The Garden of Hope Foundation accompanied abused women and children in social housing to mend their wounds and rebuild their lives
In 2012, the “Housing Act” came into effect in Taiwan, the first time that Taiwan legislated residential policies to protect the residential rights and interests of vulnerable people.
In 2020, The Garden of Hope Foundation established the Linkou Service Center, stationed in the Linkou Universiade Village Social Housing. Every year, 80 families affected by violence will be provided with medium and long-term living and care services after they end their shelter.
We hope that all life experiences can be in their proper place and not be excluded by society. We encourage women and children to reconstruct the new experience of a “zero-violence life” at home and in the community in social housing.
“I was beaten by my ex-husband for more than 10 years. There were times when he put his hands on my neck and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.” One time, Pinru’s (pseudonym) son could no longer bear the violence against his mother and reported it to the police. “I packed my luggage and left quickly to meet the social workers of The Garden of Hope Foundation,” Pinru said, adding that the three children also moved away to live with her because they could not tolerate physical and cold violence anymore. “After leaving home, I went to a temporary shelter, and start looking for a place to live outside at the end of six months term.”
“My monthly salary is less than NTD$ 25,000, and we can’t afford to live in an apartment in the city,” she said. To find an apartment, Pinru asked her son to stay with a relative. She and her two daughters, who are still studying, rented a small apartment of less than seven square meters in the city. The landlord doesn’t want to pay more to fix it.” She described the furnishings in the house: a bed, a wardrobe, a table full of necessities for three people, and a chair. It was nearly taken up half of Pinjou’s monthly salary, to rent the accommodation.
Whether it is the former husband’s domestic violence injury, or living alone with children outside the burden of living, let Pinru being out of breath. Parents or children who flee domestic violence are often at high risk of homelessness, and most of the time face a choice between a violent home and homelessness if the parents do not have adequate work skills.
A mere 1% of shelter resources is a drop in a bucket
“There are very few shelter resources for abused women. There are only two shelters in New Taipei City, so most of the abused women are on their own and rarely use the government’s shelter resources.” Li Yuhua, director of The Garden of Hope Foundation’s Linkou Service Center, said demand far outstrips supply. In New Taipei City, there are more than 10,000 reports of domestic violence every year, but only over 100 families find shelter, which is a drop in the bucket. But she admits that Taipei, New Taipei, and Taoyuan are already relatively well-resources and can provide shelter for women and children for three to six months, while some counties and cities, such as Keelung, offer shelter for only one to two weeks, or at most a month. Some cities and districts even think there is no need for shelter resources for abused women.
“Because local governments have limited resources, they only have 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, which is very tight.” Said Yu, Mei-Kuei, a professor of social work at Taiwan Normal University. When women enter the service system for victims of domestic violence, they often continue to face threats to their personal safety. For example, when their counterparts learn that women seek help or change their place of residence, they will continue to abuse them in the form of stalking, harassment, and verbal and mental violence. Nowadays, in the world of digital technology and devices, social workers need to avoid the extension of digital violence, such as GPS tracking, and the use of mobile phones and digital devices to send black letters and threatening messages. The immediate security crisis is not yet over, the children’s schools and lives are not settled, and the “future” is still too far away for the battered women who are just out of danger.
Our practical experience shows that it takes at least one to two years for women to become free from violence or to reduce their risk of violence. The resources currently mandated by the government for three to six months are far from sufficient. According to the Garden of Hope Foundation’s data, 50 percent of women choose to return to their families; At the same time, more than 30 percent of women remain in violent families because their external systems are not consistent enough, even though they receive counseling and intervention services. Women and children rise and fall in and out of relationship after relationship, escape, report, go to hospitals for wound inspection, go to court, and file protection orders.
A month after fleeing violence: ‘I still have to go back to that home’
After asking for help, the key is whether the resources are followed up. However, in less than a month, the situation of violence is unlikely to change. “As the asylum deadline approaches, social workers constantly ask: ‘Will you leave home?’, ‘Will you make up with your husband and return home?’, ‘What will you do with your children’s classes?’, ‘Will you choose to rent an apartment if you leave home?’ Divorce, raising children, renting an apartment and other demands make women poorer, and many times they choose to return to violent situations.” When a woman’s employment, financial, and family support systems are not enough to support her living alone in the community, returning to a violent home may become her only remaining option.
“No one wants to be subjected to violence, but if Taiwan’s society is willing to make efforts in the direction of ‘freedom from violence is a basic human right’, I think this support will empower women to fight against violence, and the right to live in the home of the victims of violence will be a very important factor influencing their choice to leave violence.” Yu, Mei-Kuei believes that the housing needs of abused women should be more visible.
Everyone wants to have the right to live, but poverty and weakness make people have to give in. Even though the women are determined to escape violence and bite their teeth to find jobs that can afford high rents, many landlords have long since excluded people of similar status in Pinru from their demand for tenants. “I started looking for a house for a while, but the landlord didn’t want to rent to me because he knew I was abused and a single parent. Once, when the children were quarreling at home, a police car came downstairs and was found by the landlord, he directly said that he did not intend to continue renting to us. “Thinking of that period, Pinru still felt lonely and said:” At that time, we moved around and floated around, just like duckweed, without roots.”
Matthew Desmond, an American sociologist, once wrote in his book “Evicted.” Displacement is not just a dark depression for poor families, nor is it simply a laborious but brief derailing of life. It fundamentally sets the course of life back… Displacement is not the result of poverty, but the cause of it,” the book says. He believes that evictions and forced evictions are the most complete denial of a person’s basic needs. In particular, leaving the community where they have lived for a long time will make the evicted feel socially isolated.
Behind homelessness is a disconnect with life and relationships
Sometimes it begins with a crisis: violence, divorce, abandonment, illness, unemployment, or accident, but more often it is accompanied by the collapse of family support systems, the change or end of important relationships, the loss of ability to work and live, and the exhaustion of social support network resources.
The real meaning of “homelessness” is no longer the literal loss of the space or shelter called “home,” but more likely the loss of the community and interpersonal relationships that are closely linked to life — a deeper lack of “being” and “belonging.” “Even though I moved around, I still lived in the same area as my old home, but I couldn’t get too close,” Pinru said. “I didn’t know what to say, not only because I didn’t want to meet my ex-husband, but also because I didn’t want to meet my neighbors and be asked about it.” Violence seems to disrupt the order of local communities, and limited social values often make it difficult for residents with different life experiences to find a place.
But where can a battered woman and her child live in peace?
Social housing is a place where abused women and children can live
In 2017, the Executive Yuan, R.O.C. approved the “Social Housing Development Plan” for the purpose of stabilizing the housing market and stabilizing people’s living conditions, with a view to achieving the policy goal of building 200,000 social housing units in eight years proposed by President Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, of which 120,000 units will be centralized social housing built by central or local governments, and the other 80,000 units will be released from the private sector. And is provided by the Government’s “Social Housing Subleasing and Management.”
In 2018, the Universiade’s Village in Linkou, New Taipei City was transformed into social housing, and 2,500 households will be released for public application. The next year, the Garden of Hope Foundation moved in and rented 26 households. Twenty of them are medium – to long-term self-supporting hostels for women and children who have been subjected to violence after leaving the emergency short-term shelter, with up to two years of unpaid accommodation; The other six are planned as a “Sunflower House” playroom to accompany children, a space for counseling sessions and a Sensory Motor Arousal Regulation Treatment Center to meditate on traumatic emotions, There is also a “Sunflower Canteen” that provides after-school tutoring and meals, and a resource center on the first floor that serves as a community communication platform to facilitate the sharing and exchange of resource among residents.
Social housing can be seen as a living space, a unit of family life, and a cornerstone of the social safety net. While the Garden of Hope Foundation provides residential care services in social housing, we think about how all life experiences can be contained in this space and not be excluded by society. At the same time, social work and psychological services are used to reconstruct women and children’s new experience of a “zero-violence life” at home and in the community. “In recent years, The Garden of Hope has tried to develop community services. We hope to create a diverse and friendly space within the community of Linkou Social Housing.” Wang Yueh-hao, CEO of Garden of Hope Foundation stressed.
Interdepartmental resources integration to jointly foster social care energy of community housing
However, Linkou is located in the suburb of New Taipei City, and the construction of public facilities is not perfect. Therefore, the Garden of Hope Foundation made a lot of consideration and evaluation when deciding to choose Linkou as the new service base. The distance from the urban area has always been a pain point for Linkou’s social housing. “The nearest social welfare center to Linkou is Xintai in Xinzhuang, an hour away by public transportation.” Li Yu-Hua added that the Garden of Hope Foundation has observed for many years that the suburbs are not suitable for disadvantaged groups to live in. In addition to the transportation considerations of employment and schooling, if the women and children we serve want to leave the original community, they will undoubtedly be out of the original social welfare system. It is inevitable that the women and children will feel pressure due to the increase in living costs, and even affect their ability to connect with the community and participate in society.
“We want to build a social safety net here, which is centered on ‘residence’, and the key is how residents, communities, and units in the system work together and connect with each other.” Li Yu-Hua believes that it is difficult to weave a close social safety net with the services of housing departments and non-profit organizations scattered in different districts and in a single location. What is more important is the integration of cross-ministry government resources, and the sharing of resources through community platforms, so as to construct the support of a network of the social welfare system, not only for the victims of violence, but also for the vulnerable groups and communities in need of Linkou, and build up the community care energy of social housing.
Housing, care and financial support keep women and children stable in their communities
“Social services in social housing can spill over into the whole community. There is even an opportunity to build a larger social care system in the local area.” “In the beginning, the main target was families of victims of violence, but as we began to live with the residents, the children would bring their classmates to eat at the Sunflower Canteen. Very often, we would find that the children brought their friends who were neglectful or abused,” Li explained.
Over time, Linkou Service Center gradually expanded its service target to reach other children and vulnerable families in the community who had negative childhood experiences. At the same time, the service team also accumulated various kinds of local service experience and established a cooperation network with the surrounding education and care system. “After the community house residents moved in, the school transferred more than 100 children, and many of the children’s families faced many difficulties, which made the school’s guidance teachers overwhelmed. So we started working with school systems, and we also did trauma awareness workshops where we invited school teachers to attend classes.” She says when more people have a “trauma-informed” perspective, they get closer to a violence-free life in their community.
In addition to the expansion of the target group, the Linkou Service Center has developed three concepts of “housing”, “care” and “economy”, including child care services for children, employment services for women to enhance the economic ability of abused women, and family support services to promote family harmony. So that the abused women and children can have the confidence to live a stable life in the community of Linkou Social Housing.
Share a good living culture and create a “good time” in Linkou Community House together
Space is a place of shelter; Relationships make space a place full of humanity.
“The Garden of Hope Foundation wants to be more naturally integrated into the local community in Linkou, rather than hiding in a residential service base. This is also an important goal of our attempt to transform the working mode of” community-based shelter ” To break the isolation and allow victims to reconnect with the community. The first step is to open up the space for different communities to communicate and establish relationships.” Wang Yueh-Hao is easy to say.
“Can I borrow the book I want to read and bring it back later?” Lin Lin (not her real name) pointed to the bookshelf in front of the Well-being Cafe and asked, “She is a child we serve in the community, and her family has neglected to take care of her. In the early stage of preparing for the operation of the cafe, Lin Lin would chat with us when she saw the lights on in the store, expecting to ask when it would open. Seeing it was getting late, social workers asked Linlin whether she had eaten dinner, all the interaction was so easy and natural. “To create a friendly and integrated space in the community and develop community work, we attach great importance to how people can interact with each other naturally, connect with people naturally and develop relationships naturally.” Li Yuhua said. Instead of going to a Garden of Hope Foundation service center for help or information on violence prevention and control, going to a roadside cafe to participate in the “Zero Violence Community” activity is more like a novel attitude and culture.
“I want to learn how to make snacks for my kids after school.”
“One of my kids’ homework items is baking and I want to learn it somewhere.”
“I want to make cookies and give them to an uncle who was kind to me.”
In response to the residents’ wishes, the Good Time Cafeteria & Resources Center held two hand-made baking classes this winter, and in late November, a “Snacks Magic hour” where cream and chocolate cookies were made, combining the five senses of trauma-informed care:
Eyes: Categorization of materials, observing the state of each stage of the internal stirring period, sometimes even, sometimes clumped
Ear: Listen to the teacher vividly explain each stage of the manual steps
Touch: After mixing the flour, touch the dough with your hands and begin to squeeze the dough
Smell: The sweet, sweet smell of baked cookies
Taste: Kids can’t wait to shove cookies into their mouths
Not only did the kids enjoy the experience of the five senses, but also communicate and connect with teachers, other adults, and children in the process of group collaboration. In addition to hand-baking classes, the Good Time Cafeteria also holds classes on hand-drawn books, father-son music sessions, and planting arts to help families in the community learn how to run a “zero-violence” partnership, and parent-child and peer relationship.
Epilogue: Life is anchored after habitation takes root
“I didn’t know where I was when I was beaten by my ex-husband when I couldn’t find a stable house with my kids, I felt like I was gone.” Now Pinru lives with her three children in a self-supporting, three-bedroom, two-bedroom home arranged by social workers, with a large picture window in the living room. “Whether I get up in the morning or come home late after a long day, I look out the window and feel calm. I know that ‘I’ am here and I know where to go.”
“Dwelling” is closely related to “being”. The place called home is the place where people’s memories, imaginations, and dreams are held. It is also the place where our relationships are attached and our lives are rooted. It’s where we build perception and experience, and we learn about the world.
People can live a stable life in a place, and create a stable family residence and community belonging for people. For example, “we know where we live”, “where we work”, and “where we have fun”, and therefore place has a deeper meaning for people’s “being” and “being”. Just like the concept of Dasein by Heidegger, he believes that the essence of existence is related to the way human beings live in the world, and real existence is the existence rooted in the place.
