Decolonising Policy and Advocacy in Gender-Based Violence

Hi, my name is Tina Odu.

My name is Eleanor Hogan. We're social work apprentices pursuing bachelors and social work in the United Kingdom. Welcome to the Decolonised and social work Field Education podcast.

We've gone from learning about different types of abuse and safeguarding class, and now we're actually applying that in all the placements, and let's be honest, that transition can be a lot. How has it been for you, Tina?

It has definitely been a learning curve. Abuse is such a complicated subject to navigate, and when it comes to something like an abuse, abuse or working with diverse families, there are so many hoops that we may have to jump through in order to access basic protection there, immigration challenges.

And so on.

And colonial perspectives still shape so much of policy and advocacy. And when we're supporting migrant families or victims of Anubis abuse, it really makes me think, how can we, as students, as workers, juggle all of that?

I remember when we had one session on a base of use in class, but on placement I worked with someone who didn't even realise they were going through.

Abuse.

And because they were a recent migrant to the United Kingdom, they were just too scared to ask for help that really hit me. It's about who these policies were written for and who's being left out.

So today we're asking how do we as students begin to recognise these gaps and start to challenge them?

We're joined by Iphost professor Nishi Mitra Vanberg, who brings deep feminist and decolonial insight to the table, and a guest today is Yvonne Tyree. She has been in the social work field for over 30 years and currently works as a team manager for the people from abroad team within a local authority.

Let's get into it decolonising policy and advocacy in gender based violence.

I'm Nishi Mitra bomberg. I'm professor and chairperson of Advanced Centre for Women's Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. I'm your host for today and I'm very happy to have.

That's our guest, Yvonne Terry.

I invite you, Yvonne, to tell a bit about yourself.

Hello, my name is Yvonne and as as you said, I am a social worker of over 30 years and I've worked in lots of different teams, including child protection, youth offending. I've worked with the travelling community, adult mental health services and I'm currently working as a team manager.

In the people from abroad, team in local authority.

Even today, I would like for you to tell us a little bit about a story or an experience that illustrates the unique challenges you and your team face when you are supporting particularly immigrant women who face gender based violence or honour based abuse.

Yeah, we are currently just begun really to work with on a based abuse within our local authority.

It's something that I think it would be fair to say that we have not always been aware of enough to do anything about it, but domestic abuse obviously is something that we work with and I've worked with for many years on a based abuse does fall under the the domestic abuse.

Bracket I have been trained. There's two of us in my team, been trained with the police in what's called the Karma Nevada.

Training, which is a specific training for working with on a based abuse and it's we use it with women and men who have been subjected to causing dishonour seem to be causing dishonour to their family and bringing shame on their family and it also.

And include the community, which is a very important part of on a based abuse. So it's not just about the family, it's about the community that they live within and the community, not just in this country. If they're living here, obviously living here but in their home country.

As well. So it's it's a very wide subject and something that we are in my team learning more and more about. We started working with it in October of last year and since then I've done 14 on a based abuse assessments and the police in this local authority are working with over.

55 live cases at the.

Amen.

OK. So that's really a remarkable amount of experience that you have in focusing on on obese violence. I would like you to tell us like a story or a case with all confidentiality, which can help us understand what are the particular challenges in terms of?

The cultural understanding you are confronted with when looking at something which is described as on obese abuse and women's ambivalence, or women's challenges with which you need to be aware of.

Yes. So one case which I've worked with quite recently, which is quite a live case, it came about because the husband was under the mental health team within the local authority and he went to and went abroad to get married. So that brought up its own concerns around his capacity.

He came back to this country with with his wife.

And the mental health team were concerned about whether or not this should have happened, and also what the purpose really was of going abroad to get his wife from Bangladesh.

I was asked to go in to look at a career assessment for the wife and a carers assessment because she was clearly caring for him.

And he was living with his parents.

So I went to the home.

And it was very clear from the moment I walked in that she was very uncomfortable about being there, that there was a big power issues happening. It was interesting because I felt that the power issues were coming from her husband's father.

You.

But actually what it turned out to be it turned out to be it was the mother-in-law that was really had the power in the relationship.

That was very interesting to me because.

Whilst I was in the House, I didn't feel that she had a great deal of power, but actually as the story unfolded from the victim, it became very clear that it was. I had got my assumptions the wrong way round whilst in the home she asked. She said to me that.

She was terrified. We were in in another room having a private conversation, and she was terrified that they were going to kill her.

Because she felt that they believed she was bringing shame to the family because she wasn't doing what they asked her to do within the family home. This was in her in law's home.

So it was a very difficult situation to be in because obviously I had to leave in order to get her removed from that home.

But I had to leave her there, not knowing whether she would be there when I came back, whether she would still be alive, whether they would have kidnapped her, because they'd already threatened to kidnap her.

So I did return. I obviously contacted the HBA police. Within two hours we removed her from the house.

And put her into safe accommodation.

Please.

Even this is really a very live and sensitive case that you have shared. Thank you for telling about the sensibilities regarding the family and the victim of this abuse. Were you able to you and your team were able to find a reasonably satisfactory solution to this case?

Yeah, she was very incredibly brave. She spoke to the police. We I went with her to give video evidence. So she's been video interviewed by the police. And she has been put in a safe house away from the local authority that I work in. And we are currently in a position where there's a prosecution.

Of domestic servitude, honour based abuse, assault and several other threats to kill is another one. So it's it is a live case and obviously the police have.

Taking it incredibly seriously, which is right and proper?

So, Yvonne, I'm sure in this kind of context there would be also as a social worker, you would also have to deal with colleagues in the police, it's and the law. And as you said, in some ways, making the woman also come to an understanding of this as abuse.

And not her caring function in the family.

So.

Dealing with all these issues can be quite tough. Personally on you and I would like to know how these these kind of contexts of much trauma, wherein racism, immigration laws and cultural disconnect all confront you. So how do you support yourself and your team?

While still showing up meaningfully for survivors like this woman.

Yeah, it's a very difficult situation because we're, I'm very aware that we're coming from our team. It is multicultural, but mainly we're coming from a very westernised approach for trauma.

So really what we have coming at it from is from an individualists approach, which would mean looking at counselling and 1:00 to 1:00 for the victims or the survivors when actually most of the people we work with will want to come from a collectivist approach. So thinking about the community.

They live within.

So we need to be looking at how we use trauma focused approaches that don't necessarily look at treatments, because otherwise we can end up neglecting the culture and the political and social economical factors of that.

So within our team I have, I've got a I have done a course in psychological trauma for a year, which was an amazing course with Chester University. So I've put on quite a lot of training for the team around.

Trauma.

And I'm keen to look at some of these other areas, particularly around the cultural concept of the distress that we see in service users, which is about their individual lived experiences, but also that of the community they live within, because the community is so important for the people we work with.

So I'm keen to put on some more training for the team looking at that specific part of trauma.

Within my team, we work with a relationship based approach so that extends out to the team as well as the service users. I'm seen as the specialist within the team around trauma, so part of what I do as well is to support the team in in what they're dealing with, so do that through reflective practise.

So I I hold reflective supervisions for the people that I regularly supervise.

And also obviously, regular professional supervision is really important where we look at sharing skills and we name I ask people to name the trauma for for the people we, the staff team and to reflect on that and how it impacts on their sale.

And to encourage them to get the support that they might need when dealing with these really complicated issues because also we're looking at a degree of loss for the people we work with. So the loss of their culture, the loss of their community, loss of social structures, economic deprivation.

And also loss of agency.

So there's an awful lot of loss gone on for them, which we need to recognise, which can lead to us feeling a sense of loss as well as the professionals.

Because we do what we can for these people. But sometimes, you know, we don't always, we don't always get it right. So we can feel a sense of loss, but we may not have done the best job we possibly can. So there is a lot of support around the team, but we have to get that right for ourselves first.

And traumas, not just about the people that we work with traumas very much about the circumstances we work with in as well. So things like where do we see people, where do we hold meetings with people. So lighting for people can be very difficult if you come so well. That's really bright lighting. If we go into a room that maybe has got warm.

Memorabilia which we have a room in where we sometimes hold meetings. That's a really inappropriate room to be holding discussions with people about.

Comma, so the tumour is of massive subject right from the very, very tiny things, the minutiae right up to the macro of what's happened to people. So it's a big topic in itself.

Yes, and even in this case that you were telling, there was a certain level of cooperation by the victim woman who even in the same House could tell.

You about the challenges she was facing, but I'm sure in the 30 year long period of experience that you have, you might have met women who would tell you something on in one meeting and would change their mind in another meeting and.

You were confronted with with withdrawal of the very same women who would be seeking intervention in the first case.

Yeah, definitely, definitely worked with lots of women where they've been subjected to violence and they have withdrawn consent. They have decided that they didn't wish to prosecute or that they would return to the person who was committing that violence. And that's a really.

Difficult place for a worker to be and also obviously a very difficult place for the woman to be. And of course, it's not always women and men are subjected to these things as well.

So do you think in these cases where there is such a withdrawal or you turn is it that it is only out of the fear of consequences or there are some changes in the behaviour of the family because of the intervention that has been done?

In a timely way. So the family is able to change its approach to the man or the woman who is facing victimisation.

I think that sometimes is the case in my experience.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen an awful lot of that happen. We have we use all different types of tools to help, not just help the survivors, but also to the help the perpetrators to change their behaviour.

It's a very I think it's a very difficult field where I've worked with perpetrators of violence against women and.

They do struggle to change, I think struggle to change their behaviour and it can come from lots of different angles that it can be about their culture and it also can be about other things that maybe they're using within their lives to survive. Whatever they're trying to survive, such as drugs or alcohol, I think there is a misconception.

That violence can be about somebody losing control, but actually, in my experience, I would say that actually it's much more about being in control.

So having the control and using that control over somebody.

Yes, this brings me to my next question which has got to do with based on your experience, what policy or institutional barriers?

Especially in case of UK, have you seen which make it harder for immigrant women?

To come out to speak out and to access support.

For family based violence that they experience.

I think what we see quite often is that there there can be a normalisation of the violence in the different countries of people that are coming from different countries to here it. There is definitely a normalisation that happens.

And some of that is cultural. Quite often it's a cultural normalisation that we can see, but also when we've got vulnerable migrant groups or vulnerable migrant women coming over from different countries, what we do see is that there is a few.

Here, of disclosing the violence, the gender based violence due to stigma, then feeling that might get stigmatise, stigmatised and they do live with the consequences a lot longer than maybe white British women. So we have women.

That aren't believed when they have their asylum interviews, and if you're not believed once, then why would you tell your story again?

It also goes back to trauma because the more times you tell your story, the more times you become retraumatization there is, I think there's also an unequal power dynamic because of the cultural norms for women. So what we see with a lot of our migrant women is that the man.

So.

Does tend to be in charge. Does tend to be the leader of the household, and that is then followed down to the boys within the household. We had a case in our team of some domestic abuse from an Afghan family.

And the father left. The family was removed by the police. But now what we have is we have the older boy who's 15. He has now taken on the role of the man within the family and continues to perpetrate the domestic abuse against his mother.

And his female siblings, so that perpetrates throughout the family.

Thank you for pointing this, because the fact that they are already living on the margins, so to say of legitimacy in a different cultural context and maybe very often faced with poverty of an acute nature in this context, when you are talking about younger boys taking up.

The role of the dominant patriarch and wrecking violence.

On.

Girls have have the mothers and daughters still taken the initiative to come out for social support, or they clamp up in such cases.

This the some of the cases I would say they climb.

Up.

Because their children are really important to them, obviously, and I think it becomes part of what they expect. So we work quite closely. We run a women's group within our team and we work closely with the women.

To try.

Support them and advocate for them and empower them and give them agency to begin to understand that actually women do have a voice. Women can speak up and that they can have power.

Although it's very feels very alien to them because of their culture.

We try to encourage them in very small ways to start with, to understand that actually here in this country it's OK to speak up and people will support you and you don't have to be part of what's maybe happened in the past. This is you're starting a new life.

And it's very different here and we don't accept we don't accept gender based violence in this country and we will act on it.

Yeah. So, Yvonne, there's a lot of things you've pointed out actually in terms of how to deal with these challenges. I would like you to address this last question that I have, which is particularly oriented for social work students. So maybe hearing you is to.

Your advice on how to recognise loopholes barriers in policy and advocacy and actively counter them in their field education so that they are kind of ambassadors of decolonizing.

Their approach to immigrant women?

Particularly.

Yeah, that's a big subject in itself, isn't it? So how we how I, we ask people are social students to think about it is to think about. Firstly I would say they need to self reflect. So they need to think about their own implicit and explicit biases.

So that they can identify them and understand them for themselves, and then to maybe.

Also, be thinking about challenging themselves on their own power that they have, and the privileges that we hold in this country because we are very privileged. We have. There is a lot of privileges that that we have that the women and the men that we work with don't see and we need to identify.

Those and help social workers to really accept that social work is is powerful in itself. It's a very powerful place to be a social worker, and we can't. We can't use that power over people. We need to be using the power with them.

Working with a coworker or another student to hold each other accountable, I think with, with really good place to be.

And I also think students definitely need opportunities to incorporate in their study. The colonial legacy of White Western intellect, because we make the view quite often that we are superior as white Western people to other forms of knowledge and to what goes on in the universe.

And we know.

But we do make that assumption. Social workers need to be listening to the stories of the colonialism and looking at the culture and the psychological and the economic freedom that we need to be giving to the people that we work with, from migrant families, creating a shift in the power.

And.

Dynamics power is.

It can be really misused, so we need to be looking at how we shift those power dynamics to give people advocacy, to give them empowerment and not just as a word empowerment, not just as a word, but empowerment in its truest form. So our team works from a community community based approach to relationship based approach.

Use community social work as part of what we see going forward, and that's very much about.

Asking people what they would like to happen, giving them the advocacy, giving them the power and really making them feel that they are in have the control over their own lives. So I think that's I'm really passionate about social work, students, understanding and starting.

Very much from understanding their own self reflections.

Thank you, Yvonne. That is really insightful and experiential sharing that you have gathered over long years. We are very grateful for your sharing these this advice with all students who want to work in this area of gender based violence.

Comma transnational lens and to deconstruct their own attitudes and values towards practising decolonized, social work, education. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for inviting me and I hope that some of this makes good listening and people can learn from it.

I've had a really thought provoking, listening to Yvonne when she was telling us about how westernised the approach to trauma is and that looking at the community and cultural factors can help survive us when we're working with them.

One of my key takeaways has to be that we need to be aware of our own biases and the real life scenario. Even shift shows how male and female family members, for example, can be perpetrators of 1 obese abuse, which is usually explored from a gendered.

Friends with females as victims and males as perpetrators, being aware of issues like power and privileges and the legacies of colonialism seem to be key in this area.

I used to think that there wasn't a lot of power that was held as a social work student, but actually listening to it, Yvonne just now talk about the powers that's held in our role and how students we should challenge our own power and own privileges has really made me question my own thinking. I really liked when she said, not power over people, but power with people.

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