The Safety Net Project

Goals

This project aims to deal with domestic violence against women from abroad and to help them to integrate in the welcoming country or to go back safely to their country of origin.  

Abstract

Many foreign women come to European countries knowing nothing about the real living conditions in Europe or the institutional rules that will determine their future life.  

They don’t know how to protect their property there or here, they don’t know anything about their rights and duties, they don’t know anything about the social, cultural and religious background of our societies.  

The welcoming countries don’t know how to prevent these situations, how to cope with people talking different languages, having different historical, social, cultural and religious background.  Our project aspires to help these women to integrate harmoniously in the welcoming societies and the members of the welcoming countries to cope with these women in their daily duties.  

We were personally involved in helping women who came from abroad, got married and then divorced in the most distressing conditions, not knowing anything about their rights, their duties and the help they can get from the national institutions in the welcoming land.  

In order to help them more efficiently, we wanted to formalize and professionalize our interventions by creating a foundation – Stichting Lingua Franca Foundation – and dedicate a specific project to these women: the Safety Net Projet.  

   

One Project – Five Fields

From our first experiences in this field, we identified five fields of intervention to cope with the multidimensional problems posed by the situations these women faced:  

1. Prevention
2. Coaching, training and networking
3. Aid and empowerment
4.  Information and training of welcoming institutions
5.  Partnership

1. Prevention

The prevention mainly consists  of a permanent information campaign in the countries of origin.  This will be done through on-line information and advice on a specialized website addressing the women in their own language.  A collaboration with local authorities, embassies and NGO’s will relay this information to the people considering moving abroad.  

  

2. Coaching, training and networking

One of the major issues for people coming from abroad, especially women, is the feeling of isolation in an unknown country.  People tend to stay at home, with no contact with the locals and the institutions of the welcoming country.  They don’t learn the language to get enough autonomy and then, they cannot apply for a job.  We’ll propose clubbing and socializing activities in order to prevent this isolation feeling and coaching and training for languages, job search and social integration.  

  

3. Aid and Empowerment

If things are going wrong we provide help and advice : we are searching for a shelter, housing, work, we provide training and psychological support, legal advice and/or medical aid.  All this will be provided on a voluntary basis and on demand.  

  

4. Information and training of the welcoming institutions

The world is growing  more complex everyday and civil servants and social workers have to cope with  globalization’s side effects.  One of them is to deal with people coming from abroad and sometimes trapped in very complicated situations.  Furthermore, these people are coming from very different social, cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds. We aim to provide these professionals tools deriving from ethnology, ethno-psychiatry and cultural mediation in order  to analyze  and deal with these multicultural patterns.  

  

5. Partnership

Such an ambitious program can be achieved only through a broad partnership involving local authorities, embassies, governments abroad, NGO’s, social workers and organizations.  We are also working with lawyers offices and health professionals.  

We will inform you of the evolution of this project in the coming days. To know more about the origin of the Safety Net Project,  just visit this page.