Meet the team

Biography

What do you like best about your job?

I’m privileged to manage a very dedicated team. Whichever office you go to, I am confident that you will receive fair and balanced advice. When I worked as a full-time case worker, what I liked most was seeing a client blossom back into full life following a particularly traumatic relationship breakdown. To be a part of that process was always the most rewarding part of the job.

I guess that is why we do a lot of injunction work. It is very satisfying to get an order from the court which helps to keep people safe. An injunction isn’t guaranteed to keep someone safe. But it is a clear sign to the perpetrator that their abusive behaviour will no longer be tolerated by their partner – nor indeed society at large.

Almost as important as the protection offered by the injunction is the process itself. Very often it can be the first time the ‘victim’ has disclosed the abuse. To be believed and supported can in itself be incredibly empowering and healing. To have society, in the form of the Civil Court, accept what they say is a huge psychological milestone. All too often it has been drummed into the victim that they are ‘mad’, won’t be believed, or are themselves the cause of the abuse, the violence would stop if they were better in some ill-defined and ever-changing way.

To have an outsider say no, there is no excuse for abuse, can be a massive reality check which enables people to reclaim the power in and of their lives.

Career history

1991 – present: Assistant, then Associate then Consultant at Wards
1989 – 1991: Trainee at Wards