Women supported while in difficulty

She admits her work with abused and troubled women could make some a tad anti-men, but her teacher husband Andrew and two sons are the perfect counter.

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“Andrew says, ‘Don’t try that counselling rubbish with me. I don’t work at the women’s centre’,” she laughs.

“He brings me right down to earth. Even the kids say ‘you’ve got your women’s centre voice on, Mum’. It’s a good job the dog’s on my side. But it’s also good to know that the whole world isn’t in crisis.”

Her ‘sisters together’ stance may not hold much sway at home, but at work it’s a very different matter.

Sarah, 42, wrote the women’s mental healthy strategy for East Lancashire.

She’s also been a key protagonist in the Avert project which aims to reduce rates of criminal re-offending by supporting women to turn around their lives. The project, which has been piloted in Blackburn, and has the support of Police and Crime Commissioner Clive Grunshaw, has had a 93 per cent success rate and is now being looked at nationally. That’s pretty impressive.

What’s more she’s also championing a similar support service for the boys.

A community wellbeing centre at Richmond Terrace in Blackburn has just opened.

“I’m a wife and mother of boys and I know how great men can be.”

Sarah, went to Westholme School in Blackburn and studied for a degree in European Studies at a time when she say: “You could do waffly degrees with a few hours tuition.

“It’s a different world now. It was very interesting and I’m very good at answering questions on University Challenge.”

She was married at 23, but it didn’t work out. She’s also had her own share of personal problems.

“I was married straight out of uni which was difficult and I had periods of suffering from depression.

“I’ve come through that by reflecting on things that are important to me.

“When you’re young it’s all about making money and being successful. Having kids made me change my values.

“I started to think about what made me tick and even what made my ex-husband tick. I wanted to understand where things had gone wrong. It helped a lot.”

She re-trained as a counsellor, went to the women’s centre to do a clinical placement as a volunteer and got hooked.

“I started to get an understanding of the lives that women in our communities were involved in.

“I’ve had a few ups and downs in my life. I had a middle class, semi-privileged background but what I thought was hard was nothing compared to the lives of some of the women that I started to work with.

“I became really passionate about it – how women are marginalised and disproportionately affected by political changes, lots of systems are designed for men.

“It’s much better than it used to be but it still tends to be the women who are the sole carers for kids and are often victims of domestic abuse.

“Of course, women can be perpetrators too, but it’s mainly men.”

Once qualified she got a job at the Women’s Centre as counselling coordinator and wrote the mental health strategy about the kind of barriers women were facing and the services needed.

East Lancs PCT, as it was at the time, took it on board. She went on to work in occupational health, but the centre drew her back as manager.

“I’ve tried to leave three times, but I just keep coming back,” she laughs.

There’s a lot of laughter at the Women’s Centres, according to Sarah. A lot of black humour too, and it’s just as important to support the people who work there as those who seek help.

“Poverty and lack of opportunity underpins so much.

“But we also see an awful lot of resilience among women. Some of the stories we hear I don’t know how some women get out of bed in the morning.

“There’s a lot of laughter and female spirit pulling together which is very powerful but there are major issues with deprivation, debt, doorstep lending, loan sharks and women often get left with a lot of those debts.”

The centre is seeing an increase in the number of older women seeking help.

“Teenage and adult sons (mainly) who have substance and debt issues are returning home and mums are picking up the responsibility.

The centre also does a lot of work with offenders and although they support women to turnaround their lives, they’re not a soft touch.

“They’ve committed a crime and they need to be held responsible for that but we need to look below the surface and what’s led to them committing that crime to stop it happening again. Putting women in jail has a devastating effect on their children.”

The centre is also seeing a lot of women from all social classes with alcohol issues. Women are also dying younger.

“We see women who are privileged, in work, and have a drink problem. It very quickly escalates from ‘I’ll just have a glass of wine to unwind after work’, to having a bottle of wine to ‘I have to have a bottle of wine to function’. It has a knock-on effect causing depression, problems with relationships and ability to stay in work.

“For those out of work, with a poor education and criminal record the chance of them getting into work and breaking that cycle is far reduced. We offer support and we’ve had some success stories, but excessive daytime drinking of very cheap alcohol means women are dying younger. It used to be that women lived a lot longer than men, but the gap is closing in Lancashire and it has a lot to do with alcohol and obesity.”

But it’s not all doom and gloom. The centre is currently working with a young woman in her 20s who has been arrested up to 40 times for public nuisance offences.

“We have people who inspire us and make us despair every day. But we don’t give up on someone. We chip away until we get through to them.

“This young woman has been in Styal Prison three times. She felt as though she had nothing to lose. But she’s now volunteering with us and she’s not been arrested for six weeks.

“That may not sound much, but its massive for her. We understand her story. She was abused as a youngster and she gives two fingers up to the world because nobody gives her anything. She says people promise her stuff but all they want is something from her, usually sex.

“She’s been very promiscuous but that’s her way of connecting with people. It’s the currency she’s used to. But when she’s sober and working with us, she’s a bright young girl and she has so many possibilities. She just turned a corner. She enrolled at college and is going to do a beauty course.

“We’ve got her goals to work towards and this may sound daft, but we’ve said if she stays out of trouble for three months we’ll get her a pair of hair straighteners. She’s made up with that. We will keep up our end of the bargain if she keeps up hers. That inspires me massively. This girl has put herself in very scary situations which could have got her killed. Just by doing something very small and consistent we can turn her life around.

“It’s not a soft option. We can save money and nuisance for the community if we look at what’s going on in a woman’s life.”

Lancashire Women’s Centre has 10 sites in Lancashire – there are pop-ins at Blackburn, Burnley and Accrington – and five partners in Cumbria. The service has 24 funders, from organisations as diverse as the police and NHS to community fundraising.

There is no need for a referral, says Sarah. “We prefer for people to just walk in and tell us what’s going on. If we can’t help we know a woman who can.”

And nobody would doubt that for one minute.

For more information on the centre visit the website www.womenscentre.org.