When women's services are corporatised is that the beginning of the end?

[stumbledin]

I realise that Women's Aid like a lot of long standing women's support services has moved towards a more corporate style (probably having to compete with Refuge's business model - but would never have imagined that WA new CEO spoke at a UKIP conference!!!!!
twitter.com/bindelj/status/1090381745348902912

But given recent threads about there being no problem with feminist working with right wing christain fundamentalists maybe I am just being a bit too old school.

And of course all women's aid refuges now have this issue, which of course means they aren't old school at all. www.change.org/p/katie-ghose-keep-out-of-women-s-refuges

Yes.

There is a fundament difference between accepting a venue for a meeting when no other venues are available or talking to conservatives and Christians whose children have fallen foul of the transcult and hiring a right-wing CEO for such an important charity.

In light of the previous discussions about liasing with people on the right, I’d say the problem isn’t who Ghose has been meeting with, but the abandonment of feminist principles and replacing them with corporate ones.

but the abandonment of feminist principles and replacing them with corporate ones. exactly.

In light of the previous discussions about liasing with people on the right, I’d say the problem isn’t who Ghose has been meeting with, but the abandonment of feminist principles and replacing them with corporate ones.

YY.

I think taking government money comes with a lot of disadvantages and does corporatise your organisation.
That applies to women's organisations and others like sporting ones.
I hate the restrictions Sports Scotland put on sporting organisations before they will give them money (unrelated to trans stuff) which take a lot of the fun out of sports organisations and makes volunteers spend more time on paperwork, admin and bean counting rather than doing their sport.

As soon as you rely on funding from any source who doesn’t have feminism at heart, you are putting your service at risk as you are no longer only responsible for the needs of the women in your care, but have added in the requirement to keep your funders happy.

As we’ve seen, even government funding has strings attached.

Yes it never ends well. Late last year the White Ribbon campaign here had a massive setback. The chairman (a former DPP) made comments that basically outraged supporters. This brought to the public's attention how in his former DPP role he was actually quite misogynistic with decisions and comments he had made. Women withdrew both support and funding in droves (while stating they prefer their funding to go directly to refuges).

How a man with a government appointed position to say who does and doesn't face potential prosecution becomes a chairman of a charity trying to prevent domestic violence against women is mind boggling. Particularly with the appalling way victims are treated and the low prosecution rates here.

Actually on reflection it's quite predictable. Stop feeding at the government (read taxpayers) trough and get a cushy charity job with a large salary. Same shit the world over, unfortunately.

The women that originally fundraised, fought and worked for these resources would never have agreed to this. Decades of work and money has been appropriated.

Application of market orthodoxy to services that deal with violence, risk, abuse, which connect other services, means those services have to strip the primary output of institutions, and reshape themselves to suit that market orthodoxy. Its why the corporate dv charities didnt realise that austerity would roll back equality and never touched welfare reform, only closures, when actually removing womens ability to survive outside the home removed our ability to leave abuse and only a few wome use refuges, the numbers with welfare reform were huge, its why there was no co-ordinated understanding or objection when child protectio simultaneously became punitive and the decision makig for corporate charities linked to elite political cultures largely combines those corporate principles with the feminism that led to terf and the reality is that most of the people making decisions at that level now have little to no understanding of the systmes they are shaping. Its a revolving door to well paid charity ceo level with links to political paries and feminist organisation and lobbying. Its separate from the reality of those systems and allows them to be eroded systematicallty to the point where they no longer function. Which we are at. And means noone will speak for them. Which we have seen. Unless there is a media opportunity in it. Which we have also seen. The basic remedial ignorance of elite women of these systems, has enabled their absolute decimation and with it an entire generation of women woke up in 2010 to find out equality had been rolled back and this culture could wilfully ignore any type of violence, state violence, male violence, violence y poolitical cultures, online abuse, could be ignored if it was the women in these systems. The systems the self id crisis discussed.

You get onto that well paid roundabout from universities like the LSE and Oxford, and it requires a fundametal ignorance of these systems to get anywhere near shaping them. Understanding these system s connect, link around the rule of law, are dependent on each other, and that this contradicts market orthodoxy and elite feminism, any reflection on their failure and limitations(required to work with abuse) is seen as undermining the image of the charity. So we end up with an endless circle and no systems. Which is hwere we are.

I believe very strongly that the state should fund women's services.

But I also believe that organisations that get public money should be accountable.

And I also believe that receiving state money compromises those organisations' independence.

And I have no idea how to reconcile these three things.

Well said Lisa.

I think I was maybe a bit too condensed in my intro post.

To put it bluntly I was totally shocked that someone who has spoken at a UKIP conference could have got the job of CEO of WAFE.

But on the other hand refuges which have staff that are representative of the local community they serve can have (from my experience) quite right wing politics and feel labour has let them down.

I think I was thinking more on a public persona level it is a strange choice.

But maybe if you are following truely equal opportunities job selection procedure up until the interview you should not know the age, beliefs or personal details of the interviewee.

www.thearticle.com/womens-aid-federation-is-vitally-important-it-cant-afford-to-forget-its-feminist-roots/?fbclid=IwAR2OG4PYw5xhth8zC93H_CGwsg2ew-MD1OqRvkrE08wT0_Q9ww7WIkjFbk

II love Julie B anyway but I love her even more for putting this out there.

For context: I've been the manager of a WAFE membership women's refuge for 22 years, worked in refuges for 25 years and worked in organisations helping women overcome and recover from experiences of sex based violence for more than 30 years.

I live (and love) my work and I know that WAFE as an organisation lost their way a long time ago although I can't quite pinpoint exactly when. These days though, rather that fighting for services for the abused women they say they represent, the WAFE approach seems to be "how can we compromise" - with Government, with T/MRAs, with Commissioners, with Social Services, the DWP, etc. etc. That the CEO of such a fundamental grassroots organisation - created by women for women - applied for the job purely for reasons of her own "career progression" and is recruited, presumably on prior "performance" (obviously no-one Googled - or did they?) demonstrates that WAFE management are selling their membership down the river with little or no concern for the traumatised women and children I work with every day.

I totally agree with Karen I.S. - the CEO of Women's Aid must be a feminist - it's not rocket science is it....

Again I think I might have given the wrong slant by using the word corporatise (which was mainly useful to make negative comments about Refuge who has drained the women's aid movement from its start as Erin Pizzy ego trip).

The reality is the must refuges struggle to survive and whilst we are all at our keyboards saying how awful it is that women only services are being cut / compormised, that is partly because what used to exist as a wider support framework of local feminist activism for refuges, ie refuges could feel they were part of a wider group of feminism, this barely exists any more. (Although Women's Lives Matter is starting to revive this feminist tradition - from a socialist perspective?)

I am not going to rehash the Chiswick Women's Aid (now Refuge) saga of sabotaging the firmly feminist origins of what became WAFE. But the endless and still continuing competition with their entrenched political and media contacts has worked against WAFE and the concept of a federation.

The other long standing problem is that back in its early days, partly because many refuges started in squats, and because local authorities didn't want to recognise the concept of male violence, refuges were funded as a housing issue. And as is usual with local authority finances someone came up with the clever ruse of saying housing benefit should be used to cover the costs of women living in a refuge - with the added benefit for the local council that this HN money would more often than not be paid back to the LA.

This meant any additional support or services refuges wanted to offer had to go for project funding, which is time consuming and leads to stop start services.

ie there was never a national strategy that for instance said all councils must have a refuge of so many bed spaces let alone a funding stream to make it happen.

So long before the declining political support for women only services many refuges just couldn't survive, or local authorities decided that projects were too small, and / or there pot of money was effectively given to larger organisations who in theory could provide services cheaper. This was a the time when Housing Associations started empire building, moving from their core values, and went after domestic violence funding, partly also because women survivors of domestic violence could be the basis for other pots of money. ie it was a widely held belief among funders that what women fleeing domestic violence need was (and this is true, if unbelievable) was literacy and employment training. ie men who controlled the purse strings somehow excuse the male perpetrators of violence and turned it on its head to imply that illiterate jobless women somehow bought violence on themselves. (A view point that Erin Pizzy firmly believed that women who were victims of domestic violence sought out violent men - yuk )

Then of course you move into the "logic" of if its housing why women only (some local councils now only offer homeless hostel accommodation to women fleeing violence)

And out in the wider world the increasing influence of queer politics in universities was creating young people who were "educated" into thinking sex and gender were the same thing. And they moved into work, including the media, and started publicly peddling this. And no doubt refuges started to find them in their staff.

But in the meantime the wider feminist movement wasn't exactly speaking out about this, not realising quite how far and how fast this active part of the male backlash against women's liberation was taking hold.

Women's organisations like Women's Aid cant exist in a vaccuum. I dont know how corporate WAFE is. But if you look at any high profile women's groups they are constantly trying to partner up with commercial companies that might give them some token amount of money. Even on a local level refuges will work with a local bank or supermarket.

Short of all women committing to give 5% of their income each year to some central women's fund (and I can imagine the internal conflicts that would be to administer) unless we all lobby for women's services to be adequately funded, women who are actually at the coal face will do what they have to to survive.

But with the trans tenticles reaching so far into local and central government it is almost inevitable that refuges like other women's services will be pressurised to abandon women only services. Or like women's services in Scotland eagerly accept it.

Hi BettyFloop

From my experience of the women's voluntary sector the weak point is the management committee. Many of whom are taken on because of their supposed skills eg finance, legal but have no knowledge of or committment to community let alone women's group ethics.

(I know of one refuge where a member of the management committe who was a solicitor took a dislike to a member of staff and insisted she be dismissed without notice. Which even if the member of staff had done something questionable, you would think a solicitor would be informed enough on employment practice to know they couldn't do that)

Many workers are left balancing the needs of service users, unsympathetic funders, and MC members who think they are entitled to act like tyrannical CEO of a conglommorate!

Here are my comments from the Julie Bindel post re Katie Ghose:

Ghose is a former Stonewall trustee and a look at her history shows she seems to be one of elite uni trained lib lefty good women who are out of touch with the reality of male violence - so no doubt she calls herself a feminist but not one that I respect. I watched the UKIP video and frankly she came across as more like one of them - so attached to her proportional representation goal but uncritical of UKIP’s lack of ethics and morals and actually fawning and congratulating them - very inappropriate behaviour.

She said her mission at Womensaid is to get legislation through parliament and focus on funding stakeholders. In that case they need a real feminist COO to keep in touch with the operation and inform her work.

I fundamentally believe she does not have the credentials for the job of leading Womensaid - the question is why did the board who appointed her not recognise her lack of appropriate experience and why wasn’t Polly Neate instrumental in the appointment of her successor?

And please no more appointments of women who value their identity and brand and political alignment (ie undying labour supporters) above women and children. Appoint someone with a lived experience who’s a mother - it’s all about mothers and their children and their mistreatment by men, the patriarchy and sometimes by those good women who work in the services eg where was and are those women speaking about labour’s complicity in the gross economic deprivation of women and kids who have escaped abuse?

Watch for forked tongues and undeclared vested interests - personal or otherwise

You make a lot of important points stumbledin and I'll try and distil my thoughts.

First, the main problem arises when women and the services they rely on become dependent upon funding from political bodies - eg govt and LEAs etc Because those very bodies don't embody safeguarding and protection of women and children. As you observe, once the funding screws are applied, then all sorts of rationalisations are applied with no impact analysis upon women and children. e.g. where I am a few years ago the whole refuge and women's services movement was decimated by the funding govt body (led a right-wing woman) deciding they wanted to reduce their administration by reducing the number of service providers. Sounds good in principle, but the tender process meant that many of the small refuges, which made up the majority of the sector, did not have the resource and /or fit the defined criteria for service delivery en-mass. So overnight the service delivery contracts were awarded to large religious organisations. Feminists wouldn't work for them so the sector lost almost all the expertise and services they had built up. Some refuges were run by abusive men who worked for the charities who started to charge women for overnight stays in the refuges!! Bit by bit the financialisation and outsourcing of services, with no mind to impact nor ethics, has nearly eroded that sector so it provides a cheap sticking plaster over a gaping wound injury. Again women and children's injuries are ignored and perpetrators enabled and emboldened.

Secondly, once a service is taken over by a government body, the rot sets in by the appointment of many women who are civil servants, not a survivor or their advocate. They again want to help but only within the confines of making a career of it and again lack the competencies and experience to relate to survivors. The peak bodies are staffed by NFP/NGO types who disempower survivors and don’t stand up for, nor deliver, the support that is needed. They are career civil servants. first and foremost. Women and children's injuries and needs are ignored and perpetrators enabled and emboldened. Even some of the women who work in those services, whilst professing feminist principles, are no friends to women - they follow the rules but have little empathy in practice for the devastation caused - preferring to applaud poster child DV survivors and ignore the systemic subjugation of those escaping violence - but hey they get to look good and build up a fearsome personal brand.

Third and last

From my experience of the women's voluntary sector the weak point is the management committee. Many of whom are taken on because of their supposed skills eg finance, legal but have no knowledge of or commitment to community let alone women's group ethics

This is a huge issue - I’ve seen many a lawyer/ banker both female and male, get onto boards to build their personal brand but who fundamentally have no investment in the service - they are another version of the second point above, but are worse as they do the appointing, administer complaints etc so are no friend to women survivors and their advocates. And worse, I have observed many abusive men with psychopathic traits colonising organisations like White Ribbon, Lifeline, Relationship Counselling services etc It really is disgusting what they will do in terms of brand building and disguising their disordered and misogynistic thinking - and of course, they corrupt the services delivered whilst earning fat cat salaries. So once any women's service is adopted by govt, these same types will colonise and erase survivors and their advocates

When did Women's Aid start asking for degrees instead of experience and/or feminist analysis/understanding of dv in their workers? When I worked for a Scottish WA collective 20, 25 years ago, most co-workers didn't have degrees but many had been through dv/refuge themselves. Now I see job ads which demand a university qualification but no real understanding of the women they're working with.

When did Women's Aid start asking for degrees instead of experience and/or feminist analysis/understanding of dv in their workers?

Great point and yes part of the problem....it all creeps in when politically correct civil servants and guidelines are attached to funding....

Interesting if incredibly sad posts womanformallyknownaswoman

Thanks womanformallyknownaswoman for your information.

I am still processing the fact that Ghose is linked to Stonewall.

And I;ve heard some really shocking things about voluntary sector groups but men managing a women's refuge????????????

Although come to think of it when Eaves lost its funding it was assumed services provided by a male christian organisation would be just a suitable for trafficked women as a women only service.

I cant respond in full as too tired to think straight.

But do remember that strangely one of the consequences of when there was funding for salaries in women's sector groups, those applying for and getting jobs were not longer those who identified with or had a committment to feminist principles. I can remember meetings where women were complaining about not having a proper pension package and so on.

Way, way back, just before the GLC started funding what became Voluntary Sector groups there was a meeting in London where women discussed should women's groups accept money. The majority said yes of course - except the Anarchist Feminists who said that it would eventually mean losing the right to control services.

But do remember that strangely one of the consequences of when there was funding for salaries in women's sector groups, those applying for and getting jobs were not longer those who identified with or had a committment to feminist principles.

Hear you're tired - for clarity - are you saying you recall that when women were appointed when there was adequate funding, that they didn't have feminist credentials or are you making another point?

Anarchist Feminists who said that it would eventually mean losing the right to control services

How right they were.......I think accepting any money from sources controlled by males is problematic - and I also know that when one's back is against the wall, it happens. I presume that's where the unease re WOLF accepting funding from / allying with Heritage comes in - ie is it a gift or does it have strings attached?

I think the whole area of economic abuse of women is frankly a scandal.
That WOLF needed to raise funds to pay for a legal challenge to the law is, of itself, unjust. To challenge a law backed by the Democratic party president and not be funded for it from the public purse adds further insult to injury.

I've heard many women say they'd rather live in poverty than play into the hands of their abuser - something the law enables and encourages.

The same goes for funding - what may seem like a gift but comes with all kinds of strings attached, like adopting certain policies, or be accused of "bad governance" and have the reigns taken away.

I think the whole area is problematic particularly because forceful personalities are no substitute for frameworks of good governance, safeguarding and transparency as well as user service. The insistence that peoples' and organisations' worht are only measuring in financial terms ie your good if you're healthy and rich and bad if you're poor and sick, is insidious and one that the neocons rolled out successfully via Thatcher/Bush/Gorbachev and suckered all political parties as well as offices of the governance of democracy into eg World Bank. So since then, you see the same thing played out by the thugs - accept our money with our terms or we'll make you bankrupt, destroy you and your family and take it anyway.