Reducing stigma and isolation for rape and sexual abuse survivors across Wales. Reflections from New Pathways’ Jennie Dowsell, Peter Griffiths, Helen Jenkins and Mike Wilkinson, along with artists Jain Boon and Matilda Tonkin-Wells
The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and the social restrictions it required risked creating additional barriers to support for people affected by rape and sexual abuse.
New Pathways, which provides specialist rape crisis and sexual abuse support services for people of all ages in Wales, was concerned that the pandemic could leave survivors feeling even more isolated.
New Pathways’ aim has always been to help reduce stigma and encourage people to start ‘difficult conversations’ sooner that lead them to the support they need.
The sudden loss of regular support networks, routines, and coping strategies that had helped keep people safe previously, motivated us to explore alternative ways of connecting with them.
We were also keen to explore how the arts could help those New Pathways support users feel more grounded and less isolated.
We hoped employing an alternative promotional approach may encourage people in Mid and West Wales particularly to access New Pathways’ services and support, as awareness and uptake of our offer there remained low.
The process has far exceeded our expectations and has led us to think more creatively about our services
Exploring ways to increase support uptake in Mid Wales
We discussed how we could use creativity to explore former and existing clients’ experiences of contacting New Pathways. We wanted to know how that journey could be made easier in the hope it would lead to more people in Mid Wales using our services.
For six weeks, we explored a group of clients’ journeys through play, improvisation and task-based creative activities, gathering insights into how we could inspire others to come forward.
This led to the group creating artwork for an online exhibition, called ‘Messages of Hope’. The artwork includes poems, paintings, drawings, letters to self and voice recordings.
We then co-created a campaign on social media and in Mid Wales newspapers to raise local awareness of the website.
Getting to witness and support people’s creativity blossom… is a treat for any artist - I’d do it all again in an instant
To encourage more referrals to our services, we also sought to raise awareness of the charity among other organisations in Mid Wales.
The results were extremely positive.
We had great feedback from the people we worked with, which was important to us, and we were pleased that referrals in Newtown increased by 47 per cent between summer and autumn 2021, from 55 to 81. Referrals in Aberystwyth increased by 32.5 per cent in Aberystwyth, from 43 to 57.
Though we can’t be certain that is a result of Messages of Hope, the numbers are unusual for the time of year, so our assumption is that the exhibition has contributed to the increase.
This is so encouraging and we are happy that more people are now getting support from us.
Learning from our ‘Messages of Hope’ experience
New Pathways’ clients are a great resource and by working with them for Messages of Hope, we not only helped new clients discover the benefits of accessing our support but also provided existing clients with a new, creative support mechanism.
We discovered that, with appropriate safeguarding measures in place, projects like this can offer people who have experienced sexual violence a positive and often cathartic creative experience. Indeed, by offering clients an additional means of support, we believe arts activities could prevent other services from getting overwhelmed.
Of course, working collaboratively between health organisations and artists can be challenging. In particular, arts activities in this setting can challenge traditional therapeutic boundaries and guidelines for health partners, such as counsellors.
A high level of trust between our clients, artists and the New Pathways team helped to overcome this but it required consistent communication, with everyone working towards the same clear goals. The HARP Seed programme’s framework also supported the collaborative relationships between us. It removed some of the risk and allowed us to set goals and experiment with new ideas more safely.
The project highlighted the incredible strength and resilience of the clients involved
Forming new relationships
Having seen the benefits that creativity brought to this challenge, New Pathways has developed several new arts partnerships to support their wider portfolio of work, including working with Jain and Matilda on other projects.
These new approaches will hopefully support the organisation’s ambitions and plans long into the future and become embedded in their ways of working.
Jain and Matilda have been inspired to keep working together, and are now in the process of setting up a new company, ‘ThisPLACE’, specialising in trauma-informed creative facilitation. Their aim is to further develop the methods they tested in this project with a host of new partners and settings.
This will hopefully mean that many more people can benefit from these experiences.
Messages of Hope was a HARP-supported Seed partnership between New Pathways and freelance artists Matilda Tonkin Wells and Jain Boon.
For more information, visit the Messages of Hope website.