Two years ago I won a travel award from the Winston Churchill Trust (www.wcmt.org.uk) to travel to the States to look at alternative ways to support people who had been effected by domestic violence. The same week I received the award I discovered I was pregnant with my second child and so the trip as postponed indefinatley as I took the time to settle Iris Belle into the world. At times I wondered if it was practical to haul the whole family out to pursue my own interests but with the support of my partner Lyndon, our family of four are now embarking on a six week coast to coast State trip. Me as research, Lyndon as primary child-carer.
To start, just a brief word about my approach with this blog and indeed my whole trip. By nature I am a control freak and attention to detail and accuracy makes me feel secure and right. However, this trip isn’t really about security and being right. It’s more about fluidity, growing, learning and asking questions.
So this is an experiment. I am throwing caution to the wind and not thinking too much about what I write and not over-preparing my meetings. I am staying open to all possibilities and saying yes at every turn. I am breathing through the discomfort at appearing undone and heartfelt. I am enjoying the spontaneity and ease which is flowing from this new mindset.
My family has been in NYC for three days now and it has been enough to get them acclimatised to the new city and adjusting their sleeping patterns. Eating breakfast and brushing your teeth to start the day at 3am feels alien and is unsustainable – but my 3 year old (Matilda) and 1 year old (Iris) won’t hear any of it. It has been an eventful three days since we arrived; Iris has learnt to walk and Matilda has acquired the important skill of skipping so we are a family of differing speeds as we journey around the glorious and magical city of New York. Highlights include a trip in the fastest elevator to ‘The Top of the Rock’ to purvey the spectacle of New York from the 70th floor (just 45 seconds from the ground up) and breakfast at Katz Deli on E Houston Street where Harry meet Sally for breakfast (and no I didn’t have what she had – it was far to early for all that).
It’s Tuesday and I am visiting Lucia Rivieccio (Director) and Connie Marquez (Deputy Director) at the East Harlem offices of STEPS to End Family Violence. STEPS is part of the Edwin Gould Services for Children and Families and they work with the most vulnerable families who are at risk of losing their children around the issue of domestic violence.
Negotiating the New York subway is far easier than I imagined, although the walk to the subway from our apartment in Brooklyn was anxiety-producing after my partner Lyndon showed me a map illustrating the plethora of shootings that have taken place in the last few months. Each incident was illustrated by the symbol of a fire arm and in the area we are staying it’s a wall-to-wall carpet of guns. I make a note to myself to be back before sun down.
My meeting with STEPS is interesting and they do some great work but their model is very similar to the way we work back in the UK. I shall write in detail about each of my meetings when I get back home and have the time to transcribe the conversations I had, but for the purpose of this blog I shall just write what stood out for me.
The main learning I have taken from STEPS is around their Teen RAPP program. Teen RAPP (Relationship Abuse Prevention Program) partners with a number of high schools in New York to provide early intervention and counselling around the issue of intimate violence. Rather than supply endless training to the pupils of these schools, they provide a counsellor in each high school and a range of ways they provide early intervention. It strikes me that the States have really started to look at the preventative work as a way to make the difference. It seems that, even though the crisis work is still the most attractive to funders, DV organisations in the States are finding a way to make early intervention and especially teen dating and awareness raising a priority.
On the way home a policeman standing at the entrance to the subway hands me a leaflet. I absent-mindedly roll it up into a tube and put it into my pocket. Down in the subway, as I reach for my ticket I pull out the leaflet - ‘Are you a Victim of Domestic Violence?’ I’m impressed. A policeman is pro-actively handing out leaflets in the street? That doesn’t happen in the UK. When I go back upstairs to talk to the policeman, he tells me that domestic violence heavily contributes to the violent crime in the area and they want to reach out to the community – a text book answer. Some training somewhere is reaching its target, but my subsequent meetings suggest this is an exceptional happening rather than the norm.
It’s Wednesday and I have a full day of meetings.
First, I am meeting Kala Ganesh from Connect NYC.
My meeting with Kala transported me back about 15 years when I first started working in the domestic violence field. I feel energised and galvanised by their work. A new approach – but hold on, the language is reminiscent of that used in the DV landscape about twenty years ago. A language that has been heard less and less since the field has become more professionalised and more embedded into the status quo. It’s like they have come full circle. Words like community empowerment, grassroots mobilization and transformative education. These words act like new blood pumping fresh oxygen into my work veins.
Kala Ganesh explains ‘The prevalence of violence against women remains unabated and women continue to struggle for freedom inside the home, on the streets and in our communities. The complex interplay of factors that define and limit women’s ability to seek safety is not sufficiently explored in mainstream discourse. Women who are victims of intimate violence may also be struggling with HIV/Aids, homelessness, children in foster care, immigration issues, abuse of their pets, substance misuse, issues of childhood trauma etc.
Few organisations are equipped to deal with more than one of these issues, despite the fact that their relationships with each other imply an unexplored territory that can best be charted by intersectional collaboration. Our current blame-based crisis response keeps women and children spinning on a carousel of discriminatory practices with no relevance to their real life experiences. More encompassing spaces need to be created where families can seek holistic help to deal with and heal from the multiple issues that keep them in unsafe and potentially fatal situations.’
These ‘encompassing spaces’ are not provided by CONNECT but by the community as a whole. CONNECT seeks to mobilise the community against intimate abuse by collaborating with organisations in order to find community-focused solutions. They look to build up capacity within the community rather than provide the solutions. For example, through their program ‘CONNECT Faith’ – they talk with faith leaders about how best the issue of abuse is tackled and then provide the technical assistance to the leaders in order for them to take it forward.
Likewise CONNECT YOUTH works with engaging youths in a bystander capacity in order to introduce positive role modelling and peer-group intervention. In each area that they engage, CONNECT seeks to build capacity in the community and provide technical assistance for the communities to achieve this. Rather than attempting to train and assist the whole population they serve, with all its differences and nuances, they collaborate with the people in the communities in order to effect change. As Kala Ganesh puts it, ‘In a way we hope to eventually work our way out of a job because we will have built the capacity up so well in the city to deal with the issue of domestic violence, we are no longer needed.’ Once again, this approach is breaking down the power structures. It’s not about an ‘expert’ in the field lecturing to the masses, it’s about the masses finding their own solutions to their specific issues and mobilising change in their own communities. So, rather than going to all the schools in their area for an hour a year, year in year out, CONNECT would meet up with the Heads and talk about what would be the best approach for their particular population, how Connect can provide the technical know how to deliver this and how it could be embedded into the structure and ethos of the school.
Towards the end of our meeting Quentin Walcott joins us. Quentin is the Director for CONNECT’s Training Institute and Community Empowerment Program and he does a lot of work with the last program of the organisation I am interested in. It’s called CONNECT Men which is probably the most powerful message in itself. CONNECT Men offers a range of anti-violence initiatives to engage ALL men in the issue of changing societal values. I think of this as The Men’s Movement in the same way women had the chance to change ways of thinking and ways of relating with The Women’s Movement. Some of the initiatives include Monthly Round Tables where men who work with men came to discuss issues of masculinity, Peer group support, Seminars and Community workshops on masculinity and male socialisation, Work with Fathers and Manhood Development for Young Males. This seems to be part of a larger movement in the States that is enlisting the support of men to eradicate violence.
