SAY Women – Housing, young women and trauma
We spoke to Pam Hunter and Zoe Taylor of SAY Women, a unique organization providing semi-supported accommodation and support for young women who have experienced sexual violence; some of the women they support are or have been involved in selling or exchanging sex. Pam is the Chief Executive and Zoe is the Services Manager.
We discussed housing issues for young women, the realities of exploitation and grooming and delved into what it means to be ‘trauma-informed’ in practice.
Can you start by telling us about SAY Women and the services you offer?
Pam: SAY Women started in 1991, when four strong feminists coming from social care identified the need. At that time, the CHAR report came out, a piece of research that identified that for every 10 young women 4 of them are homeless because they were sexually abused. After identifying the need, our founders then started with one flat and it’s grown from there.
We support young women aged 16-25 who are homeless because they have been sexually abused. We use Judith Hermann’s model from her book Trauma and Recovery, which follows three stages: physical safety, remembrance and mourning, and connectivity.
While we offer semi-supported accommodation, we are not a refuge. Young women sign up with us because they want to change, and they have to adhere to the progression of change that we are introducing. Now, it’s very person-centred and very compassionate and empathetic, but you must embrace that change.
Two areas of our work that are growing is our training – we provide training for those who are in homeless or housing arenas to help them understand the connectivity to sexual abuse as an underlying cause of homelessness – and we also have a tenancy sustainment arm.
In terms of Hermann’s model of trauma and recovery, how do you apply this model in your service?
Pam: For the first stage, physical safety, we support 8 young women in our residential unit here in Glasgow for an 18-month period to help them understand what physical safety feels like - the idea is to get the women into their own tenancies at the end of that period. We also support about 80 women a year who are in and out of physical safety.
The second stage, remembrance and mourning, is the majority of the work we do. This stage is very person-centred, helping the women re-build their lives and understand what trauma has done to them. It is very much not “what’s wrong with you?” but more “because of what’s happened to you.” We look at more socially-acceptable coping mechanisms and help them understand the four Fs – fight, flight, freeze, fawn – because many of them carry a lot of self-blame.
Our third stage, connectivity, is about connecting with yourself, with others and with the wider society. We have groupwork activities where we bring an art therapist, we have a movie group… anything to try to inspire them, motivate them, take off the shackles of the shame of the abuse they’ve experienced and help them to live their lives fully.
Zoe: And also, we don’t see Hermann’s model as a linear process – when it comes to homelessness, it is always about going back to establishing safety.
You mentioned tenancy sustainment as part of your services, can you explain more?
Zoe: The idea behind the Tenancy Sustainment Project was to raise housing worker’s awareness and confidence about asking about sexual violence, because still today housing and homeless services do not ask that question. They ask about domestic violence, and Scottish Women’s Aid has done an immense job of getting women with experience of domestic violence recognised within homelessness, but underlying this is commercial sexual exploitation, childhood sexual abuse and all other forms of men’s violence against women.
Pam: We started off with Renfrewshire Council where we provide all their council staff with training. We then place a member of our staff in their building and that person is there to get referrals of any identified people, meaning we support the staff to ask the question “have you been sexually abused?” and not be frightened of the answer. Once we get an appropriate referral, we start working with the young woman. It was so successful in Renfrewshire for a year that we now have a full-time person in post funded directly from the council.
Is selling or exchanging sex an experience you often see among the women you support?
Zoe: Yes, but it’s changed a bit. There are less women involved in street prostitution accessing our service and lots more indoor involvement. I think it changed with the internet and the media, and we are finding that a lot of women living in isolation will be targeted online by predatory men and then find themselves with men at home being sexually assaulted.
We often find that, with survivors of sexual violence and trauma, there’s a cyclic pattern of abuse which links with the cyclic pattern of homelessness. What happens is that they’re being abused, they’ll have to flee their tenancy in order to find safety and they’ll end up in homelessness. While they’re in mainstream homelessness accommodation, there can be a risk of exploitation and the cycles interlink with each other.
What are the main issues that you see for women who sell or exchange sex?
Zoe: A lot of issues relate to tenancy sustainment. If it’s women who have been groomed and are being sexually exploited, they’ll have men coming into their flats, which will cause a neighbour’s complaint, which will then cause a housing issue and the risk of somebody losing their home. It’s about being able to work with housing staff and making them aware of what is going on for the young woman and working with her. A lot of the women that we work with have no idea that they’re being sexually exploited.
Pam: We talk to our women who, as we said, they’re not aware that they’re being exploited and they don’t appreciate that there’s an element of abuse in the activities that they are taking part in and don’t always consider who is coercing them, who is controlling them. That process of choice, of what you do has to come from a position where you are not in poverty.
Whenever there’s poverty, you don’t have freedom of choice. When we look at what’s happening now, with increasing fuel costs, the cost of living is going up, women are in isolation, and people are already going to food banks. So what are they going to do? Are they going to choose to have food out of a food bank and never be able to pay their electricity bill or are they going to look for other sources of income?
Zoe: We encourage the women to find alternatives access to food, fuel, income opportunities rather than being involved in something that is inevitably going to cause a lot of trauma.
What is your process to support women involved in selling or exchanging sex?
Zoe: Any work that we do around CSE, prostitution or transactional sex is non-judgemental. You can’t come from a place of judgment when you are working with survivors at all. But we need to do an assessment with the young women about why they found themselves in that situation. It’s about that mourning and remembrance. When we work with a young woman who is in that position, our job first is to establish safety. That would happen in one-to-one sessions and through discussions.
Pam: Just like we were explaining about understanding each individual’s trauma and own experiences, we would do the same in this situation because we would need to understand why they’ve gone down the CSE route, why are they in this situation. So unpicking their trauma to find out where their triggers are, the isolation triggers, the fear triggers… We can give them coping mechanisms that can help them not go down that route. But again, as Zoe said, not from a judgmental position of saying “you know you shouldn’t do that? You should do this instead.” It’s more an educational process and working with them about what could they do that could be different and help them to come to the ideas themselves, you know? Using the coaching model – trying to come to the ideas themselves.
What advice would you give to other front-line workers who may come across women who sell or exchange sex, for example about asking the question?
Zoe: When it comes to asking women whether they are being sexually exploited, often workers fear that they are opening a can of worms. We encourage the housing officers we train to ask the question because they have SAY Women as a backup and support. One of the staff might tell us: “a young woman has just told me that men are coming ‘round her house, and she’s been doing it for ages and she takes money, what am I supposed to say to that?”. The first thing you need to do is talk to that worker about establishing safety for the woman, and reassure them that the fact that the woman disclosed that in the first place speaks volumes about the relationship she feels she’s established with the worker. Utilise this information to the woman’s advantage – find out more, find out about the woman’s safety, that’s the most important thing. Find out about her health, her wellbeing and what she needs. Don’t judge and don’t panic.
Pam: Yes, don’t judge. We always say that if anyone discloses that they’ve been sexually abused, they have to be believed. If you are talking about sexual exploitation, believe what they are saying, don’t come from a judgement perspective, don’t come from a non-belief perspective. Consider how can you help make her life a bit more manageable? How can you make it more safe? And then refer to the organisations that can dig a wee bit deeper.
Zoe: We just teach all of our staff to be curious and interested about people and have a non-judgemental, non-prejudice approach. Ask how long has that been going on for? How did you get involved in that? We encourage our staff to come from a human perspective, with warmth, empathy, kindness, curiosity. You need to take the darkness out of these situations and the fear away. Don’t be afraid to ask a question.
We have to work positively, we have to be trauma-informed, we have to know about the coping strategies that people use, we have to find out how that’s come about for the young woman and what’s her take on it. Women might not always recognise when they’re being groomed, especially young women and those with a history of sexual violence. You don’t want to say “can’t you see that’s sexual exploitation?” She maybe has no idea about what it is that’s going on for her.
Pam: And these are our words anyway, not the women’s words.
I can hear how this idea of being ‘trauma-informed’ really comes through in your work, in understanding the underlying cause of someone’s behaviour, understanding that people might take longer to recover… Is there anything else you would recommend workers to do when responding to trauma?
Zoe: Sometimes you need to re-do things because she’s in a different house, in a different environment, a different local area, has different neighbours. Our job is to help women build resilience, help them identify stress that they’ve completely forgotten that they’ve got, give them the tools and techniques so that they can survive. When they get into new accommodation they forget because fear kicks in. You don’t cognitively work well when you are in threat, so we have to re-do it again in a new environment, and that’s what we do.
Unfortunately, when they are in the community, women do become isolated. If you’ve been stalked and harassed, you are not going to put your bin out at the usual hours. You are going to put it out at 3 am when no one can see you, and that will be a neighbour complaint. You might have music turned up because you want a break from intrusive thoughts because of a head injury from sustained violence that you’ve experienced or you’ll invite people in so you are not alone with your thoughts…
Pam: Also when we talk about trauma-informed, each person reacts to trauma in a different way, so it’s understanding what caused their trauma, the nuances of it and how it affects them as an individual and therefore knowing what their triggers are and then being able to form coping strategies. It’s about not judging, being compassionate and empathetic with the individual, help them find nuance… We are always challenging ourselves, especially when you are working with the women 24/7. There will be occasions where the young women have pissed the staff off, there will be behaviours that cause friction, so we have to challenge ourselves constantly. This is us being trauma-informed, that we are not judging or criticising them, it’s not their fault.
To finish, can you explain why we need a gender analysis in housing?
Zoe: Gender and gender inequality are massive issues in homelessness. Women are generally the caregivers, women will have children, women face more economic inequality than men do. These are barriers for women accessing statutory services. Shame, guilt, gender stereotyping of what a woman should be - able to manage a house, able to manage a family. A gendered approach is when women are recognised and counted, and women’s needs are recognised.
When women find themselves homeless, they won’t go down the statutory route, they will exhaust routes of friends and family first before they go into homelessness because they know there is a vulnerability in being homeless. And if they got children, they won’t highlight themselves to social work or to anyone else because there’s a risk of losing their children. That’s why we need a gender analysis and a gendered approach and a look into the differences between men and women when they are accessing services.
SAY Women are based in Glasgow and offer support for young women across Scotland. Visit their website to find out about their housing and support services for young women and their programme of training for workers in the housing sector and relevant services.
We discussed housing issues for young women, the realities of exploitation and grooming and delved into what it means to be ‘trauma-informed’ in practice.
Can you start by telling us about SAY Women and the services you offer?
Pam: SAY Women started in 1991, when four strong feminists coming from social care identified the need. At that time, the CHAR report came out, a piece of research that identified that for every 10 young women 4 of them are homeless because they were sexually abused. After identifying the need, our founders then started with one flat and it’s grown from there.
We support young women aged 16-25 who are homeless because they have been sexually abused. We use Judith Hermann’s model from her book Trauma and Recovery, which follows three stages: physical safety, remembrance and mourning, and connectivity.
While we offer semi-supported accommodation, we are not a refuge. Young women sign up with us because they want to change, and they have to adhere to the progression of change that we are introducing. Now, it’s very person-centred and very compassionate and empathetic, but you must embrace that change.
Two areas of our work that are growing is our training – we provide training for those who are in homeless or housing arenas to help them understand the connectivity to sexual abuse as an underlying cause of homelessness – and we also have a tenancy sustainment arm.
In terms of Hermann’s model of trauma and recovery, how do you apply this model in your service?
Pam: For the first stage, physical safety, we support 8 young women in our residential unit here in Glasgow for an 18-month period to help them understand what physical safety feels like - the idea is to get the women into their own tenancies at the end of that period. We also support about 80 women a year who are in and out of physical safety.
The second stage, remembrance and mourning, is the majority of the work we do. This stage is very person-centred, helping the women re-build their lives and understand what trauma has done to them. It is very much not “what’s wrong with you?” but more “because of what’s happened to you.” We look at more socially-acceptable coping mechanisms and help them understand the four Fs – fight, flight, freeze, fawn – because many of them carry a lot of self-blame.
Our third stage, connectivity, is about connecting with yourself, with others and with the wider society. We have groupwork activities where we bring an art therapist, we have a movie group… anything to try to inspire them, motivate them, take off the shackles of the shame of the abuse they’ve experienced and help them to live their lives fully.
Zoe: And also, we don’t see Hermann’s model as a linear process – when it comes to homelessness, it is always about going back to establishing safety.
You mentioned tenancy sustainment as part of your services, can you explain more?
Zoe: The idea behind the Tenancy Sustainment Project was to raise housing worker’s awareness and confidence about asking about sexual violence, because still today housing and homeless services do not ask that question. They ask about domestic violence, and Scottish Women’s Aid has done an immense job of getting women with experience of domestic violence recognised within homelessness, but underlying this is commercial sexual exploitation, childhood sexual abuse and all other forms of men’s violence against women.
Pam: We started off with Renfrewshire Council where we provide all their council staff with training. We then place a member of our staff in their building and that person is there to get referrals of any identified people, meaning we support the staff to ask the question “have you been sexually abused?” and not be frightened of the answer. Once we get an appropriate referral, we start working with the young woman. It was so successful in Renfrewshire for a year that we now have a full-time person in post funded directly from the council.
Is selling or exchanging sex an experience you often see among the women you support?
Zoe: Yes, but it’s changed a bit. There are less women involved in street prostitution accessing our service and lots more indoor involvement. I think it changed with the internet and the media, and we are finding that a lot of women living in isolation will be targeted online by predatory men and then find themselves with men at home being sexually assaulted.
We often find that, with survivors of sexual violence and trauma, there’s a cyclic pattern of abuse which links with the cyclic pattern of homelessness. What happens is that they’re being abused, they’ll have to flee their tenancy in order to find safety and they’ll end up in homelessness. While they’re in mainstream homelessness accommodation, there can be a risk of exploitation and the cycles interlink with each other.
What are the main issues that you see for women who sell or exchange sex?
Zoe: A lot of issues relate to tenancy sustainment. If it’s women who have been groomed and are being sexually exploited, they’ll have men coming into their flats, which will cause a neighbour’s complaint, which will then cause a housing issue and the risk of somebody losing their home. It’s about being able to work with housing staff and making them aware of what is going on for the young woman and working with her. A lot of the women that we work with have no idea that they’re being sexually exploited.
Pam: We talk to our women who, as we said, they’re not aware that they’re being exploited and they don’t appreciate that there’s an element of abuse in the activities that they are taking part in and don’t always consider who is coercing them, who is controlling them. That process of choice, of what you do has to come from a position where you are not in poverty.
Whenever there’s poverty, you don’t have freedom of choice. When we look at what’s happening now, with increasing fuel costs, the cost of living is going up, women are in isolation, and people are already going to food banks. So what are they going to do? Are they going to choose to have food out of a food bank and never be able to pay their electricity bill or are they going to look for other sources of income?
Zoe: We encourage the women to find alternatives access to food, fuel, income opportunities rather than being involved in something that is inevitably going to cause a lot of trauma.
What is your process to support women involved in selling or exchanging sex?
Zoe: Any work that we do around CSE, prostitution or transactional sex is non-judgemental. You can’t come from a place of judgment when you are working with survivors at all. But we need to do an assessment with the young women about why they found themselves in that situation. It’s about that mourning and remembrance. When we work with a young woman who is in that position, our job first is to establish safety. That would happen in one-to-one sessions and through discussions.
Pam: Just like we were explaining about understanding each individual’s trauma and own experiences, we would do the same in this situation because we would need to understand why they’ve gone down the CSE route, why are they in this situation. So unpicking their trauma to find out where their triggers are, the isolation triggers, the fear triggers… We can give them coping mechanisms that can help them not go down that route. But again, as Zoe said, not from a judgmental position of saying “you know you shouldn’t do that? You should do this instead.” It’s more an educational process and working with them about what could they do that could be different and help them to come to the ideas themselves, you know? Using the coaching model – trying to come to the ideas themselves.
What advice would you give to other front-line workers who may come across women who sell or exchange sex, for example about asking the question?
Zoe: When it comes to asking women whether they are being sexually exploited, often workers fear that they are opening a can of worms. We encourage the housing officers we train to ask the question because they have SAY Women as a backup and support. One of the staff might tell us: “a young woman has just told me that men are coming ‘round her house, and she’s been doing it for ages and she takes money, what am I supposed to say to that?”. The first thing you need to do is talk to that worker about establishing safety for the woman, and reassure them that the fact that the woman disclosed that in the first place speaks volumes about the relationship she feels she’s established with the worker. Utilise this information to the woman’s advantage – find out more, find out about the woman’s safety, that’s the most important thing. Find out about her health, her wellbeing and what she needs. Don’t judge and don’t panic.
Pam: Yes, don’t judge. We always say that if anyone discloses that they’ve been sexually abused, they have to be believed. If you are talking about sexual exploitation, believe what they are saying, don’t come from a judgement perspective, don’t come from a non-belief perspective. Consider how can you help make her life a bit more manageable? How can you make it more safe? And then refer to the organisations that can dig a wee bit deeper.
Zoe: We just teach all of our staff to be curious and interested about people and have a non-judgemental, non-prejudice approach. Ask how long has that been going on for? How did you get involved in that? We encourage our staff to come from a human perspective, with warmth, empathy, kindness, curiosity. You need to take the darkness out of these situations and the fear away. Don’t be afraid to ask a question.
We have to work positively, we have to be trauma-informed, we have to know about the coping strategies that people use, we have to find out how that’s come about for the young woman and what’s her take on it. Women might not always recognise when they’re being groomed, especially young women and those with a history of sexual violence. You don’t want to say “can’t you see that’s sexual exploitation?” She maybe has no idea about what it is that’s going on for her.
Pam: And these are our words anyway, not the women’s words.
I can hear how this idea of being ‘trauma-informed’ really comes through in your work, in understanding the underlying cause of someone’s behaviour, understanding that people might take longer to recover… Is there anything else you would recommend workers to do when responding to trauma?
Zoe: Sometimes you need to re-do things because she’s in a different house, in a different environment, a different local area, has different neighbours. Our job is to help women build resilience, help them identify stress that they’ve completely forgotten that they’ve got, give them the tools and techniques so that they can survive. When they get into new accommodation they forget because fear kicks in. You don’t cognitively work well when you are in threat, so we have to re-do it again in a new environment, and that’s what we do.
Unfortunately, when they are in the community, women do become isolated. If you’ve been stalked and harassed, you are not going to put your bin out at the usual hours. You are going to put it out at 3 am when no one can see you, and that will be a neighbour complaint. You might have music turned up because you want a break from intrusive thoughts because of a head injury from sustained violence that you’ve experienced or you’ll invite people in so you are not alone with your thoughts…
Pam: Also when we talk about trauma-informed, each person reacts to trauma in a different way, so it’s understanding what caused their trauma, the nuances of it and how it affects them as an individual and therefore knowing what their triggers are and then being able to form coping strategies. It’s about not judging, being compassionate and empathetic with the individual, help them find nuance… We are always challenging ourselves, especially when you are working with the women 24/7. There will be occasions where the young women have pissed the staff off, there will be behaviours that cause friction, so we have to challenge ourselves constantly. This is us being trauma-informed, that we are not judging or criticising them, it’s not their fault.
To finish, can you explain why we need a gender analysis in housing?
Zoe: Gender and gender inequality are massive issues in homelessness. Women are generally the caregivers, women will have children, women face more economic inequality than men do. These are barriers for women accessing statutory services. Shame, guilt, gender stereotyping of what a woman should be - able to manage a house, able to manage a family. A gendered approach is when women are recognised and counted, and women’s needs are recognised.
When women find themselves homeless, they won’t go down the statutory route, they will exhaust routes of friends and family first before they go into homelessness because they know there is a vulnerability in being homeless. And if they got children, they won’t highlight themselves to social work or to anyone else because there’s a risk of losing their children. That’s why we need a gender analysis and a gendered approach and a look into the differences between men and women when they are accessing services.
SAY Women are based in Glasgow and offer support for young women across Scotland. Visit their website to find out about their housing and support services for young women and their programme of training for workers in the housing sector and relevant services.
