Sarah and her mother now attend our INTERSOS24 Safe Space in Rome, where our staff take care of them
Sarah is 12 years old; she is just a child and for almost her entire life she has lived at home with an abusive father. For years, she witnessed her father’s physical and verbal violence against her mother. These moments changed her, forcing her to grow up too quickly. But the suffering she escaped from, along with her mother and younger sister, continues to haunt her even now that she has been living in another home for the past two years, far from the aggressive and unsafe environment that has characterized her entire existence up to now.
The mother recounts that while she was at work, the two girls were often locked in the bathroom for hours as punishment for any mischief. When Sarah recounts the hours spent locked up, her eyes stare into emptiness and she still feels a sense of anguish. An anguish heightened by the knowledge that no one would help them, not even the grandmother who lived with them. “One day Sarah began to challenge her father from the moment she woke up. Just the thought that something could happen to my daughters gave me the strength to run away and ask for help,” the mother tells us. Although they are now far from that home, this context of violence continues to follow them. For less than a year, in fact, protected meetings with their father have begun, from which Sarah always comes out incredibly angry and overwhelmed, because even on these occasions, he diminishes her choices, even the most trivial ones. Despite the negativity that seeing her father again entails, Sarah shows surprising maturity: she asked him to sign off to give her the opportunity to begin psychotherapy, aware of the need to face her fears. However, her father answered with a resounding “no,” hindering her once again.
INTERSOS24 Safe Space activities
We met Sarah in the Psi Space (for psychological support), a place dedicated to listening to the women we host in the Safe Space of INTERSOS24, a Centre in the heart of the Torre Spaccata neighborhood in Rome. In our Psi Space, Sarah’s mother is reconstructing her story to try to heal her wounds and reflect on those of her daughters who would be helped in a dedicated space. It is here that the man’s violence returns: it seems impossible to get the necessary authorization to activate psychological support for the girls. However, thanks to the meetings that take place in the Psi Space, the mother is trying to improve her relationship with her daughters as much as possible, building an ongoing dialogue and accepting their emotional state.
Psi Space is one of the protected spaces in INTERSOS24’s Safe Space. Here, women find a place where they can reflect, process, and adopt new points of view. Where they can be heard by a professional, where they cannot feel alone, and find the strength to share their story. INTERSOS24 staff is committed to helping them regain the right to live their identity and life freely. We also offer them help in dealing with bureaucratic paperwork, through support paths for the technologisation of administrative and bureaucratic paperwork, such as enrolling their children in school, activities very often left in the hands of their husbands or partners. With us, women have the opportunity not only to take care of their physical and mental health but also to enter the world of work. There are several professionalising workshops where women and girls can express their skills and socialize: such as cooking lessons, Italian language, yoga, aesthetics, and tailoring, from which Kore social tailoring, a social business involving many women from Safe Space, was born. The teachers, moreover, are professionals in the field who in some cases arrived as guests at the center and now collaborate in organizing the activities.