boards, some peer advocates. Most are doing brilliant participation work without any project titles or specific funding. But women, children and young people are having their rights respected within our sector, to help challenge the other services who ignore their rights and force them into further abuse.
At Scottish Women’s Aid, we have a newly formed survivor’s group. An incredible group of women who come together because they know first-hand the lack of understanding and supportive processes there are for those who experience domestic abuse. Without exception, these women have been let down, ignored and placed in danger, because of a wilful ignorance of services whose role it is to protect them. They are angry, hurt, passionate, strong and scared for the women and children who have yet to escape their abusers.
They are willing to use their own experiences, to relive their worse memories and to take time to explain the very basics to people who should already know better; who should know how abusers operate, and how these services can protect survivors.
They inspire me and amaze me every day. I really wish everyone could hear them speak. But you can’t. Because we do participation safely and respectfully. We won’t ask survivors to tell any of their own story, it’s their insight and advice we need. No matter how often we are asked “for a survivor to make this more real”, they are not stories for hire. And by the way, we still get asked for this – A LOT.
If you are working on a policy or trying to improve practice which impacts survivors of domestic abuse, you should definitely be including those with that experience from the very start. No work should begin to take shape without their unique and essential experience. If it starts to take shape without them, it will be the wrong shape and won’t be fit for purpose.
For this to happen, you need time (a lot), a detailed and structured plan which includes time for risk assessments, training, feedback loop and wrap around support. You need the advice of others to guide you on best practice – every participation worker I know wants to speak about their work, there’s loads of us about – just ask! You need to do your research into participation models that take a rights-based approach, and you need a budget.
Budgeting is difficult. Those of us who work in the third sector know the struggle only too well. And participation work is so difficult to budget for. Many times, I’ve sat with a line manager and said “I don’t know how long this will last, or what outcomes the group will want until we start. But can I have some money please?” and seen their furrowed brows. But if you want to do it safely and successfully you need to focus on what will make that happen. And that is care.
Demonstrate you care enough to research, plan and change your traditional way of working to ensure that those taking part are taken care of as much as they can be. The work needs a safe space where they feel confident and comfortable to share their views. But it also needs time before and after the work itself.
Imagine your worst memory. Imagine you’re going to have to think about it and possibly discuss it tomorrow for an hour, with a group of strangers and that how you do that could be the difference between other women and children being safe or not. That’s quite a lot of pressure, isn’t it?
You might not sleep the night before because you’re worried, so you’ll be tired. You might be so anxious you can’t make breakfast, or you have to drop your kids off with your mum before you go to the meeting, so you’ll be hungry. You might remember the threats your abuser made to you if you told anyone what was happening, so you’re physically shaking and a panic attack or migraine is coming on.
Then you get on a bus to the meeting. You’re asked to hand over your bus ticket for expenses. You’re given a cup of tea and a biscuit. You’re then asked to relive the most traumatic experience of your life while strangers take notes. You’re thanked and then back on the bus, alone, to sit with your memories. You’re not sure if what you said was helpful because it’s a confidential process and no end date is confirmed for publication. But you’re feeling absolutely empowered because you have the knowledge that you’re part of something that could make a difference.
That was a joke. You’re not empowered. You’re alone. You’re still tired and hungry and you’ve got to go pick up the kids because your mum can’t afford to feed them lunch again. And you have no idea if you’ve helped anyone, because you’re not part of any meeting after that one.
This is often the scenario we’re presented with. We are asked to ‘find’ survivors to talk to people without any budget at all. But our participation standards and ethics have been developed with survivors who have told us what feels safe and what doesn’t.
We know a survivor supporting our work may not have slept, so we sort out convenient transport for her. We give her mum money to buy the kids lunch if they need it. We provide food and refreshments that she likes, and we make sure she is not alone before, during or after the meeting. We make sure she receives payment, just like everyone else in the room and we always make sure she knows exactly where her words will be written and who will see them. That way, she might feel empowered and more likely to share her expertise with confidence, but she’s still very, very likely to feel all those horrible memories again. No amount of budgeting can prevent that, but it is vital to make it as safe as possible.
So, if your role or project requires you to speak to those with “lived experience” (hands up who already hates that term!?), put yourself in their shoes. Feel how small and uncomfortable those shoes are and then try your very best to make them better.
Participation work isn’t easy, it shouldn’t be easy. It’s really, really fragile and needs a lot of attention. It cannot and should not be carried out by anyone who hasn’t had a chance to learn from those who have taken part before. There are a lot of people doing it really well in Scotland, so seek them out and learn from them. Or you’ll be one of the ones that is doing it really badly. And when you do participation badly, good people get hurt.
You can find out more about Scottish Women’s Aid’s participation work by emailing survivors@womensaid.scot
