How We Support The Children Of Survivors Of Domestic Abuse

Children of the survivors of domestic abuse could sometimes be overlooked in the process of supporting women escaping domestic abuse and coming into our refuge.

Here at Women’s Aid NEL, supporting children is one of our key priorities and we  have a number of initiatives to enable us to do this.

In this blog, we’ll talk about the support we offer and the opportunities we give to the children staying with us in the refuge, including:

• The support we provide
• The activities the children get involved in
• The Outings we go on
• The funding available (spoiler alert – there’s not a lot available to fund our children’s work, so we rely on you, our supporters!)

We have an excellent service for children who live at the refuge. The children have their own activity room and their own space that is fully equipped and staffed by qualified children’s workers.

Our children’s workers offer emotional and practical support to the children and support the family as a whole with work around boundaries, routines, behaviour and any general parenting support.

This vital service gives children time to themselves and also allows the mums some time alone to receive support for themselves.

Our enthusiastic and dedicated team are committed to ensuring that the children do everything, during their time with us that children outside the refuge, in ‘normal life’ also do.

They love to engage the children in all sorts of activities, including…

• Arts and crafts
• Games
• Christmas parties
• Trips and days out
• And more

The staff also make sure that every child in the refuge gets to celebrate their birthday, with a party just for them, with all the usual birthday treats, presents, games and delicious party food.

Whenever possible we arrange to take the children on outings and days out, giving them time away from the refuge to do nothing more than simply have fun, while also allowing the women some time alone to receive support for themselves.

These trips are organised at regular intervals as the opportunity arises, proving to be a huge hit with the children who forge strong friendships in this unlikely community.

No government funding is provided to support our children’s services, so activities like our 300 Club, which quickly became our 400 Club and is now well on the way to becoming the 500 Club, gives our supporters the opportunity to donate a minimum of £1 per month, with the opportunity to win 50% of the takings from the monthly prize draw, with the other 50% going to our children’s services.

The children’s support we provide is totally funded through our own fundraising activities and donations from generous supporters and donors.

We also have corporate sponsors who donate gifts to our children’s services, like Grimsby company Advantage Finance, who donated three Nintendo Switch consoles for the children, among other things and Grimsby Town Football Club, who recently donated a full football kit with a heap of accessories, making one of our resident children very happy indeed.

We thank each and every one of our lovely donors and supporters.

We’re very lucky to have a dedicated team who support our children in The Hideout and make their stay with us as rich and genuinely soul-nourishing as possible, at a time when events in their lives could make things so different.

We want to thank those who support us and raise awareness for the activities we deliver so that others who might want to support our children’s services know what their donations will go towards and allow us to offer.

Being a child, caught up in the complex and bewildering world of domestic abuse can be very scary, so we go above and beyond to make their stay with us one where we support them to build confidence, resistance and self-esteem.

If you’d like to support our children’s work, please visit our fundraising pages to find out ways you can personally get involved with our charity or get involved through the community or your workplace.

And if you’d like to join our lottery, please click here for more information.