Baobab Women’s Project advocates for refugee and migrant women transitioning through the government systems. When it comes to tackling gender-based violence, the big picture for Baobab is the need to change the structure of the system. Their aim is to make seeking protection, or migrating abroad, a clear process that’s easy for women to navigate. This will help to ensure women aren’t left in exploitative situations relying on others for their basic needs.
As part of #16DaysofActivism, Baobab Women’s Project has created the first infographic in a three-part series designed to simplify the transition journeys women take once they get to the UK. The process of claiming asylum and seeking appropriate support is long, complex, and often traumatic. These image-based documents are simplified versions of an in-depth document covering the migrant to refugee to citizen journey. Each will be translated into a range of languages.
Baobab gives confidential advice and assistance to women on immigration, health, financial and housing issues, as well as information on other projects and services, colleges and support groups. We focus on undocumented and asylum seeking women, and help newly granted refugees and settled women access established community services. The team prioritises women who have been affected by gender violence and trafficking.
It started as a project with Hollaback London, a movement to end harassment in public spaces powered by local activists. We were collecting and mapping people’s stories and found lots of incidents were taking place in bars and clubs. It was interesting because we thought, surely that’s where there’s security, safety and lots of people? But no. From this, we wanted to empower and educate staff and owners to understand and intervene in sexual harassment. The project took a while to design because we were mindful that it’s easy to ask a venue to just put up posters. What it’s really about is examining shared attitudes and ideas around alcohol and responsibility when it comes to victims and perpetrators. Getting underneath that was a big job.
How are you tackling sexual harassment?
We’ve spent the past six years testing and developing the full-service accreditation programme we now offer. We work with venues to learn what they’ve done so far and what issues are coming up. Then, we offer a best practice policy that’s legally sound but goes deeper. It puts choice back into the hands of people who are targeted. We train staff, owners, managers, DJs, artists, and security on how to enact that policy. The principle is always to make it as accessible as possible.
How has Covid-19 affected you?
Before the pandemic, we were working with local councils, like Hackney Council, to design an intervention that would go onto billboards on bus stops. It was about reframing myths around sexual violence, so we called it Reframe the Night (we love a pun). Rosa funding covered the overheads and we operated as a core team of four. This meant we could expand our work into partnerships with the City of London and the city’s Night Tzar, too. When the pandemic hit, all of this work and the interest we’d get each week from licensed premises just stopped. It was a very difficult moment. We tried to hit the ground running with Good Night In, which was a series of individual free workshops for individuals.
How did you form the idea for Club GNO?
We were talking about trying to safeguard our organisation and realised we had a resource that we weren’t tapping into: the support of people who care about what we do.
The people who love going out but who don’t work in bars of clubs. Club GNO was born out of wanting to ask people for financial support and share our expertise as widely as possible. We have a broad range of toolkits, workshops and other resources, so sharing it out to individuals made sense to us. Club GNO is a membership-based scheme, but we also offer free membership for people. It’s about not putting a price on sexual violence prevention skills.
What do people gain from Club GNO?
All members get a quarterly newsletter, access to all of our resources and tools, a tote bag and an enamel pin. We’re also building an online space for members to connect and share their own resources. Our work is ultimately centred on the skills and response around sexual violence. It’s an educational piece rather than supporting individuals on the frontline.
How else have you evolved during the pandemic?
A big part of our work over the past six months has been reworking our training programmes and packages to make sure they work online. Feedback has been really awesome, with people saying “I never realised online training could be this fun and this exciting!” We want to build on that so venues know they can offer training while staff are on furlough. Now’s a good time for organisations to think about what they’re doing. Something everyone’s noticed is during lockdown there was an equivalent #MeToo with people having time to reflect. One of the areas we worked on during the pandemic was the comedy circuit. Now we’re looking at ways we can pivot to support broader prevention agenda across all forms of art, culture, leisure. Our approach to nightlife works, so we want to broaden it out.
What does the future look like for Good Night Out?
It’s still uncertain how much capacity there will be in nightlife. We want to ensure we’re able to reaccredit some of the Student Unions we work with, but that’s been difficult. In term two we’re hoping to get out to do some training at universities once their campus bars open back up.
We have a partnership with Galop around access and inclusion for trans and gender non-conforming people. It’s around bathroom access and challenging hate crime attitudes that are really common. We’re also working with the Association of Independent Festivals ahead of potential events in summer 2021. Another thread of our work is accountability. What does it mean for an individual to reflect on their own behaviour when they’ve caused harm? How can we build skills to manage these complexities when services are already overstretched? These are the questions we’re asking at the moment.
The Empower Project is an intersectional, feminist, membership organisation supporting communities to lead change to end gender-based violence in Scotland. Our focus is on responding to violence and abuse in the digital age, looking specifically at online and tech abuse; this includes image abuse (so-called revenge porn), sextortion, doxxing and harassment.
We do this by creating spaces for women to share their experiences and thoughts on tech-facilitated abuse and then support them to design local and community-based responses. Over the past three years, we’ve been creating spaces for women to engage with us, this could be anything from a pizza party or zine-making workshop through to a parliamentary reception.
Taking what we learn, we engage with support organisations and universities and schools, providing training directly to workers, students and teachers on issues that women are faced with in the online world. We also engage with Scottish Government and elected officials to ask for change in making online spaces safer for all.
What is tech abuse?
Stalking and Harassment has always existed but since the growth of the digital world, it has become easier for those who carry it out to do so in online spaces. This is a broad term for a type of online abuse that can affect or impact people in many different ways. Some terms you might not be familiar with are doxing, which means documents and is the act of disclosing personal information without consent. Deep fakes are an emerging form of abuse where images of a person have been photoshopped onto pornographic images to humiliate and manipulate. Orbiting often happens if someone has been rejected but they continually orbit your online world to threaten you.
So-called ‘Revenge Porn’ is not about revenge or pornography, it’s about control and humiliation. This type of abuse is frequently commented on within the media and is one of the more ‘well-known’ types of online abuse.
Cyber-flashing is the sharing of nude/explicit images often via Airdrop, DMs, messaging apps or email. The images are often sent to strangers or you will receive them from someone you might know but they will be unwanted.
Cyber-bullying is offensive, threatening or abusive behaviour that happens in online spaces.
Finally, here are some of the things you might see happening on social media platforms:
A troll is someone who deliberately tries to upset someone or be controversial to start arguments for their own amusement or a specific gain. A pile on is when a large number of people respond to a particular tweet or target an account and being ratiod is when the number of replies to a tweet are larger than the number of likes. This usually signifies that a pile on has occurred.
How can people look after themselves online?
Firstly, it’s important to think about your privacy. Privacy can be anything from the level of privacy we have on our social media accounts and who can access our pages through to who we let follow us on social media accounts. Some apps will auto-set your privacy settings to basic when you update or re-install, so it’s always important to check.
We see so much content online that it can be become really overwhelming at times. Make sure you set yourself boundaries. Boundaries is a two-fold heading, as we mean both online and offline. Online, social media platforms allow us to edit our feeds in a number of ways to limit the harmful or abusive content that we see. Take advantage of these settings! Filtering can improve the quality of the tweets that you see by using account origin and behaviour and can improve your experience. The mute feature is always a great way to remove an account’s Tweets from your timeline and of course you have the option to block users too.
Think about what you need from your online world? Sometimes, we need support from our families and friends but they also need to know your boundaries! It is okay for you not to want certain content shared of you online, even if you have an active social presence.
What does the future hold?
The Empower Project is a small charity with no paid members of staff. We operate with two co-directors, who are paid on an ad-hoc basis through grants for projects, volunteers and we are governed by a board of trustees. We are currently being supported by Rosa Fund for Women to redevelop our strategy and build the capacity of our small, but mighty, team.
Looking forward, we are approaching the future with ambitions under the three headings of Community, Learn and Influence. Our vision is to ensure that we are a community-led charity that exists to create inclusive spaces for people to learn, resist and party. We want our people to embody and champion our values and are from diverse backgrounds.
We want to build on our existing training packages to provide high-quality, current training and resources to practitioners, public-sector workers and teachers and students to inform and educate. We want to ensure our website and digital presence is interactive, engaging and provides opportunity for learning.
Our intention is to use our community-led insight, we make change at a Government level and to establish new, diverse partnerships, to engage new groups, promote opportunities and amplify voices.
You can find more information about us on our website, www.theempowerproject.co.uk and on instagram and twitter @empowerproject_
Can you tell us a bit about Excel Women’s Association?
Excel Women’s Association is registered charity dedicated to support women in Barking and Dagenham, East London. We provide numerous support services and activities both virtually and in person. This includes education and training, a work club for women, IAG, a wellness café, Sewing Sisters for older people, and more. Domestic violence falls under our advice service, too. That’s where we signpost women to external agencies who can then provide them with housing and further support to overcome their plight.
Victims of Domestic Abuse, ‘WE BELIEVE YOU’
Frankly, violence against women and girls is not acceptable. Here at Excel Women’s Centre, we’re committed to providing information, advice, guidance, and support services in a friendly, caring and welcoming space for women and girls who are victims of domestic abuse. We believe and advise women who come to us and walk alongside them throughout the process. Each woman’s situation is very different and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.
The real definition of Violence Against Women and Girls any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women. The women we support hold the key and the resolution of their problems and we are here and ready to give the backing they need to move forward to a better, safer situation.
What support do you offer?
Most of the women and girls we support have language and cultural barrier and we offer a bilingual service. Language barriers deter women from reporting as they think that no-one will understand them. In turn, this means they think no-one will believe their account of events. Women feel more confident when they’re supported by a service that embraces their culture and they’re able to speak to someone in their language. It’s about having the confidence to communicate their case and report without fear. That centres on having peace of mind and believing they can then end the abuse and violence they faced.
Excel Women’s Association:13 London Road, Barking, Essex, IG11 8AA. Call us on 020 8594 3730. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Pandora Project’s chief executive, Tracy, explains how the organisation has started using an outreach vehicle called Dora to help isolated women who experience domestic abuse in rural Norfolk.
This year will certainly be one to remember. The year women were locked in with their abusers. The year children weren’t allowed to go to the safe haven of school. The year referrals to domestic abuse agencies stopped.
For us, 2020 also brought with it some amazing funding opportunities. As well as emergency funding for PPE and other safety equipment, we were awarded funding from Norfolk Police and Crime Commissioner for a mobile support unit, Dora.
Norfolk is a very rural place, so it’s ideal for perpetrators who want to isolate their partners as part of a coercive and controlling game plan. Some villages have no access to public transport, none at all. Villages are spread out from each other and communities can be very close knit. This gives perpetrators the opportunity to groom the locals, then they become part of the prison walls. According to the National Rural Crime Network report 2019, women suffering domestic abuse in rural settings live with their abusers for 25% longer than their urban counterparts.
One of the reasons is that there’s a lack of services and no way to get there. Statistics tell us that if there is transport available, on average it takes two hours to attend a support meeting, compared to 25 minutes for women living in urban areas. Women are less likely to call the police and less likely to leave.
One of our clients, Emma, isn’t allowed to leave the house, except to drop her children at school, a short walk away from her home. Her partner checks her mileage on the car every morning and evening. He goes out to work every day but calls her on the landline every hour and she has to answer. If she doesn’t, he calls her mobile, then he comes home from work to confront her. His mum lives nearby and she also keeps an eye on Emma. There is no public transport and no escape. Emma doesn’t trust anyone in the village and believes that neighbours are reporting back to her partner, which they probably are.
Using shotguns for hunting and pest control is common practise in Norfolk and perpetrators often have easy access to weapons. Emma’s story is not uncommon and shows a picture of rural life for domestic abuse victims in Norfolk.
Dora is an outreach vehicle to reach women who can’t get to us. We arrange our meetings with current clients in places like supermarket car parks. This means they can return home with shopping and nobody knows they’ve also popped in to see us. We don’t advertise the vehicle. There are no signage or drop ins and everything is pre-booked. Clients have stated that they feel very safe in Dora, it feels secure and discreet and women feel able to talk freely. We carry safety alarms, personal care packs and food vouchers to give out to women in need.
Virginity testing is ‘inspecting’ a woman’s vagina in the false belief that it can determine whether or not she has had sex. Having a hymen that is intact is still thought to be a way to tell if a woman is a virgin. This thinking is flawed since a woman’s hymen may be broken in a number of ways that have nothing to do with sex: vigorous exercise, bike riding, gymnastics, horse riding, or simply using tampons. Some women are also born without a hymen. Years of research have dispelled the myth that the hymen breaks after a woman has sex for the first time. Yet its power remains.
Hymenoplasty is ‘repairing’ a broken hymen surgically. While the practise of hymenoplasty isn’t a new phenomenon, it’s only in recent years that such surgery has increased in the UK. An investigation conducted by The Sunday Times uncovered a minimum of 22 clinics offering hymenoplasty in London alone. Many patients also travel in from abroad. The procedure costs up to £4,000 and consists of a 45-minute appointment under local anaesthetic. The surgeon ‘pulls’ the layers of skin together before re-stitching them.
Why are hymenoplasty and virginity testing happening in the UK today?
“An indoctrinated belief in Muslim communities is that women should be virgins when marrying their husbands. If it’s found that a woman has lost her virginity before marriage, the consequences can be dire,” says Halaleh Taheri. At best she risks humiliation and embarrassment from her family, her husband or fiancé and his family, and the wider community. It can lead to relationship breakdowns and women being disowned. At worst, women can be victims of honour-based violence at the hands of male relatives.
An even more pressing issue, Halaleh argues, is banning the practice of virginity tests. This procedure is still legal in the UK and America. “Women are being forced by their families and their fiancé’s families to provide a certificate of virginity from their doctors before their wedding day,” she says. “If we were to help educate our communities and to reverse this belief, then there would be no need for hymen reconstruction. It would go out of business on its own.”
MEWSo’s Hymenoplasty Matters campaign aims to educate communities and schools around the myths and dangers of these deep-rooted misogynistic customs. “Just because a law or ban is in place doesn’t mean that its effects will reach the people who need to hear it most,” says Halaleh. “The problem is that if our government creates a law, smaller communities who are not familiar with the law only listen to their community leaders. These figures usually only share practises relating to their own faith. The government should recognise this and communicate with these communities. They should treat them as equally as they treat English communities.”
“Banning these procedures, without educating those most vulnerable, will only push them underground, putting more women at risk.”
What is MEWSo asking the government?
MEWSo wants the Department of Education to make sex education a mandatory part of the school curriculum to eradicate these archaic notions of virginity for future generations. “UK laws and regulations should be implemented on all communities in the UK. The emphasis should be on protecting Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) women women, who are the most vulnerable in our society. At the moment, many women are left at the hands of community faith leaders and their barbaric customs. We hope our actions will bring us a step closer to living in a society of equality, diversity, and compassion.”
