‘Women’s centres should not be part of the criminal justice system.’
‘The idea that if something is painted pink and has the tagline of ‘empowering women’ then it is helping women, is not only harmful but is simplistic and dangerous.‘
So says Dr Gemma Ahearne from the University of Liverpool in her blog The Problem with Women’s Centres. I discovered her work when trying to understand what is happening to women’s centres now, having been aware of them right from the heady days of the second wave of feminism, when women were out there in the community doing things for themselves in the 1980s, setting up services for women. I’ve always found them to be an important resource for the women I saw in my clinic. A place where they could not only get the emotional support they needed in a relaxed, ‘women only’, non-institutional environment but also get practical help with the key issues facing them, from sexual abuse, domestic violence to benefits advice and hunger. Some women I knew attended long-running groups in the local centre. Some centres and services were specifically set up to provide help with mental health such as the, now sadly closed, Women’s Therapy Centre in London and Self-Injury Support in Bristol, still going strong and nationally, on-line. Others provided and still do offer counselling and group work based on the kind of feminist psychotherapy interventions developed by people such as Pamela Trevithick who pioneered groups for working class women experiencing depression with the organisation, Womankind. (as an aside I met a psychiatrist recently who had never heard of feminist psychotherapy…am I just old??).
We know that women’s centres provide important effective support for women. They do work. Outside of what is offered by NHS Talking Therapies and limited counselling available from voluntary organisations they are the only other free resource available for women who experience significantly more common mental health disorders, anxiety and depression, than men, and are prescribed twice as many antidepressants. If we are really serious about helping women to find alternatives to medication, they are absolutely key. But there have always been funding problems, so it was disappointing but not surprising to hear from a friend of the demise of Salford Woman’s Centre, based in the city where I used to work. Ruth Hunt wrote about this, and the need to keep women’s centres going in the Morning Star recently.
Baroness Corston also recommended them as key in keeping women out of prison in her 2007 report, prompted by the increasing rate of suicide in women in custody. As a result there was a considerable increase in criminal justice funding and involvement in women’s centres, of different hues, in the community. They can all be found simply by typing in https://www.womensservicesmap.com – some are traditional women’s centres open to allcomers but also receiving funding, sometimes the majority, from criminal justice. Others are doing entirely criminal justice focussed work and require a professional referral. Then there are the ones in-between that are primarily focussed on helping ‘vulnerable’ women who have been or are at risk of being involved with criminal justice, but anyone is welcomed, as continued funding depends on keeping up the numbers. I learned much more about the conflicting roles that many women’s centres now perform from reading Gemma Ahearne’s book chapter Sister’s Keepers: the Case of Women’s Centres also reproduced on her blog here.
This was not an easy read:
..’.the centre performs conflicting roles, on one hand it is there to support women by offering domestic violence support, education courses, free food, sanitary products, counselling and free legal advice, and on the other hand it is there to punish women. This paradox cannot be ignored, for women who go there on a statutory basis experience many of the pains of imprisonment, simply displaced on this alternative site. The idea that if something is painted pink and has the tagline of ‘empowering women’ then it is helping women, is not only harmful but is simplistic and dangerous.’ Ahearne 2022
Gemma spent some time working in one of the centres that is primarily focussed on criminal justice referrals but also anyone else can also attend. Her blog is a sobering read. This is not the kind of women’s centre that the pioneer women who set up services in the 1980s had in mind. Far from it. Yes, women can get many different types of advice and support in a ‘one-stop-shop’ but she describes an atmosphere of surveillance, a place where therapeutic groups including those on domestic violence are not run by qualified staff, with limited one-to-one work to develop trust and where, for heaven’s sake, making friends to meet outside is actively discouraged! Those doing community payback work were required to wear bright orange tabards which seemed a demeaning form of punishment. To be honest, what came to my mind was a new workhouse – a system of controlling women (as ever) from deprived communities who are being catalogued as the new ‘undeserving’ and ‘deserving’ poor. There is a focus on recognising that your lifestyle is your ‘choice’ regardless of what you’ve been through and learning how to not question the trauma that the state itself is inflicting on you too, as a woman. It’s certainly not aimed at supporting women to become activists, as the original women’s centres did and still do. Rather the opposite, to encourage you to conform. Attending somewhere like this may well help some women but could retraumatise many others. Women experiencing complex mental health problems of the kind that many attendees at women’s centres face, especially those who have been in the criminal justice system, require skilled help from trained and supervised staff, not simply warehousing in the community (a term that is also sometimes used in relation to long term in-patient wards for problematic women with a diagnosis of personality disorder).
We need more and better women’s centres with safe funding not dependent on criminal justice to keep them going.
Thanks to Dr Gemma Ahearne for the conversation!
Out of Her Mind: How we are failing women’s mental health and what must change is on sale now.
Further reading:
Ahearne G. Empowerment or punishment? The curious case of women’s centres. In Experiences of Punishment, Abuse and Justice by Women and Families 2023 Mar 28 (pp. 32-47). Policy Press.
Elfleet H. NEOLIBERAL FEMINISED GOVERNMENTALITY: THE ROLE AND FUNCTION OF A POST CORSTON REPORT (2007) WOMEN’S CENTRE IN THE NORTH-WEST OF ENGLAND. British Journal of Community Justice (BJCJ). 2022 Jan 1;18(1)
Patching the Soul 