Wise heads on young shoulders
When Women’s Refuge asked children for ideas on improving the service, it was surprised by the quality and selflessness of the advice. Bess Manson reports.
Every Women’s Refuge should have a two-storey pillow fort with a rock climbing wall. Hot chocolate in the winter, cake every day, and a teddy for every child would be excellent. Dangly fairy lights would be cool to help kids calm down. This is the advice from 9-year-old Charlotte, one of 19 ‘‘special advisers’’ to Women’s Refuge on how it might better serve children coming into its safe houses. All the children chose pseudonyms. Charlotte’s ideas swung from the practical to the fantastical, but her proposal, which included more leaders and help for other children, was the essence of a report published today.
Kids in the Middle analysed how support was currently offered to tamariki and how it should work in the future. It asked what children thought about their time at Refuge and looked at how their stories could help design support specifically for children.
In a series of interviews with the 19 children, aged between 5 and 13, Refuge asked about their experience before, during and after their stays at a safe house.
The interviews, conducted with rigorous consent measures, gave a moving insight into the emotional state of children who came with their mothers to Women’s Refuges, having escaped violence at home.
Kids in fear for their safety
A preoccupation with safety prevailed among most of those interviewed. When asked what toys they would like, one suggested toy sharks, so long as they did not have teeth, and a chainsaw, so long as it was a safe blow-up one.
The children all said they needed more time spent acting out their safety plans to build their confidence in actually being able to carry them out. Ihaka, 9, and Kauri, 8, told of a safety alarm installed in their home which would trigger the police if activated, but feared they might not be able to enact their escape.
Rose, 7, spoke of her fear of a safety plan not working if her father came to her home. Children told interviewers they spent much time going over and over their plans in their heads, but needed more time and help to practise them. When asked how they coped with frightening situations, one recounted how they found relief ‘‘screaming into a pillow’’. Some of the children expressed themselves through detailed drawings. Others talked non-stop, or acted out their ideas.
‘‘Their willingness to explore their experiences and ideas with Refuge emphasises how much children have to offer in a research process, and why they deserve to have their participation honoured,’’ says Women’s Refuge research and development adviser Cleo Arathoon.
‘‘Only kids can teach us how to hear from and think about kids. Unfortunately, what we have heard from children throughout this research suggests that we adults, advocates, and Refuges do not always hear children.’’
It was absolutely critical that children were consulted in the research, says Dr Ang Jury, Women’s Refuge chief executive.
‘‘We have seen enough in recent years to know that we have to listen to what children are telling us. That they are sentient beings who have their own thoughts, understandings, strategies for getting on in the world.
‘‘Some of their ideas are pretty damn good if we would just stop and listen to them.’’
Putting kids first
The Refuge model is currently limited by the adult-focused design of its services, says Arathoon.
While it has always focused on women, children are far from passive passengers in their mothers’ journeys.
‘‘So much of our attention and resourcing has historically been on women. But 50 per cent of the people who come into our safe houses are children, so we started to ask ourselves: are we best equipped to understand and deal with children and their experiences, or has our focus been so much on their mums that we are almost overlooking the importance of children as clients individually?’’
The children interviewed turned out to be a much more competent resource than Arathoon imagined.
They were the essence of the report, she says. ‘‘I had no idea the level that they would be able to explain and divulge.
‘‘I hadn’t put them first. I hadn’t centred them in everything I was doing, and that’s the problem with Refuge; we weren’t centring them in everything we were doing.’’
Children were very matter-offact about their experiences and what they wanted out of Refuge, she says.
‘‘They were prepared to answer questions about themselves, about their family, about the violence, about what we could do better.
‘‘They were more prepared than I was. I needed to meet their energy with a report that
actually makes change for them.’’
Those changes include appointing child advocates at refuges who specialise in children and family violence, follow-up help for children leaving refuges, help to plan safety measures at home, more training for staff, better play spaces – and perhaps that cake the children asked for.
All this will be part of a yearlong pilot programme being
launched at seven of the 40 Women’s Refuges across Aotearoa, with the support of the Ministry of Social Development.
The pilot, Ko¯kihi nga¯ Rito, revolutionises the way tamariki receive support by developing a service that accounts for children’s specific needs as clients in their own right, says Arathoon.
‘‘The pilot emphasises what children have told us is important to them. Once we have evaluated Ko¯kihi nga¯ Rito, the dream would be to have a purposeful children’s service running in all of our refuges, so that children are prioritised as clients in all the work we do.’’
Having a child advocate specialist would take the onus and burden of all the mental energy that children spend asking where am I? Why am I here? What’s going to happen? AmI safe?
‘‘We want to remove the onus from them and put it on to ourselves,’’ says Arathoon.
‘It’s about the other kids’
Despite their own traumatic experiences, a key theme from children interviewed was their desire to help other children who come into refuges.
‘‘It isn’t about me and my brother, it’s about the other kids,’’ Kauri, 8, reflected.
Their ideas spoke volumes about who and what they value, and made interviewers wonder at the selflessness of the children.
‘‘From the point of view of the children, there are simply many more children to help, and they believe Refuge needs more people, more resources and play items, and a greater space to help them,’’ says Arathoon.
‘‘When I asked if they had a million dollars, what would they do, none of them said they’d buy a PlayStation 5. They said this [money] is how we could help all the other kids. They were entirely selfless.’’
Charlotte summed it up when she remarked to an interviewer: ‘‘There are more kids who need help every day . . . If we made [Refuge] bigger, that would help a lot of kids. More kids and humanbeings in the world.’’
Children talked about the import
ance of the friendships they developed during their Refuge stays, and of the solidarity they had with others who had similar histories.
They felt blindsided by the realisation that these relationships would come to an end when they left Refuge, as there was no mechanism for these relationships to continue when one party had left.
Refuge now wants to explore the possibility of continuing these children’s relationships, though they would need to consider the confidentiality of children and their families.
‘‘But it’s something they have told us is essential, so we want to try and do this for them,’’ says Arathoon.
‘I have wings’
In their discussions around possible improvements to Refuge, children also spoke about what they wanted to feel like when they left safe houses.
Creating an imaginary character named George, three siblings said they hoped he would feel ‘‘like if he was a caterpillar, and he went into metamorphosis, and he emerged a butterfly’’.
Another said it would feel like ‘‘crawling out from under your blankets, fresh air on your face’’.
Charlotte remarked on the difference between her ‘‘before’’ drawing and her ‘‘after’’ one. Of the latter, she says: ‘‘I don’t have that derpylooking face. I’m not wondering what the hell is going on, and I have wings. I have wings.
‘‘It is peaceful, and I can fly to space.’’