At INTERSOS24 in Rome, we support women on a journey of awareness and overcoming violence. We offer them psychological, legal, and linguistic support and guidance to local services. Through training and recreational workshops, we promote female empowerment and intercultural dialogue.
Recognising that you are experiencing violence is never easy. It is even more difficult for a woman who has to do it in a foreign country. Relatives, friends, and confidants are far away, while the people around speak an incomprehensible language and follow different social rules. Everything contributes to creating a sense of loneliness and bewilderment, and the burden of economic difficulties is often added. But for the women we meet in the INTERSOS24 safe space, paradoxically, the new reality opens the way to autonomy.
The process of uncovering gender-based violence among migrant women is long and complex. Silence is often dictated by the fear of being left alone and without means of subsistence, by the weight of social stigma, and by the difficulty of understanding one’s rights in a foreign cultural context. Furthermore, the existing services in Italy are not always able to respond to the specific needs of these women, who need cultural and linguistic support to undertake a path out of violence.
The work of INTERSOS24, our centre in Rome’s Torre Spaccata district, rests precisely on the awareness of the difficulty of this path.
The INTERSOS24 safe space is a safe space for women only, within which workshops are held, both recreational and educational, aimed at women and made by other women. The courses in Italian, computer science, fitness, tailoring, and hairdressing are all designed to provide those who attend them with empowerment tools. Still, they are also important opportunities to spread gender issues and bring out experiences and realities of violence. All these courses, then, are built with a transcultural approach and attentive to the specific needs of the women to whom they are addressed; Italian classes, for example, also admit children into the classrooms to allow the participation of mothers of children not yet of school age.
“In general, all the services we offer in our centre are not limited to solving the individual problems of women, but aim to build skills and overcome the linguistic and cultural barriers that prevent access to existing services,” explains Luisa Silvestri, GBV Officer of INTERSOS24. “Simply put, our social secretariat desk is not a CAF with the addition of linguistic mediation because we do not limit ourselves to taking care of the practice but work on understanding to create autonomy for the future. For most women who turn to us, taking care of bureaucratic procedures is culturally the exclusive prerogative of men, and acquiring the knowledge to do it on their own may seem small. Still, in reality, it is an important step towards autonomy.”
Our social support service also aims to accompany women towards paths of autonomy, starting from the constellations of difficulties they may encounter, as a bridge towards mutual understanding between the institutional services in the area and the women who turn to us.
Understanding the cultural context in which a foreign woman fits is essential to have a positive impact on her life, especially if we are faced with a survivor of gender-based violence. The women we meet in our centre come mainly from Ukraine, Bangladesh, Peru and Afghanistan. In several countries, many forms of violence are normalised in societies, and to get to recognise domestic violence or economic violence, it is first necessary to undertake a long path of intercultural dialogue. Even in cases where violence emerges and is identified, it is necessary to accompany foreign women in a process of understanding.
“Accessing an anti-violence centre can be inconceivable for many women, as can the possibility of leaving their husbands and entering a shelter. This is why we hold group psychosocial meetings to talk about gender issues and also address these issues, ” adds Luisa Silvestri.
These psychological support groups, which we have symbolically called “A Room of Our Own”, are a new feature of 2024 and result from the multidisciplinary work we carry out in the centre. In these groups, we talk freely about gender stereotypes, parenting, emotional experiences, and gender-based violence. The groups are managed by two psychotherapists, carried out with the support of linguistic-cultural mediators and include the participation of figures such as GBV experts, doctors, and artists. The most experimental is the Italian course for women in a state of trauma, in which language teaching and psychoeducation are combined to facilitate learning.
Working on the emergence of gender-based violence with foreign women means accepting that the path will be very slow because getting out of violence must be understood and felt as a real possibility. It is a path that develops in daily activities, in recognising violence and gender disparity, and ultimately aims to achieve the cultural appropriation of autonomy.