The only thing more joyful than one Own My Life trip to the Republic of Ireland this year is TWO trips! Unlike our Irish Tour in March 2024, this week’s trip was a flying visit solely with Adapt Kerry as they launched their three year strategic plan.
Our CEO, Natalie Collins, delivered a three hour session with Adapt’s strategic partners across the area before the strategic plan was launched by Adapt’s Chairwoman. They were recently awarded the funds to expand their refuge provision from six beds up to thirteen which includes an ambitious building project. Natalie writes here about her time with Adapt Kerry:
During my presentation, I talked the group through some of the core aspects of Own My Life; including both how abusers control their female partners and how women resist that abuse. Honouring resistance is a crucial, but often neglected concept in supporting women who have been subjected to abuse. As THIS 2001 article by Gale Goldberg Wood and Susan Roche shows, women have been advocating for the importance of women’s resistance for many years. Their article’s title, “An Emancipatory Principle for Social Work With Survivors of Male Violence” seems somewhat oxymoronic in 2024; social work now is rarely a site of liberative practice. As an arm of the state, social work often seems more concerned with women’s compliance than their emancipation.
During lunch, I spoke with a recently retired social worker with decades of experience. We spoke about the radical roots of social work and the sadness of a work that has become incredibly hard to do and rarely achieves the outcomes women like her had hoped for when they entered the profession in the eighties and nineties.
Later that day, I visited Adapt Kerry’s wonderful charity shop. Shown round the shop by the super sharp and organisation wizard Lou, I learned that each month brings a new window display and that their monthly sale has people queuing up from 7am for a bargain. Few UK domestic abuse services have a charity shop (the brilliant North East Lincolnshire Women’s Aid being an extremely brilliant exception).
The next day, it was a joy to have a tour of Kerry Refuge and learn that Own My Life remains a brilliant resource for women across Kerry, the big challenge is being able to run enough courses to meet the many women on the waiting list to attend a course.
Over dinner, I chatted with Adapt Kerry’s magnificent Own My Life facilitators; Catherine, Siobhan and Noelle. We spoke about Irish perceptions that UK domestic abuse responses are much advanced beyond what Irish services do; when in reality, having diverse and creative income sources and not being dependent on commissioning to survive gives Irish services freedom to make autonomous choices.
Stark comparisons could be made between an abuser’s financial control of their female partner and the state’s control of UK dometic abuse service provision; charities are subject to control and demands which mean they are rarely able to do meaningful work with women. And down the slope they go, with social work already waiting for them at the bottom.
I arrived at the airport on my journey home and precious Sara Sharif’s face was all over the news. The family court placed little Sara in her abusive father’s care, and he and her stepmother have just been found guilty of killing the little girl after horrifically abusing her for more than two years. An independent safeguarding review will now commence, but the families of other children killed are pointing out how little learning has actually been implemented after reviews into the torture and murders of their little ones.
Such reviews generally find the sames brokenness within the systems. While social care is at the bottom of a depoliticised and ethically dubious slope; with domestic abuse services being pushed down that same slope by aggressive commissioning, bureaucratic demands and, perhaps, a loss of courage and conviction on services’ behalfs, there is no hope for change.
In County Kerry (and across Ireland and the UK) there are women working to make women’s and their children’s lives better, and as we refuse to allow obscurity to overtake the work of women like Gale Goldberg Wood and Susan Roche and others who can teach us emancipatory practices, perhaps we can start pushing social work and domestic abuse back up the slippery slope, and see lasting and meaningful change for children and their mothers.
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