Mayo Women’s Support Services prepares for lockdown fallout

Áine Ryan

THE full impact of lockdown may now only begin to reveal itself for those women in abusive domestic situations. That is according to MWSS (Mayo Women’s Support Services) whose manager, Josephine McGourty has said that the ‘new normal’ of working from home could mean that situations become like  ‘prisons for women and children living with abusers’.
The service is now preparing for an increased need as women in abusive situations find more freedom to reach out for help.  
Ms McGourty confirmed that MWSS, like similar services throughout the country, is reconstructing how ‘to provide the best levels of safe, professional support for women and children’.  
She revealed that during the lockdown period, the phone lines were quieter than usual while the outreach service remained busy.
“It is the silence that is ominous,” Ms McGourty said. “Our greatest concern, is that women may be finding it much more difficult to make contact for support. Previously women may have contacted services when they or their partners were at work or out of the house, or when children were in school. Those little windows of freedom are being cut down.”
Explaining that the services continued to operate throughout the crisis, she said: “As we begin to open up here in County Mayo, we are available, now more than ever. We believe that many women may have been living with intolerable control and abuse over the past two months. It is important they know that we are here and that we can support them to be safe in their own homes, or help re-home them if this is what is needed.”
Ms McGourty said the fallout from the pandemic ‘had exposed the fragility of the sector and the deep fault lines that have existed for decades in the State’s response to domestic violence’.  
“Mayo Women’s Support Services has been advocating for women fleeing domestic violence during Covid-19 to be able to receive rent supplement, for example, which has so far been denied by Government,” she continued.

Concerns
Concerns are widespread amongst the sector that the longterm reconfiguration of the ‘home-work divide’ could cause problems regarding ‘the risk and invisibility of domestic violence’.
“What we now regard as ‘the private’ may be radically changed with technology likely to reconfigure our lives utterly. We have to seriously consider if the future will make an absolute prison of these combined spaces for many women and children. We have to be prepared to respond to this new normal. The fractured and piecemeal state response to domestic violence that we had for decades simply won’t do this.”
MWSS is a member of Safe Ireland. It has established an Emergency Covid-19 Fund to support the  needs of women and children, which has been distributed directly through frontline services. To date this fund has provided for such essential items as food, heating oil, utility bills, transport costs or materials and appliances. The fund is still open for donations.

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See www.mwss.ie