Domestic Abuse Increases During World Cup Football Match
In May 2013 BCBN hosted a business networking event at the House of Commons with guest speaker, Dr Vince Cable MP, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills, in support of the REACH Project. With the help of our sponsors, we raised £37,500 for the REACH Services’ life-changing work of the REACH project which seeks to provide assistance to disadvantaged people in vulnerable relationships and social support to families in crisis, helping to rebuild their lives.
We were delighted to hear from the REACH on their achievements and would like to commend them for their dedication and efforts in providing this vital service at Guys and St Thomas Hospital.
Reach Manager, Laura Stretch wrote,
“Both the REACH Service and the A&E department were very pleased to welcome Nilgun Aynar into her new post as Multi-lingual Domestic Abuse Advisor on 10 February 2014 which was a new post made possible by the kind donation by the Better Community Business Network (BCBN). Nilgun has many years of experience working in the domestic violence and voluntary sector and her multi-lingual skills in English, Turkish, French and Arabic will make a huge difference in our ability to provide easy accessible, effective support to our patients, whose first language is not English. Nilgun has now completed both her local and Trust-wide inductions and has also started to attend local Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Forum meetings to help promote the REACH service and the work we do to the wider community and also to establish vital links with other multi-cultural services. Nilgun’s caseload is starting to build up and in the short time she has been here she has already helped over 50 adult victims who between them had 48 children. That equates to 100 people that Nilgun has already helped to be safe.”
Recent statistics show that reporting of domestic abuse escalates around periods when major sporting events take place and problems can often intensify as a result of increased alcohol consumption. Reports showed an increase in Domestic abuse during World Cup football matches – especially if the home team loses, according to a UK study last year. Domestic abuse can take the form of psychological, physical, sexual, financial or emotional abuse and can affect anybody, regardless of gender, age, race, sexuality or social background. [i]
For the REACH services at Guys and St Thomas Hospital, “the next coming weeks will be one our busiest times due to the start of the World Cup. Historically, our service sees a significant increase in referrals during big football tournaments. BCBN’s funding of the new post means that the REACH service is able to expand the service during the World Cup period to include opening on both Saturdays and Sundays. This will have a dual effect of reducing the time that new victims will have to wait to see us and will also help reduce the workload of A&E staff who would normally have to deal with any Safeguarding issues during the weekend. This in turn, will help A&E staff deal with their own expected increased workload due to higher alcohol consumption and non-domestic violence injuries that also occur during major football tournaments.”
[i] The study was published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency.
