P.H.O.E.B.E offers specialist advice, information, casework, advocacy and support and counselling services to Black and minoritised women and children. Funding from Rosa’s Emergency Response Fund for BME Women’s Organisations, in partnership with Imkaan, helped the organisation to support women and children through the crisis.
What kind of specialist support does P.H.O.E.B.E provide?
Our support is completely holistic. We have offered language classes for the past 10 years. These classes help us get in and support women emotionally as well as teaching them the language. Since the pandemic the most popular need has been for emergency essentials, like money to pay for food and fuel so people can live. We’ve also been supporting children in their self-esteem work, and encouraging those who can’t speak English to join the language class. Sometimes the people we support are just surviving, so they don’t have time to think about classes. But actually, if they learn and they can speak, they become more independent and they can get better work. It’s a difficult situation at the moment because they need to work. There’s a lot of deprivation and vulnerabilities in the families that we work with.
How have women’s needs changed during the pandemic?
Domestic violence doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. It’s the result of interlocking factors such as economic difficulty, mental wellbeing, alcohol abuse – the pandemic has compounded all of these factors. We’re doing a lot of welfare support for the women and trying to reach out to them and give them confidence. That’s the work we’re doing at the moment. Expanding with the other languages and just trying to reach more women. There are lots of shortages of resources within the households of the women who come to us.
How has funding helped?
Funding has given us the stability and security to employ someone long-term. Someone who we can invest in and who can commit to the organisation. This means we can create our programs accordingly, without the fear of losing a member of staff after short-term project-based funding runs out. It’s added value to Phoebe.
Limited funds have meant we’ve never had the opportunity to go out into the community and do outreach before. The grant has allowed us to do that, too. It’s having the confidence that we have a pot of money so we can actually plan. We can work through all our issues. That’s what we’re doing at the moment.
Language barriers are one of the main problems we face as lots of the African women we support are Portuguese-speaking. Funding has also meant we can employ a Portuguese-speaking support worker to reach these women. Since she came on board in August, we have had 45 more women come to us for support. Offering linguistically appropriate support is so important in our specialist area. We’re now looking at hiring a Romanian worker and Asian workers to reach more women. These are the predominant large communities we have in Suffolk.
Can you share a story of a woman you’ve supported?
We had a referral of a Kurdish woman who was sexually assaulted by an acquaintance. But because she doesn’t speak a word of English, police were unable to offer her lasting support. She became suicidal and jumped out of a window. She’s now housebound because of her injuries. This woman has insecure immigration status, so can’t access support or mainstream women’s refuges. Then there’s the language barrier, which makes it hard to understand what’s happening to her.
We’ve been liaising with other sister organisations in London that work with Kurdish women to see if they can help. At the moment she’s living at a friend’s house, where she’s still quite vulnerable. The combination of language barrier, insecure immigration status and mental state mean that agencies just tend to let her drift. This is an extreme case, but it’s the kind of scenario we tend to get at Phoebe.
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