Ashiana offers safe accommodation across three schemes. Our main refuge is a bed shared house for South Asian, Turkish and Iranian women between the ages of 16-30 who are experiencing domestic violence. The second scheme, Ashiana Y Stop is a four bed safe house for young women at risk of forced marriage. The third is Saranaya Project, offering 5 bed-spaces to women at risk of forced marriage. Each resident has their own bedroom and shares the kitchen and bathroom facilities.

During their stay at Ashiana, residents are offered culturally specific support, confidential advice and advocacy regarding their legal, financial, housing and personal situation.

Residents can stay at Ashiana for up to a year. Staff assist residents in securing safe alternative accomodation. This may be in the form of other supportive shared housing projects or permanent independant accomodation.

All three schemes are refuges and places of safety therefore all residents accept the following conditions of confidentiality.

• Not to allow visitors to the safe house.
• Not to disclose the location of the house to anyone.

With 485 referrals this year alone, the message is stark and clear, young women are accessing our services, because they don’t want to be missed and want their needs to be recognised, supported and to be well informed regarding their rights.

The clients that access our services share in their struggle of being subjected to all manner of abuses. The misuse and rigidity of power and control client’s families and partners hold makes these young women feel marginalised and unimportant. Therefore it falls on us to tackle and challenge communities appropriately regarding the inequalities that are prevalent and being exercised towards young women.

While women live at our refuge it falls on us to advocate for them, but our aim is to empower women so that over time they are encouraged to become independent. We try to do this in a number of ways that feel supported and specifically geared for that individual i.e. during weekly meetings and support planning meetings, and always making it clear that she matters.

In 2008, Ashiana dealt with 485 women:

The most common presenting needs amongst women seen in the year were:

• Abuse from a family member (47%)
• Suffered abuse from their husband/partner (44%)
• Homelessness (38%) and unsuitable living conditions (30%)
• Depression (31%)
• At risk of a forced marriage (28%)
• 17% of the women needed legal advice.
• 11% of the women needed help with speaking/understanding English.
• 11% of the women needed help with their immigration status.
• 12% of the women had no recourse to public funds. 

Outcomes

Ashiana’s work appears to have been most effective in enabling women the women to whom we provided in-depth support to take steps to deal with domestic violence/relationships issues (35%).

In particular, we enabled:

• 24% of women to leave their home/abusive situation
• 13% to avoid forced marriages
• 12% to improve their family relationships.
• 10% to report the abuse