Charity is reaching out to help women in need
THE Western Morning News and its sister websites, Devon Live, Cornwall Live and Plymouth Live, have launched a fundraising campaign to support the organisations providing essential relief to those hardest hit by lockdown – including shelters for victims of domestic abuse.
An estimated 2.3 million adults aged 16 to 74 years old experienced domestic abuse last year, with 1.6 million being women and 757,000 being men.
These shocking figures are according to an Office for National Statistics (ONS) crime survey for England and Wales, and cover a 12-month period ending in March last year.
There are people behind these figures, and organisations in the UK are offering invaluable support to those who need it. Trevi House charity is one such organisation in Plymouth which aims to help and transform the lives of thousands of women and children.
Trevi House runs three centres. The first is Jasmine Mother’s Recovery (formerly known as Trevi House), a residential rehabilitation centre exclusively for mothers and their children.
The second is Sunflower Women’s Centre, offering wrap-around therapeutic support in the community, and the third is Daffodil Family Centre, a residential family centre.
Hayley Dann, fundraising and marketing lead, explained: “Trevi is a charity that has been running for 28 years. It started off as one centre, which is a residential rehabilitation centre exclusively for mothers and their children. It’s the only one in the UK where mothers can take their children through rehab.
“It’s now called Jasmine Mother’s recovery. In 2016, we started to realise that women were relocating to Plymouth after their rehab because they felt safe. We set up Sunflower Women’s Centre, which has grown massively over the years. In its first year, it was dealing with about 60 women and now it’s over 700 women.
“The third centre we run is Daffodil Family Centre, a parenting assessment centre. The organisation has grown significantly, especially over the last three years.”
Paula Carnell, team lead and a practitioner at the Sunflower Women’s Centre, explains what they offer to women who may be fleeing domestic abuse relationships.
“We’ve incorporated loads of training programmes,” she said. “We say training – it’s not really the right word, there are programmes to help educate, empower and help women grow in confidence and build their self-worth based on what they’ve brought to us from the community.
“Either they’ve been in domestic abuse relationships or they’ve been through domestic abuse, or they might have suffered trauma from other areas.
“Our programmes are extensive and we’re listening all the time. If we feel like there’s a real need for something, then we endeavour to put them into our training programmes.
“I’m team lead, so our staff has also expanded,” Paula added. “We’ve got more practitioners, we do lots of things with people in the community such as art and drama. We’ve had people who do belly dancing, we have a big gym which outside of Covid we use, it’s just growing and growing.”
The team lead says that working throughout the Covid-19 pandemic has been difficult. “I’ve been one of the staff working throughout Covid,” she added. “Some of the staff have been working from home, and some have been furloughed. It has changed massively, it’s so strange.
“The house is a big house, but sometimes it felt we needed somewhere even bigger– it would be a throng of women coming in. All the rooms would be full, counsellors in one room and training in another, as well as a women’s space where people could come in and have a cup of tea, and suddenly there was nobody.
“We had to resort to doing what we could over the phone, it got to a point that we had so many referrals it became overwhelming for us to manage in a sense of what could we offer?
“Before, we would welcome them in and someone would come and sit and talk to them one to one, we’ve had to offer online zoom sessions.”
The centre offers a daily women’s space via video call, as well as training online.
Paula says, especially since the latest lockdown, their numbers have increased. She said: “We’ve probably taken on another 250 to 300 referrals. We’re trying to support the best we can. We say, if they’re in crisis, to call and we’ll bring them in to do a oneto-one and sometimes that’s all they need, to just sit and listen.
“I’ve had to have police interventions when people are fleeing or trying to flee domestic abuse. We’ve invited people in to talk and just be here and feel that they’re heard and seen.
“I think the isolation has caused a lot of people’s mental health to really take a nose-dive. It has been hard, but in Sunflower style we’re organic, which is why we evolve and adapt.”
Paula adds that she wants to encourage women to contact the organisation directly. She said: “It’s not always easy. Some people have anxiety, depression and their confidence is low, but, if they can do that [get in touch], then their engagement will be a lot more positive and consistent.
“We want to make sure we’re not compromising on what we can give. The first port of call would be to contact us,” she added.
“We ask them some basic questions and background and put them on our lists for the training, and it’s a process they will go through. There’s a mental health awareness course, which is two or three days, and from that they can go onto a six, eight or 12-week course.
“If somebody is really ready to get that support, they can go right through the process with us and end up being peer mentors”
Trevi House has been a recipient of Devon Community Foundation (DCF) grants.