Just that. Lisa has been scapegoated from all directions for being the truthsayer about austerity and it’s unconscionable impact on the lives of the marginalised, particularly lone mothers and their children. She talks with inside knowledge, as an experienced social worker, about how the systems established to support them have been decimated over many years by financialisation. In other words, putting money ahead of people has deliberately undermined the user design focus and purpose of those support frameworks, including the safeguarding of children. This has resulted in the re-creation of Victorian workhouse conditions, where poor and sick women and their children have no rights in practice and are subjected to handouts at the whim of kind benevolents, cementing their place as the underclass. Many women have been consigned to economic deprivation by such combinations as:
- leaving adult male violence perpetrators and abusive relationships of all types (coercive control, financial/physical/sexual/economic violence)
- being estranged from families that perpetrate family violence and don’t acknowledge their victimisation of children and adults
- wholesale financial abuse enabled by divorce courts, that lead to women not getting their fair share of combined assets
- being continually forced to compromise their own economic wellbeing for the safety and protection of themselves and their dependents
- no secure housing tenure
- frequent disruptive relocations
- being sexually victimised as children and/or adults
- being re-victimised by aggressive systems such as family court & hostile exes who never give up/weaponised welfare/ unjust judicial and law enforcement that protect abusers and harm victims
- inadequate health systems
10. unaffordable quality child/elder care up until the age of majority/death
11. unreasonable demands and expectations on those with no/few support systems
12. being forced to live week to week, below the poverty line, whilst in the front firing line from many hostile bodies listed above
In other words, instead of getting what they need to get back on their feet, women and children experience 360-degree withholding from opposed systems designed to keep them in their place, at the bottom, as punishment for daring to stand up for their rights. These are the women and children who should be getting wrap-around, caring support but who experience exactly the opposite. And what makes it worse is no-one, but no-one, is seeing things from their perspective and making a no-holes-barred, informed stand for them-never mind about having the unique informed, lived-experience, insider view of a social worker as well as a user. But Lisa does and is wilfully discounted and ignored, as her views take no account of wokeness or of social standing. Her sole focus is advocating for mothers and children against exploiters – ranging from sexual to financial to reputational predators who use the marginalised for their own ends.
Lisa pulls no punches in her condemnation of the wilful blindness of all the people who have enabled this – whether from academics, politicians, professionals, media, service deliverers or the like – she takes no prisoners in her advocating for fit-for-purpose safeguarding. Like many other brave women, her speaking out against abuse has made her a target of many – including those whose professional, personal and ethical competence she questions. Lisa, like all of us, is not perfect. Maybe her delivery could do with some refinement. Irrespective, she wears her heart and her outrage on her sleeve. She has neither backup nor family “bank” to support her. Any income she gets has to be declared and taxed and adversely affects her below poverty line welfare subsistence. She has a child to care for and protect as well as try to find income. She has been harassed from a decade's long stalker, who operates outside of the law. Why the disparity between her treatment and that of those able to evade taxation, afford PR, “finishing” coaching plus bring lawyers in to invoke the misnamed justice system?
I find it especially distressing and angry-making that women who have the public platform to speak out about these effects on mothers and children choose to stay silent. One wonders why. Is it for the sake of their woke reputations, confining their support only in so much as it bolsters their “good person” image, protecting their own reputation by supporting the wilfully blind line of whatever party or body they align with? All sides of politics, academia, media and service deliverers have been complicit in a gross failure of care for vulnerable women and children, most of whom are there through no fault of their own, but from the unacknowledged, covert guerrilla warfare of the hostile forces mentioned above. These women and children need the support of the herd and particularly of other women.
Why do so many people, including women, with a public platform to do so, choose not to condemn austerity, all of those complicit in it plus its dire adverse effects on mothers and children? Why do so many, including women, choose not to speak out about the safeguarding frameworks undermined by austerity that anti-women forces seek to exploit? Why do people, including women, attack Lisa publicly, knowing her back is to the wall, instead of seeking mediation if they have a gripe? That’s the elephant in the room.
I stand with Lisa.
Please ignore any personal attacks of Lisa that may occur in the thread (past behaviour of a few being a good predictor of future action), in order to keep the conversation going about austerity, the ongoing wall of silence and lack of advocates. Otherwise, it will be derailed and the important conversation about the complicity from all sides deflected. Please play the ball, not the person. If someone has a personal gripe with Lisa, they can take up elsewhere with her.
