By Ellen Marks, Director of Practice & Learning
As a member of the senior leadership team, and as someone who is trying to be a better anti-racist ally, I go to Pause’s monthly anti-racism meeting. It’s chaired by our CEO and is part of the organisation’s commitment to become anti-racist. We do some reading and listening ahead of the session and then reflect on a different theme every month.
Two things have been talked about a lot over the past year or so:
- The fact that Pause has consistently worked with considerably more white women than women from the global majority; and
- The increasing amount of mis- and disinformation that we, and the women who work with Pause, find ourselves bombarded with.
Now, the therapist in me can do lots of thinking and reflection about these things. But the social worker in me tends to win and goes, “Well, what am I/we going to do about it then?” Attending these meetings has made me think about my personal individual responsibility, as well as my responsibility as a leader in my workplace.
So, over the past year I’ve been leading two pieces of work at Pause, both of which have only been possible because people in the network volunteered to contribute to the projects.
The first project is an exercise to try and understand the demographics of the communities Pause works in, and in particular whether our eligibility criteria around age disproportionately excludes women from global majority communities from accessing the core Pause programme. Our eligibility criteria prioritises younger women and women who have had a young child(ren) removed from their care, as we know from research that these are the women who are most likely to be caught in a cycle of repeat removals. However, based on experiences in practice, we had a working hypothesis that fewer women from global majority communities are working with Pause because they are older when they have children, and have older children taken into care. To explore this, we’ve been working with four Pause practices to analyse local data, to determine whether the women that work with Pause are representative of those who experience care proceedings.
The second project has centred around developing resources that Pause practices can use to help women develop critical thinking skills. Practices told us that the contentious flag campaign led by Tommy Robinson sparked some difficult conversations about race and immigration last summer between practitioners and some women taking part in the Pause core programme. Concerns about mis- and disinformation were raised a lot. In response we have drafted a workshop for practitioners to use with women in either a group setting or one-on-one. The goal is not to tell women what they should or shouldn’t think, rather to provide them with the tools to critically examine all the information and make up their own minds.
Both of these projects are nearing their end. The data project is going to be presented to our practice committee next week, and the findings will be disseminated to the network. The critical thinking workshop is being tested by two practices this month, and once we have their feedback, we’ll share it with the network to use.
What I hope both of these projects demonstrate is both Pauses’ and my own commitment to work together, and to work collaboratively, to become better anti-racist allies. Change needs all of us.
