Domestic Abuse charity aims to raise £10,000 for children’s services in birthday auction
Society Without Abuse is turning 50 this year
A Swindon charity is celebrating half a century of supporting victims of domestic abuse.
Society Without Abuse (SWA), formerly known as Swindon Women’s Aid, has been marking its 50th anniversary with the name change as well as with an online auction that aims to raise £10,000 for their children’s services.
All 50 items available have been donated by local businesses and will be live until 8pm today (30 March).
Kate Rowland, Interim CEO of SWA, said: “Witnessing domestic abuse in the home as a child can have damaging, long lasting effects both on their achievement and their expectations of their own relationships as adults. If we can help repair the damage done, as well as educating young people to expect more, we can move towards one day seeing a society without abuse”.
The charity works with children as young as primary school age all the way up to college to help them understand the concepts of boundaries and consent from an early age and be able to identify controlling behaviours.
“We work with schools to have a kind of fully holistic approach to domestic abuse within their educational establishment and we work with colleges as well. We're looking at training for the staff. So, all staff are aware of domestic abuse, have it on their radar and are thinking about children and families who might be being impacted.
“We want to create the school as a safe space for families impacted by domestic abuse, so they know that that's somewhere they can go to for advice and support and to link up with one of our workers”, explained Ms. Rowland.
“And then we want to be preventing domestic abuse from happening in the first place. We want to be educating the young people in the school around healthy relationships and healthy behaviours within relationships and what they should and shouldn't be experiencing within their relationships as they get older”.
For their next 50 years, SWA want to put their focus on prevention work.
“The thing with prevention work is obviously you will never know, but I strongly believe that we have saved lives in the last 50 years. We're incredibly, incredibly proud of that.
“But we also reflect on the fact that, actually, that needs to stop. We need to stop having to pick up the pieces for victims who have been devastated by domestic abuse. And so, we're really proud of all the prevention work and the focus on that as well”, added Ms. Rowland.