Sutton Women’s Centre is celebrating 40 years this year of working with women in the borough to live lives free from abuse and to reach their full potential. We work with all women who live or work in the borough but our specialism is working with survivors of domestic or sexual abuse. 

Domestic Abuse makes up over a third of the crime in this borough and recent crime figures show that rates of domestic abuse and sexual assault in the borough continue to rise.  We run several programmes to try to combat this and have introduced new services to support women where there are gaps in local services. 

We currently work with over 300 women a week, through our counselling service, the Freedom Programme, English as an Additional Language classes and a range of wellbeing classes, such as art, drama, gardening, life coaching, computers and website design.

Our counselling service offers long term, low cost therapy, with counsellors that have been trained to work with trauma. 

The Freedom Programme is a 12 week course which breaks down the personality traits of the abuser to help women understand how this has happened to them and to notice “red flags” in the future. The programme helps women to live a life free from abuse. 

We have been working with local GPs to increase awareness of women's health issues and, with the introduction of the IRIS programme,  we have trained 14 of the boroughs GP surgeries to recognise signs of domestic abuse. Through this project, we have, to date, supported 76 patients with advocacy support.

We have introduced a course for women who have experienced sexual assault or CSA, and, in addition to this, we run The Light Within, a monthly support group.  We have also trained a member of staff to be an ISVA (Independent Sexual Violence Advocate).

Domestic and sexual abuse is rarely talked about and there are many common myths surrounding these important issues that keep victim survivors from seeking support.  

To raise awareness and bust those myths, we are currently looking for people who live or work in the community to become Domestic Abuse ambassadors. 

The idea of the training is to create a network of people across the borough who understand domestic abuse and are able to provide an appropriate response should someone disclose to them. 

To date, we have trained over 500 members of the local community. The training is over 2 days and will equip you to understand how domestic abuse happens, looks at the common myths society holds around domestic abuse, the barriers that people face in disclosing abuse and leaving, how to respond to someone who discloses to you and where to signpost them too, and also, very importantly, how to self-care if you are supporting someone. 

Anyone who would be interested in being part of this Domestic Abuse ambassador network should call us for further information, on 0208 661 1991.  Visit the Sutton Women’s Centre website to learn more about the work they do

Take a look below at some of the words from the training sessions.