For many women, the issue of responsibility of the literacy worker --- to herself and to women she works with centres on the process of disclosure, of what we tell each other.

• But [group] got to be too much for us after a while. I got to the point that I couldn't - because I didn't know what to do with it.
• [Women staff] were taking the hurt home with them. And they were sat down at home with this good meal, wondering if they had a meal at all.
• It really gets to be-
• You can't save the world.
• I know that but it doesn't help.

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• If you're sitting down to me and you're telling me that, "I have been sexually abused since the time that I was a child, my mother was a prostitute, I have been a prostitute" and you're saying to me "what do I do, am I crazy... am I a dirty person, am I a terrible person?" I mean not having the experience of having helped women walk through some of that, it's where we really lacked.

  Luckily enough, there were enough connections with women at the transition house so I could call up a feminist counsellor and say, "Look, this is what's going on. What do I say”---“Well, let them talk. Cool it. Don't send them to this person."

  But it's like feeling that you're on the edge of a cliff all the time and not quite knowing what's being stirred up here and whether there is special assistance needed or whatever. Not knowing was the biggest...

• There's a little bit of fear on our part. What's going to be the point? They're going to tell us all this stuff and there's nothing we can do about it. They know there's nothing we can do about it. They just want to tell somebody else. And they don't have anybody they can talk to... Plus, we don't bring it outside...As if she sat down with her neighbour and said the same kind of thing well everybody on the street's going to know.

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• They come in with a lot of excess baggage that they don't leave home, so they take it into you. We have no problem with that, but it gets to the point where you can't deal with it because you're not qualified to deal with it. You're not a social worker.

  There were days at the beginning that I left here and went home and I was just blown away. You couldn't talk to me home because all these problems that I wanted to solve. I wanted to make everybody happy. And I couldn't do it. It would be really nice to know how to even-not in a professional way-but some way to deal with it that it doesn't grab hold... I've heard stories and have dealt with a lot of hard mistakes. But you can't continue it.

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• To be just left with those issues, with nowhere to go and no previous association with the women's movement, no framework to deal with it in, that would be pretty hard.

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• I mean how much can you take in and then let it go. A lot of people can leave at five and forget it. I'm not one of those. And then when you have an outside life besides, it's like too much. And you need someone to tell you things so that you can learn how to let that go when you leave. So someone like that would be really good. Because someone like me...
• Yes, me too. You can't let it go. You bring it home with you.
• They tell you things that are really mind-boggling. Things that you read about and you don't tend to believe and then all of a sudden you're sitting with a person that's living that life-style and it's really hard
• even to feel comfortable with your response
• because you can make an awful big mistake. They can walk out through the door and you might never see them again or they took you wrong ...

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