Central Advocacy Partners (CAP) is a Scottish charity providing free relationship based independent advocacy for people with learning disabilities and/or Autism. Two years ago, Helen Heppenstall began working for their Survivors Project, which sought to support women subjected to abuse who were accessing CAP’s Survivors Project. Her role was to set up and run groups with women subjected to abuse, providing a safe space for the women to share their experiences without judgement and to find out about their rights as women.
Natalie Collins, our CEO, recently caught with Helen after she finished the first Own My Life course delivered solely with women with learning disabilities.
N: It’s great to be here with you Helen! Can you tell me a bit about what led you to choose Own My Life as the course for your Survivors Project group?
H: I was tasked with creating a group for women that would support their recovery and empower them to take back control of their lives,making connections in their local communities and reducing their isolation, it was a colleague from Women’s Aid that first brought my attention to Own My Life. After some research, I discussed the course with my manager; our initial concerns were about Own My Life being based in England, but after further research we both agreed that the course ticked all the boxes for what we needed for the women we support.
N: How did you find the training?
H: I thouroughly enjoyed the facilitator training and knew that the course content was powerful and with a little adaptation would be just want our Suvivors Group needed. After the training, I was keen to get started , as an organisation we agreed to run a pilot Own My Life course with women in our Survivors Project.
N: What did you do to prepare for the course?
H: The biggest hurdle was explaining the commitment to the woman and that I would need them to show up every week for twelve weeks to complete the course, after discussions with the woman we had negotiated a day/time and that would allow breaks for the school holidays to enable that them to attend all twelve sessions. We even managed to secure some of their regular group time as part of the course as that group is an important part of their week.
A few of the inital changes where that I had a visual timetable of the running of each session displayed, I enlarged the Biderman graphics (which is used early in the course presents different characters to explain abusive behaviour) and put these up each week to be reflected on. We took the time to look at the more complicated concepts/language and display these also. I simplefied the feelings and sensation pages. This was easily done as the OML graphics are already there and easy to understand.
N: And how did it go?
H: It was amazing! The sheer engagement from the group was off the scale. We met in the CAP office, utilising a breakout space when needed. We started with six women; four were long-term members of the project, two were quite new members and both had significant communication difficulties. I knew it was going to be really good, but it exceeded even my high expectations!
On the first session, I was quite nervous because I wanted everyone to enjoy the course, after the first activity, which every woman was enthusiastic in offering answer! That activity involves a comedic story about a woman whose holiday ends with her being kidnapped by the dictator king of the island. Upon asking the group how the woman could resist the king’s control, one participant was smiling coyly, but seemed reluctant to answer. I encouraged her to tell us what she was thinking and she smilingly said, “I would kill the king!” We all cheered on her brilliant idea for how the woman could escape. From there onwards, the women loved the group, they all turned up every week.
I had anticipated that the materials would require a lot of differentiation for participants’ varying learning/communication needs. But it really didn’t! It was more about adapting what was already provided, such as enlarging the drawing spaces as some of our woman prefer to draw thoughts and feelings rather than writing - this is for various reasons, as i am sure you’ll understand! We even covered the intersectionality activity. On reflection, I can see how easy it would have been to have an unconscious bias towards simplifying things or avoiding difficult concepts but I didn’t miss anything out. Particularly because each participant had a course journal and I knew if I tried to skip any of it, they wouldn’t be shy at letting me know i had missed a bit!
On reflection, I think the woman still prefer to use the journal as this is what everyone doing the course would be using, so having an easy read journal would mean that they would still have all the same journal but in a simpler form but everyone still having the same .This is important to our woman.
We had a new woman that was recieving one to one advocacy who was interested in attending the Surviviors group but she had found being part of a group very difficult. She happened to be visiting our office just before we were due to run Session Six. She asked if she could stay and everyone agreed that she was welcome to. Amazingly, she loved it, and came to all the other sessions. She had the biggest “aha!” moment of anybody in the group and is going to redo the course in January to catch up on the sessions she missed. She still continues to be part of the Survivors Group to this day.
N: Can you tell me about some of the “aha” moments that women had during the course?
H: There were so many!
Angela* said, “I needed this information years ago.” Bertha* told me, “I’ve found my inner voice.”
Chaitanya* spoke about her community and how they shunned her as a result of what her partner had done to her. She identified so much with the island activity.
After starting Own My Life, Danielle* began writing intensely about what had been done to her. She had reams of notes, and she took these to the police and made a formal statement. She is so courageous! And she couldn’t have done that without the course.
Emily* was really knowledgable and strong-willed. Through Own My Life, she began to realise that alongside abuse from a previous partner, she could see that some of the ways her current partner behaved were not okay and began formulating how to deal with that.
Fiona* had begun a new relationship and, as a result of Own My Life, asked us to help her to apply under the domestic violence disclosure scheme to check if he had a history of any abusive behaviour.
One of my aha moments was in Session 7 when we looked the risk assessment tool. It became clear that although every woman had been made to do risk assessments with professionals, none of them had ever been told what those assessments were for, or the impact they might have on their lives.. It really highlighted that nobody had been advocating for them and ensuring they were fully informed of their rights and what the purpose of the risk assessment questions and tool was. This may have had very serious consequences for each of them, particularly as there were a high number of women in the group who had lost their children through care proceedings.
N: What did you learn through doing the course?
I learned that Own My Life is a brilliant tool and that with simple adaptations can be made accessible to woman with a range of learning disabilities and or autism.I learned that the woman in the pilot were strong, resilent, brave and funny and thouroughly enjoyed the course. We are now nine months post completion and any new members of the group are fully informed about the benefits of the OML course from the womans themselves a testament to the lasting effects of the course
In terms of specific learning, we orginally started our Own My Life day by doing our Suvivors group, having lunch and then moved onto the Own My Life session, but by week seven we realised that the women needed decompression time after the content. To provide this we changed the order for the day, starting with Own My Life, moving into lunch and then doing our Survivors group afterwards, this worked much better. The women were then able to use the informal space to discuss and process what had been raised for them during the session. After discussion, the women chose not to use the six week follow-on course, they thought our Survivors group would be able to be a continuation of the OML , but what we’ve learned is that life takes precedence, we all still refer back to our learning to help support whatever issues we are facing as an individual or a group.
N: What’s next?
H: We have women who are desperate to get going and so we hope to start our next course early in 2025. I’m really excited about it! We’ve been applying for funding to work in partnership with the Own My Life team to develop an easy-read version of the course journal, which we know will make a big difference to members of our project and to women across the UK and beyond.
N: If people want to speak to you about CAP or the Survivors Project, how do they get in touch?
H: My email is helen@cap.scot.
*Names have been changed.
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