Just One Thing – Safia Griffin, Women’s Involvement Officer, MASH
I believe it’s important to understand where our ideas come from. I work with organisations around their service models and who they include/don’t include. How do we frame certain people in society and our own biases? How do we value/not value people? It is easy for our biases to get written into policies.
A big part of my role is about humanising our work and services so we can all feel comfortable in these spaces and have respectful and courageous conversations about our needs, perspectives and differences. We need to have deeper conversations so we come to a mutual understanding of why everyone is in the room and what the problems really are. So when we get to service design or reviews, or we look to co-design policy and services, we are actually dismantling those structural inequalities and biases that often are unknowingly written into policies and service models. And the role they play in how we treat, view and judge people in those service spaces. I’m talking about the culture of the organisation being shaped by policy and bias.
Through my partnership involvement role, and work across Greater Manchester with organisations like Inspiring Change Manchester (ICM), I work with a lot of women and others facing multiple disadvantage and stigma. Often services are set up to meet a single need or a crisis and do not account for the complexity of people’s lives, and how women’s needs are different so often don’t get met in standard mixed gender services. For instance, in a lot of homeless accommodation (at least until the last couple of years), there are more beds for men and when women are planned for in mixed gender provision, their vulnerability and needs are not considered. I’ve been told by women that they have woken up with someone in their bed or they feel they cannot leave their room without being harassed. Women are embarrassed asking for sanitary products. Getting a blank look when asking for things they need, because they are not catered for. They are scared to have a shower because of the lack of cleanliness and the vulnerability of having a shower and getting to the bathroom in the first place. They have had men asking for sexual favours.
Being safe isn’t just about having a security guard downstairs. Services need to think about what women have gone through and their past trauma. Provision of homeless accommodation is seen as a male dominated issue and that is what is seen because rough sleeping policy and service models accommodate more men. A lot of housing issues that women and people from ethnic minorities face are not counted for in this model. Like overcrowding, substandard accommodation and conditions, exploitation and discrimination. Women don’t always present so this reinforces the idea that it is male provision that is most needed. For many, many years’ data was gathered without gender or ethnicity or others demographics, as the thinking was ‘We don’t need demographic data as we know what the needs are from who we see in our services and it is male dominated’.
This is where my involvement role comes in, and where I can push for change in working with services, women and others around providing spaces and opportunities for them to have their voices heard and acted on for meaningful change. My role includes encouraging women to share their experiences, talk to decision makers and gather research to inform what services need to look like for women facing multiple disadvantage.
This is a key issue for Manchester Action on Street Health (MASH) as service users often face multiple disadvantage and stigma around sex work and what has happened to them. They don’t want to just be seen and defined as involved in sex work and can be reluctant and distrustful of service due to this and past negative experiences and barriers to accessing support and services. Asking for help and then not being believed, or being victimised, comes up a lot in conversations I have with women.
By the time the majority of the women we work with present in standard services, they can face several issues and are often in crisis. Instead of seeing this need and trauma, the system often labels them as high risk and complex needs. There are very few services that are genuinely built around trauma-informed approaches and complex needs, most are single need and male dominated.
Women and others are falling through the cracks as provision is not tailored to them and resources are not allocated appropriately.
However, there has been an attitude shift over recent years and a willingness to acknowledge that services could be better, that there is a hidden need and that the current system doesn’t meet this. There is a willingness to talk to people with lived experience and those facing multiple disadvantage to do something about this to lead to meaningful change.
Part of my work involves peer research and we used a method called community reporting to gather stories from women about what women-centred approaches look like and feel like. Being seen as a person and making time to get to know them and build a relationship was seen as a top priority. This can be as simple as, the importance of having your name remembered, being offered a cup of tea, staff taking time to get to know you, offering choice and building trust before going through some very personal questions for the service assessment. This attitude shift has led to recognition of these approaches and increased conversations around both women-centred approaches and trauma-informed practices.
I am not the only one working on this and having these conversations. We are starting to reach a critical mass and have more commitment from local government and services around how we not only involve lived experience but meaningfully do so and understand what it feels like to not have a voice or go unsupported or be judged when you access support and services.
There is a Greater Manchester Combined Authority commitment to Greater Manchester becoming a trauma-informed region. I don’t have the details of this but from my understanding, this means that a percentage of services have to have policies and training, and there are agencies going out to services and communities to provide training and support in implementing this. So that in the future, when you access services across Greater Manchester, chances are they will be trauma-informed.
There is an acknowledgement that in order to change service provision and the system, we need to see the person, not just the problem. In order to do so, we need to ask ourselves why and what has happened to them to stay out of judgement, to see the person, and to then actively find out what they want and what they need.