The value of women's centres

I’m in a room with half a dozen people talking about the importance of love in what they do. In other contexts, this might bring out the cynic in me, but today I wouldn’t dare. The people I’m with work in centres supporting women living some of the hardest lives imaginable. Their day to day work reads like a checklist of the ills of modern urban Britain: street prostitution, drug addiction, destitution, sexual violence, domestic abuse. And frankly, if they want to talk about love, I’m here to listen.

The women I’m meeting have been brought here by the Corston Coalition, a group of trusts who are co-ordinating their work to support services which offer alternatives to prison for women. Women in the criminal justice system have shockingly high rates of mental health problems, drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness, and domestic violence. They are less likely than men to commit violent crimes and far more likely to have children who depend on them. This, argue Corston, means that custody is almost always the worst place for them.

But for some women the traditional alternatives to custody – probation, community service, drug and alcohol treatment – simply don’t work. Their lives are too chaotic and their needs too complex. That’s where women’s centres come in. Their person-centred approaches which emphasise safety, caring relationships, trust, and yes, even love, are a world away from the formal and sometimes rigid structures of the probation service. Rather than simply providing drug counselling, parenting courses or health advice in isolation, they look at their clients as whole people with an individual range of not just problems but also strengths. Drug dealers, for example, apparently tend to have very good mental maths.

I went to this event to try and find out what statutory services like probation could learn from women’s centres. But I came away unsure. It’s hard to imagine a probation officer having the patience of someone like Helen. Helen is part of Women@TheWell in King's Cross, one of London’s most notorious red-light districts and she works often with women in prostitution. Not women who have left prostitution, as she was at pains to tell me, but women in prostitution for whom getting out feels impossible. Trying to hustle these women along a timetable would be an exercise in futility. So Helen begins by working with them where they are: offering a place of safety, basic health advice and whatever support they feel ready for.  It may take months or even years of simply being there for someone before they feel able to take on the huge challenges of exiting prostitution, combating addiction, regaining access to their children or whatever else they need to do to rebuild their lives.

Perhaps the best thing that statutory services like probation can learn from women’s centres is to value the things that they themselves cannot do. Many of the centres I met work closely with probation, but they are anxious to avoid being just another part of the system. Rather than statutory services attempting to duplicate the women’s centre model, or worse attempting to shape their approach to delivering a series of dry, easily measurable outcomes, statutory services need to find ways of funding these centres that let them retain the independence that makes their work possible.

For further reading see nef's report Unlocking Value: How we all benefit from investing in alternatives to prison for women offenders. nef is embarking on a new project about reforming the criminal justice system.