Rod Landman is the Training and Project Lead for ARC England, the membership organisation specifically for learning disability and autism providers. As well as supporting a membership of 100 service providers across the UK, ARC is committed to promoting best practice within the Learning Disability sector and we work with funders such as the Department of Health, Skills for Care and Comic Relief through a range of projects.

Here he introduces the ‘Us Too’, project about domestic abuse and sexual violence that has been led by women with learning disabilities:

A couple of years ago ARC England was approached by the Women’s Centre in Cornwall. They told us they were seeing a big increase in demand for their domestic abuse/sexual violence services from women with learning disabilities, but that they didn’t feel confident in meeting their needs. This lead us to a frantic, exhausting and exhilarating piece of work lasting that summer that lead to the ‘Divas’ project.

The work was such a success that ARC submitted a bid to Comic Relief that would build on our own experience of peer-led work in such areas as mate crime, online grooming for radicalisation and sexual exploitation. We were thrilled to get the support we needed to set up the ‘Us Too’ project.Us Too is a peer-led project about domestic abuse and sexual violence (DA/SV) for women with learning disabilities and/or autism, which runs until the middle of 2021. The project involves peer education workshops, training for professionals, and supporting DA/SV services to become more accessible to people with learning disabilities/autism.

The project team have all survived abusive relationships, and say their aim is to help others learn from their experiences, escape bad relationships and have a happy life.

Without wanting to sound like an Oscar winner, it really has been the biggest honour of my life to be working alongside these incredible women, and there can be no greater privilege than being considered (as they say) an ‘honorary woman’ in the eyes of the team.

The delivery of the Us Too project was significantly affected by the pandemic - the team has moved its professional training online, but the peer education sessions have been much more of a challenge. We have huge safeguarding concerns and need to ensure that disclosures (of which there are many) are properly managed. This experience is reflected in the following report by team member and Advisory Group representative, Claire:

Hope this finds you all well.

We have done one staff training which was held on line. This was the first time any of us have done this. From my point of view and my colleagues it went, well considering it was our first time using this technology.

The training was presented to a Care Company, called Colebrook. Rod received good feedback from all the staff that took part.

We have also had a challenge with the technology. Whilst doing Zoom team meetings and practcing,  my Zoom kept cutting out, the sound wouldn’t work, some people had no Wi-Fi.  Rod contacted ARC and they paid for a dongle for a team member as she had little or no internet access. Rod (through ARC) has also put in an extra bid to Comic Relief to see if they would be willing to provide laptops, as we think this is going to be the new norm for the foreseeable future.

As the Coronavirus (COVID19) has disrupted all our ways of life and work, as I have already said,  we have to find alternative ways of working and seeing each other as a team. We also discussed how we could travel and work safely in venues/workplaces and day centres.

The team and Rod discussed how we would go about carrying out  interviews for telling our individual stories safely on line via Zoom. This has been tricky, so for the moment we are only focusing on staff training. We are still thinking of possible ways to safely present the training to peers and clients.

So far we have used personal snippets and quotes of our individual stories from previous training material, and produced  ‘Misha’s Story’. This is a story about a woman who is abused, which we use in our teaching.

Misha’s Story  has then been recorded by an unknown actress to safe guard us from online Trolls.

A lot of work has been going on,  getting our heads around this way of working and catching up with one another. 

Rod is hoping, as are the team members, that a lot more things could allow  us to deliver the training in person, in a safe COVID secure way.

We have not done much for our domestic abuse services as yet.  On Tuesday we loosely we started to put together ideas for our teaching plan and training programme. We were asking ourselves what we would like the services to know and how they could me more approachable to people with  different needs and Autism.

The team felt as though online training was not as good as face to face, but it is the only option we have at the moment.

Watch an interview with team members and find out more about the Us Too project.