In addition to the services for women in abusive relationships, there are
many informal community responses to woman abuse. Those responding to
a woman could be her sister, her friend, a neighbour, the local service club,
her pastor, her co-worker, her banker or her child's teacher.
It is important that the response a woman receives from these influential
people encourages her to seek further assistance, support and information.
To ensure that outcome, education of the broad community about healthy
relationships and the indicators and dynamics of woman abuse is necessary.
Some suggestions made by workshop participants for inclusion in a
community information campaign are:
plain language education about woman abuse protocols;
use of TV and radio;
information about systemic discrimination against women, women with
disabilities and senior women; and
plain language documents outlining appropriate responses to a disclosure
of woman abuse.
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"... my contact with Public Health Nurses was with the baby, and they were wonderful with the baby, but they weren’t too interested in my black eye."
"The people I was working with were terrible, they were completely unsupportive, they just thought that I was really messed up and instead of trying to help, they made my life a lot harder. And it was not that they were mean terrible people, it was no understanding, no comprehension of what I was going through."
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