cuts are violence

"Women’s Aid, Refuge and independent providers of domestic violence services – all are facing ‘inevitable’ funding cuts, ‘efficiency’ measures, amalgamation and closure. Services that support, empower and protect thousands of families and single women will shut down. Thousands of workers in our sector will lose their jobs in 2011. [...]

Abandoning survivors of abuse and other vulnerable people to the “Big Society” having bailed out banks and cosied up to corporate tax-dodgers is violence that will impact our society for generations. [...]

As survivors and supporters we are face to face with abuse on a daily basis and understand all too well how abusers operate. We have a responsibility to speak out and describe the abusive attitudes of the people behind the cuts programme, and the violence that is enacted in it. [...]

We know full well the links between abuse and homelessness, abuse and poverty, abuse and unemployment, abuse and mental illness. And we know that this cuts programme re-enacts and reinforces abusive structural social injustice. We are acutely aware that these cuts will compound this interlinked violence and make it much harder for the most vulnerable people to become free. [...]

As providers of, and workers within, gendered violence services – how can we respond to this crisis and act not merely to defend our salary structures, but as if stopping abuse in our communities is our absolute priority? 

Are we going to bicker between women’s services over our share of the crumbs and step on one another to stay in business? Are we going to unite as women’s services to gain a larger share of the crumbs at the expense of perhaps asylum seekers’ services, or homeless men’s services? Or are we going to challenge the system that attempts to divide and rule us in this way? [...]


Those anti-violence services that survive or are created in this cataclysmic upheaval face a disturbing ‘race neutral’ and ‘gender neutral’ future in which existing specialist services with decades of experience are ‘streamlined’ i.e. closed, in the name of ‘efficiency’. We are facing the end of specialist “Black and Minority Ethnic” services and specialist women’s services, a future in which provision “by Black women for Black women” and “by women for women” are anachronisms, because “we’re all in this together” [...]

As survivors and supporters we know the need to look for the crux of power in each situation. We are all too familiar with abusers’ use of an ultimate threat to hold over their victim: If you leave you’ll lose your home / No one else would want you / I could kill you… We have to assess whether there is any truth in the threat, and if so what we stand to risk in our effort to be free.

What is the ultimate, most terrifying, threat that the state holds over us? No more funding. So we must reckon with this possibility and face it head on. How can we support the people around us who are experiencing domestic and sexual violence, potentially in the absence of funding? We have done it before: Women’s Aid and Rape Crisis were started by women who reached out to support one another. Before there were refuges, women offered each other their spare rooms. Faced with a decimation of services, do we need to begin this grassroots work once more? Is this idea shocking, frightening?"

- Cuts Are Violence

seeing outside of the non-profit industrial complex

so many people (including me up til recently) have wood-for-the-trees problems when it comes to charities /  non-profits (and the public sector, and academia, for that matter), and the prospect of working for one. i'm so heartened to see this discussion on tumblr, at Radically Hott Off (though i'm confused about how to reference tumblr stuff properly) about the failure of non-profit orgs to actually do much to effect social change, apart from set ourselves up in nice salaried positions and then work to maintain that salary structure:

"the number one reason I hear people say that they are working at 501c3s [US term for charities / voluntary sector orgs] is because they believe in the work and they’d be doing it anyway and this way they can survive. but…isn’t there just a bit of moral —-unevenness i guess—in assuming that our neighbors, our fathers, our grocery store check out lady—don’t have the same wishes?

[...]

what happens if instead of saying *I* want a job that pays me enough to live on AND makes me feel a little less ethically violated—and say *WE* want jobs that pay us enough to live on and doesn’t kill the world? indeed makes the world a better place? 

[...]

what would it look like to begin the left transition from dependency on 501c3s to a steady communication with radical on the street/community driven movements? [...]. *F*eminist orgs do absolutely NO grassroots organizing, instead focusing on “recruitment” in universities—that is: finding the next generation of women to run the orgs.

[...]

it’s like there’s no clear understanding that raped women in prisons, raped women in migrant camps, raped women in your family, raped next door neighbors, raped friends, etc are all pretty freaking powerful and can create more changes than olberman can ever dream of—if we’d work to give those women skills to organize. The right may have more money—but they have the top five percent of the money makers to recruit from. we have the entire world."

yes. it's really clear to me how much we who are working in charities/non-profits are just working to bolster the comfort of our own privilege - sleep tight at night knowing we've "done good", "tried hard" - rather than actively undermining the structures that privilege us over those we say we are trying to help.

when i quit my proper job and was handing over to my replacement, i was explaining to her some of the issues around supporting women with 'no recourse to public funds' and how totally trapped those women can be, between their abusive partner and the immigration system. her response was like a perfect summary of why i had to quit! she said: "oh wow. you'd just want to take her home, wouldn't you? i mean, i've got a spare room and... oh but you couldn't. you could never do that! ... but if she had nowhere else to go! it's so terrible! ... but obviously i know you could never do that..." and in that paid role, of handing over my old job to this new worker of course i had to shake my head along with her: "no, you could never do that."

but you know how women's aid refuges started in the 1970s - feminists had spare rooms and opened them up to strangers fleeing abuse. they squatted buildings. families shared rooms. that absence of resources is unimaginable now when compared to multi-million pound blocks of self-contained apartments that new labour helped to fund for several cities' DV provision.

except - that absence of resources is precisely what women with no recourse have now. but somehow we've forgotten how to offer our spare rooms to them, or how to squat or do whatever is necessary to protect these women. because women like us are now relatively protected by the state. sort of. well, maybe not. but hey at least we're getting paid now, eh? and god forbid we risk offending the funders.

i so love the part of the quote above that i bolded. i'd never even thought of it that way. it just highlights so perfectly the entitlement of the reasoning (that i held for many years) that we have a right to elevate ourselves into paid charity positions so that we can feel better about ourselves, as if other people without the same access to those jobs don't feel the same way. and then when we're in, we have the audacity to keep (other) survivors out, because you know, 'managing volunteers is resource-intensive', 'we don't have the funding right now to run a volunteer training programme', 'volunteers complicate risk-management' etc etc.

so - yes! that seems like an amazing central premise for organising - not that i should scramble to get a funded place inside the nice safe (and shrinking) NPIC while extending a hand from the parapet during office hours to 'help' 'them' - but that i should work for the right of all of us to be doing well-resourced, well-recompensed, non-violating, meaningful, engaged work.

"at least you're not going through this in the community "

-is my quote of the day from the 'professionals meeting' on a mental ward i went to today. oh my god. i really had intended to stop getting paid to be around this kind of shit, but i went back for some no-strings-attached shifts, didn't i, because it's less stressful than working somewhere unfamiliar, and before i know it i'm covering everyone's sick leave (and *everyone* is sick), including having to go outside of the office and try to look less frayed and more professional. 

so, well... these wards aren't the worst places in the world these days. they are just like slightly roomier and cleaner halls of residences. there was a greenhouse with december-wizened tomato plants in the courtyard - (i really truly believe in plants&soil as a potential lifeline of mental health, so that was good). the managers and consultants seemed genuinely to be trying to take an empowering approach. only one worker at the meeting, out of about eight of us, was acting like this woman was the biggest pain in the arse ever (i really don't understand professionals who get exasperated with clients who are not actually abusing them or causing them to have to work overtime - we get paid the same either way, right? what does it matter if this woman returns to her partner "after all our hard work"? it's not like you actually care about her, evidently), and who was saying things like (repeatedly) "she needs to be boundaried". no one challenged her on it, but at least the ward manager and the consultant had the decency to wince a bit. all the rest of the staff got it when i pushed the focus of the meeting towards giving the woman as much control as possible, regardless if she ends up returning to her partner. i guess the new labour years really did do some good in funding awareness-raising around domestic violence - and less coercive practice in mental health.

that said... the woman had said how shit she felt going through christmas in the hospital while she waits for a refuge place and dealing with grieving for her relationship and harassment threats and mind games from her ex. and the worker said "at least you're not going through this in the community." which i guess is mental health service -speak for any where outside the hospital ward.

the worker who said it was the most focussed and engaged with the woman we were actually there for, and had known her the longest. and it just seemed so amazing to me that even this worker who was doing relatively awesome holistic woman-centered work couldn't imagine a better way, a better community, or a better place for this woman to be than on a locked ward.

and there was more that was wrong with the meeting. so much subtle coercion glazed with the right, 'patient-centred' words. like the consultant (who was the most patient-centred consultant i've dealt with) told her that she was "giving him [her ex partner] mixed messages by replying to his manipulative texts when the relationship is over". later the consultant gave her totally mixed messages by saying she wasn't to pick up his calls but "texting is understandable" and then implying that she wasn't to have any contact with him at all. just loads of stuff like that, subtle erasures of her equal personhood to the professionals around her who are holding all the power.

i fantasised about recording the meeting and being able to use it in some kind of training session where everyone had to identify the parts of the transcript where the woman was being silenced, put in a catch 22, pathologised and/or subject to the same framework of abuse that occurred within her relationship. highlighter pens at the ready! but the trouble is, these people (with the exception of the pain in the arse woman) are already highly trained and as right-on as it's possible for those of us working within such a coercive system to be. this was the nicest one of these meetings i've ever been to. i could continue to attend these things and fight little battles and try to defend one woman at a time in one meeting at a time, to the inadequate best of my ability. but is that not 'giving them an aspirin to lick', when the system putting these women in these situations needs to end. and the communities to replace these hierarchical institutions need to be built.

"They [many doctors within concentration camps] would hide them [sick inmates] from the selection officers who were going to kill them. They would do this to protect the inmate for that day. They would put them to bed, you know. They would actually do everything—if they were in pain, they would give them aspirin to lick. They would do what they could to help, except for the most important thing of all, which is they wouldn’t question the existence of the entire death camp itself. So they would find themselves working within the rules, however they could, to try to improve conditions marginally. And in retrospect, of course, that’s just not sufficient."

-guess who?

WHAT NOW?

the institutions are being demolished. education, health, support for migrants, children's centres, women's aid, 'sexual assault referral centres', you name it. our world is being refreshingly blatantly rearranged in order to ensure the rich continue to get richer, faster. what do we do now? do we fight to defend these structures? in all their iniquitous, exclusionary, policing/policed and violent glory? is that really what we want?

or is it time to reimagine what education, health, support for migrants, places for children, support for survivors... could be. what could these parts of our lives look like, in our wildest dreams? in our dreams where money doesn't matter, because we aren't allowed any. (or because there isn't any anymore.)

are we going to support one another? are we? are we going to start figuring out how?

"If your experience is that your food comes from the grocery store and your water comes from the tap, you’ll defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on it. If, on the other hand, your food comes from a landbase and your water comes from a river, then you’ll defend to the death that landbase and that river, because your life depends on them."

Jensen.

organisation in 'we like girls and women', shock

oh my goodness. i found this while linking to the mind-bendingly awesome Young Women's Empowerment Project in my last post. at the moment i'm working in a couple of places that use the language of empowerment and so on... well i guess they've pretty much co-opted that language, and are using it for coercive purposes. and they seem to be among the more sound of voluntary sector organisations in the uk.

...so imagine being part of a project that promotes this stuff. imagine...

"What we believe

• Confidentiality. Anything that is said here stays here. We use anonymous identifiers to keep records of what we do.
• Harm reduction. We support young women and girls in making any decisions in their lives that they want. We don’t tell anyone what to do or who to be. We think that youth are the best at making decisions about their lives.
• No requirements of youth. Any young woman or girl impacted by the sex trade/street economy can participate.
• Every participant is smart and can contribute to the project immediately. We don’t think that people need to be sober or out of the trade to express their thoughts and feelings, help us out, or to learn.
• Sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia intersect and deeply affect the trade and girls and women who are involved. We can’t talk about the trade without talking about these issues.
• Solidarity with boys/men/transgender persons involved in the trade. This issue isn’t only about women and girls.
• We like girls and women. We don’t think they are “a problem,” “hard to work with,” or “difficult.”
• We are lead by women who have been there. We call the shots.
• We believe people who know this life are the ones who should be around this group.
• We strive to have respect for everyone. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been, where you’re at, who you are, or what your opinions may be.
• People don’t need labels. We respect youth by not labeling them as problem youth, delinquents, etc.
• We don’t want girls to “be saved.” We are here to support young women in making decisions about their lives.
• We do not have one set of ideas. We don’t think that girls in our project should, either.
• Our views about the trade are always changing. We reserve the right to change our minds when we learn new things.
• We are not a social service agency. We do not provide case management.
• Everyone can help make decisions.
• We believe in partnerships between youth and adults, and partnership means that adults don’t make all of the decisions.
• We believe that girls do not “seek out” abuse. Girls do what they need to do to survive.
• Our experiences in the street economy/sex trade do not define who we are, or who we may become.
• We believe that involvement in the sex trade/street economy does not suddenly become harmless based on age, sex, or gender. We believe in listening to people who are involved to find out what is happening.
• Girls have their own language and understanding about the sex trade/street economy. Everyone who is living it is the expert.
• Small is best. We don’t want to be a monolithic ‘agency.’ We offer different spaces, different ways of understanding, and we feel most comfortable with small arrangements."

so much to tell you

well, i quit my job! cue much identity-crisising as it's what i've done for my entire adult life, etc. but i'm starting to pull myself together a bit and remember that i still have lots to offer outside the world of employment. i'm on my way back from a workshop i travelled to, talking about power and control in queer relationships and communties. new folded flipchart paper in my bag to geek out over when i get home, caffeinated ideas of doing a massive info-sharing website, and thinking of ways to make money to live while doing work that is closer to my real values. exciting...

and wanting to ease back into blogging, i miss how it helps my brain. feels a bit awkward starting again, so here's a random relevant good and bad thing i've become aware of lately:

these folks are amazing: Stop Violence Everyday / STorytelling and Organizing Project. Especially check out the audio clips, totally inspiring community responses to abuse and manipulation.

bad thing? i dunno, look at this that i read today:

"Nicholas Sarkozy has pledged to press ahead with legislation to strip immigrants who attack police of their French nationality. [...] 

He reiterated his determination to implement the sanctions, which he first threatened after three days of riots in the southern city of Grenoble which were sparked when police shot dead a suspected armed robber in July.

The Elysée Palace said the president would implement the measures "as soon as possible". The punishment would apply to foreign-born criminals who had obtained French nationality in the last 10 years and who "endanger the life of a person in charge of public security, in particular the police and gendarmes".

The proposals have been vehemently criticised by the opposition and some legal experts who say they are contrary to the constitution that states all French citizens are equal before the law regardless of race, creed or origin. [...]

Critics accuse Sarkozy, who also faces international criticism over the expulsion of almost 1,000 Roma last month, of playing to extreme rightwing voters by linking violent crime and immigration."

which is from this Guardian article. because i'm just warming back up to blogging, and drawing the links again, and there is so much between the lines of that article about what happens to people who retaliate against their oppressors. and hey, since i'm still warming up i'm allowed to be repetitive and bring in Jensen once again:

"Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims."

Too Much

there's a wonderful new post from Tyrone at Enough, 'On Crisis and Community'. i love Tyrone's description of neighbours working together on two occasions when people were attacked:

"I have felt so much gratitude since then, for my little group of neighbors who shared my inclination and willingness to act – not by calling the police, but by putting on our bathrobes in the middle of the night and knocking on our neighbor’s door together, prepared to help."

i love the Enough project, their honesty and the links they make...

"The questions I have – how do we balance immediate safety with long-term survival and transformation; how do we stop violence when the roots are unimaginably deep;

[...]

I want too much. I want solutions that transform violence, at the roots, for everybody. I want us all to believe in transformation – not only our small, fierce transformative justice collaboratives, but my neighbors. I want there to be reason for us to believe. I want the words, the strength to begin these conversations and see them through, in all of my communities"

it starts

i'm thrilled because two ex-clients who don't know each other, in the space of one week, have asked me for advice to set up their own grassroots groups. no one's ever mentioned doing this before. i swear, there must be something in the ether. maybe it's the astrology, ha.

One is planning a general domestic violence group in case we lose our funding (the standard three years are nearly up) and one a group for women whose children have been removed temporarily or permanently by 'social care'. hurrah! the fall of the voluntary sector begins. i haven't properly started discussions with these women yet and don't know what they're planning but it sounds like it might involve not needing paid workers and general DIY amazingness. yes!

working with the system

"One of the scariest manifestations of modern capitalism is the system's ability to co-opt experiences, practices, even culture, and to then re-create and repackage them within a careerist, profit-driven (even in "non-profits" [voluntary sector]), and competitive logic. The non-profit system... supports the professionalization of activism rather than a model of everyday activism. For many of us, activism has become something you do as a career. When organisers from other countries see that activists are paid to do work in the United States, it makes them wonder. It took my father (who is very familiar with grassroots struggles) a few years to understand the work that I was doing. "Your job as a community organiser; what does that mean, it's your employment? Who is paying you to do this work? And why?" And since many of us are being paid by foundations allied with corporate interests, my father also said, "Clearly, they are paying you to keep you from really challenging the system, to make sure that you are accounted for."

When we focus on organizing as a part of everyday life, the process becomes as important as the final product. In many cases, foundation funders and the non-profit culture expect groups to achieve a campaign goal in a relatively short period of time. They are not interested in funding the much slower work of base building which takes years and years to do. Consequently, non-profits become short-term goal orientated, even if they did not begin that way. Many also become focused on "smoke and mirrors" organising, in which you do something that looks good for a photo op but has no real people power behind it."

Paula X. Rojas, from Are the Cops in our Heads and Hearts? in The Revolution will not be Funded, edited by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence.

This is so relevant to the three-year periods of funding that have been the status quo under New Labour. they just won't fund an existing project (in the name of 'encouraging innovation,' yeah right) - everything just lasts for three years. it's insane. or calculated. especially in the domestic violence field where everyone knows it takes women on average seven years to leave, three years is pointless and leaves women hanging, distraught, i've spoken to them when their services grind to a halt...

i would be so interested in hearing/reading critiques of the UK domestic violence voluntary sector and the ways in which its funding is messed up, if anyone can articulate this or point me in the right direction... i heard an amazing speech from Amrit Wilson, the chair of Imkaan, an umbrella body for Asian women's refuges, at the Transnational Feminisms Conference in Manchester. she had so much to say, but i haven't found anything written down, or anyone to talk to yet (i wish Amrit would be my friend, but i think she's busy).

i mean, it's becoming increasingly painfully obvious to me that we need to restart at a grassroots level according to the needs of our own local areas rather than wait for ever-more coercive state funding. Rape Crisis centres' funding is being cut with heartbreaking regularity so as to make them almost non-existent now, (far too feminist, and overtly challenging and sceptical of the state; gotta go) and they are slowly being replaced with one-stop type centres (Sexual Assault Referral Centres/SARCs ; check out the difference between RC's website talking to "you, if you need support" and the Home Office SARC page: "victims receive an integrated service," gross.) which have streamlined the whole process, supposedly to make it easier for survivors (true, you can be examined medically, interviewed and counselled in one place), but this also has the effect of meaning the police are always in the building. and although survivors do have the right to use these centres without reporting to the police, i'd be interested to know how many 'monitoring details' they have to hand over. Supporting People, the central government body that funds accommodation and housing-related support for vulnerable people, including many/most refuges for women fleeing domestic violence, has moved from just needing age/ethnic origin/blah blah a few years ago to now requiring national insurance numbers for all people passing through those services. so everyone is tracked! amazing isn't it.

and yeah. why are we doing this work as a job? why am i? why am i getting paid to be a sticking plaster on a wound, and working far more with than against forces that cause violence in the first place? i'm really not sure. but i will figure out what else to do.