Saheli Asian Womens Project

1

• Saheli Asian Womens Project
• Dr Sundari Anitha

2
Saheli

• Saheli provides emergency temporary refuge
  accommodation to South Asian Women and their
  children who are fleeing domestic abuse.

3
Objectives of Saheli

• To provide emergency accommodation to South Asian
  Women experiencing domestic abuse.
• To provide emotional and practical support to
  empower the women to make positive decisions for
  themselves and their children.
• Resettlement support for women who have been
  re-housed in the community.

4
Saheli

• To provide support,counselling, advice and
  advocacy to women within the refuge accommodation
  as well as support to their children.
• To provide outreach support and advice to women
  and children surviving domestic abuse within
  local communities.

5
Target populations Saheli works with

• Saheli works with South Asian Women and these
  include women from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh.
• The women Saheli works with face overlapping
  dimensions of disadvantage and discrimination on
  grounds on ethnicity, gender and class.
• Structural inequalities facing these women are in
  some instances also reinforced by state policy as
  in the case of women with no recourse to public
  funds.

6
Over the years the project has achieved the
following

• Saheli was set up in 1976.
• It was one of the first Asian Women's Refuge in
  North West.
• Saheli currently receives between 350 to 400
  calls from Asian Women seeking information,
  advice and support.

7
Sahelis work

• Developed and established a purpose build refuge
  that is fully accessible.
• The establishment of aftercare and outreach
  project Hosla
• Involvement in deportation campaigns as well as
  other campaigns that focus on the rights of women
  and children.
• Conducted research on experience of recent
  marriage migrants who have survived domestic
  violence

8
Forgotten Women Domestic Violence, Poverty and
South Asian Women with No Recourse to Public
Funds.

• The research findings highlight experiences of
  South Asian Women who have survived domestic
  abuse and have no recourse to public funds,
  including
• Destitution, poverty and deprivation
• Social isolation
• Impact on psychological and physical health
• Inconsistent and variable nature of service
  provision and service responses to women with NRPF

9
Destitution, poverty and deprivation

• Income poverty
• All the women in this study who had NRPF and had
  left the abusive relationship were living in dire
  poverty and deprivation, struggling to meet basic
  needs such as adequate food, warm clothing,
  travel expenses and medicines.
• Accommodation quality, safety and security of
  tenure
• Women who received no support from their Local
  Authority were facing destitution and were living
  on the charity of friends, family members or
  strangers who had taken them in, making them
  extremely vulnerable to further exploitation and
  abuse.

10
Social Isolation

• Nearly 50 of the women who had left the abusive
  relationship had no contact with family or
  friends in the two weeks prior to the interview.
• Reasons include lack of any informal sources of
  support in the UK, being disowned by family for
  leaving the marriage, fear of being traced, lack
  of funds to visits friends or speak to family in
  the subcontinent.
• Compounded by lack of access to specialist
  services that can meet their language needs.

11
Impact on psychological and physical health

• A majority of the women reported one or more of
  these symptoms - suicidal thoughts, suicide
  attempts, extreme fears, anxiety and panic
  attacks, depression, eating and sleeping
  difficulties.
• Very limited access to specialist mental health
  services.
• Of the women who were not receiving any support
  from LAs two-thirds did not have access to GPs.
• Women reported that their mental health problems
  were compounded by social isolation and the lack
  of appropriate services.

12
Inconsistent and variable nature of service
provision and service responses to women with NRPF

• Women made repeated attempts to contact services
  despite the additional and significant barriers
  they faced in doing so.
• However, it took most women several contacts with
  services to receive the help they needed and many
  women had not yet received such help despite
  several attempts to access support.
• Twenty eight women had contacted an average of
  four services each, some of whom did so after
  they left the abusive relationship. These service
  contacts do not include repeated contacts of the
  same services.

13
Saheli Challenges ahead

• The challenges have been many and multi fold.
• We look back at our struggle and our survival
  and have to indeed hold our heads up in pride.

14
Saheli challenges ahead

• The biggest challenge for Saheli is to continue
  to provide a very unique and specialist service
  to Asian Women and Children and to survive as an
  independent organisation
• To involve residents and ex residents in policy
  formation and in different aspect of our work and
  to take the voice of the service users to the
  policy makers.
• To develop services for young Asian Women.

15
Saheli challenges ahead

• We would like to continue to campaign against the
  two year rule, for women with no recourse to
  public funds so that the women survivors are not
  left in violent situations simply because of the
  hold of their partners have on them as a result
  of the collusion of the state.