The Malaga refuge for victims of gender-based violence: how a shelter works

SUR has had access to a home whose location cannot be revealed, nor can the identity of its occupants who are still under threat. The flat has been rented by Betania, an association that houses women who are victims of gender-based violence. It is not the only house designed for this purpose in Malaga or in Andalucía.

Those who work for Betania - psychologists and social workers - have lost count of how many women have passed through the doors of the flats they run. They arrive because they are referred by the police, a hospital, another association or on their own initiative after searching the internet for a place to stay.

However, not all women who contact Betania are admitted to one of their homes. Before any decision is taken, they are interviewed to assess their situation, whether they have a social support network, because if they have family or friends with whom they can live, this is the preferred option. In this case, the legal counselling team, psychologists, social workers, accompany the victim externally.

If the woman is alone or cannot find adequate support in her own circle she moves in to the home. Sometimes, depending on the degree of danger she is in or if her aggressor is very close, she is taken to a flat in another city. The most vulnerable women, those who are most alone and most at risk, live in Betania houses.

They usually arrive with almost nothing but the clothes on their backs, so the first thing they are given are the basics: shelter, clothes for them and their children, toiletries etc. From there, they are given moral and psychological support and company. The intervention team puts together a multidisciplinary jigsaw in order to rebuild the broken victims.

Laura Rodríguez, the psychologist at the house that Betania has opened to SUR, explains that many women enter a phase of denial: "They don't recognise themselves as victims, they don't believe that this could be happening to them. They also blame themselves with irrational ideas, justifying the aggressor, identifying themselves as the trigger for the aggression they have suffered. Their emotions can go from euphoria, joy and well-being to mourning for the break-up of the relationship."

Sometimes they wonder how they can miss someone who scares them. Sometimes they may not recognise themselves as victims even if they identify violence in other women, because then they would have to ask themselves how they could have accepted such a situation.

There are women who open up immediately, who start talking about everything that has happened to them, but there are others who find it very difficult. Each woman, each case, is different. This is what the Betania team coordinated by Martha Valencia insists. In reality, the only characteristic shared by the victims is that they are women: all ages, nationalities, social classes and educational levels.

As such the intervention process "depends on the degree of awareness that each woman has about what has happened to her", says social worker Ana Gaona: "There are people who have felt trapped until the trigger that led them to flee happened. But there are other women who don't even know what gender-based violence is. In a patriarchal structure, many behaviours are naturalised."

"Psychological violence is always at the root of all abuse. The abuser shapes the woman's behaviour. That is why they look for justifications for their aggressor's attitude and therefore blame themselves," Rodríguez explains. The feeling of guilt reaches the point where women say that they are harming the aggressor, says Ángela Guzmán: "He is going to jail and it is my fault", they say. The victim sees herself as the executioner.

And that is not the only reason why women sometimes regret having reported their aggressor. As Martha Valencia points out, the authorities will question the victim's testimony because they often do not have sufficient training to deal with the issue. "If the violence is visible, if there is a bruise, then there is no problem, but if it is not visible, if it is invisible violence, if it is economic, psychological, the first option tends to be not to believe the victim or to minimise the situation, to play it down", they say. And that is the manipulation to which she has been subjected by her aggressor, the 'gaslighting', that process that consists of making her doubt everything, even her memories and the information provided by her senses.

"The little strength that has been gathered to denounce disappears, as well as all the intervention work that has been done with the victim to teach her to identify the circumstances, the facts, the irrational ideas, the responsibility, the guilt and the triggers of the conflict," says the psychologist. All the professional work done to deactivate what has been the only thing the woman has heard for years ("you're lucky I still love you", "what would you do without me?"or "I really liked you before"), this silent manipulation, the result of which is the total loss of the woman's self-esteem and even her identity. Many come to Betania and do not know who they really are, who they were before they met their abuser and who they want to be, because for too long they have only been waiting for the aggressor's validation to try to prevent his violence.

That is why they are given a routine at home so that they can relearn how to live. At the beginning, many do not know how to be independent. Martha Valencia explains that depending on each woman's situation there are two types of resources, flats, for them: comprehensive care, in which the victim is "released" as she improves (some women arrive and do not even want to go out on the street, nor do they have the strength to go to a job interview or to carry out basic procedures) and semi-autonomy, which are offered to women with less deterioration or who are at a more advanced stage in their process of recovering their self-esteem.

The team that manages the houses has the fundamental mission that these are places where tranquillity and emotional stability are guaranteed. So they work to ensure that all the women, who may come from different cultures and different generations, live together in harmony, that they treat each other with familiarity and the same goes for the professionals who look after them.

Ana Gaona says that women who have experienced similar situations and who are living together create mutual help groups. It helps them to share experiences and to realise that they are not the only ones to have suffered violence, which reinforces their testimonies. Although she also recognises that there are cases in which no progress is made and that they are referred to other instances so as not to harm the recovery of the rest of the users.

The women who enter these houses stay for six months, according to the contract that is signed. However, the Betania team tries to prevent the women from engaging in 'false healing', so they sometimes spend up to two years in the shelters. "Recovery is not something that is achieved in six months, the process is slower, because we want them to have a job, emotional stability and housing when they walk out of the door," says Valencia.

They also want them to have gone through all the necessary stages to ensure that they do not fall back into the same situation: to live their single life to the full, not experience loneliness, so that, in the future, they can choose their partners based on completeness, not because of loneliness or need. Otherwise the relationships they would build would start again from inequality and they tend to repeat patterns, to fall back into the hands of manipulative people.

Ana Gaona says that the work is very demanding and that they have to be very "aware" of the situation of the women they attend to: "I said to one of them: 'There's something wrong with you'. And what was wrong with her was that she had gone back to her abuser". That's exactly what shouldn't happen.