What Can You Do?
Validate her experience
At the minimum, be clear that it is okay to talk about what has happened, or is happening. State clearly that nobody deserves to be hurt, either as an adult or a child. Validate that childhood abuse does have a major impact in the present.

Help her find help
You can refer women to either people or books.

If the violence is happening now:

• Provide information about the crisis phone lines, transition houses, safe houses, therapists, counselors and support groups available in your community to help her to check out her options.
• Suggest reading about the issues. The book You Can Be Free: An Easy-to-Read Handbook for Abused Women is a wonderful resource. It is easy to read and so could be read by a woman alone, or with help, to support her in weighing up her options when she is in a violent relationship and deciding whether to leave.
• Many services also provide pamphlets which clearly state women's rights, the process which should take place if they call the police, and other alternatives.

If she is struggling with memories of childhood abuse:

• Offer help to find a therapist or a group to support her work on the issues.
• Suggest reading about the issues. The Courage to Heal and The Courage to Heal Workbook are both excellent resource books for working with memories of abuse. For a woman who is seeking help they offer information on finding a therapist and joining a support group. Questions of why such support is important and how to choose a resource which is appropriate are taken up clearly. The books are not easy to read so a woman would need help using them. Beginning to Heal is also helpful. It is written for literacy learners, but is sometimes simplified so much that the information is not as complex as it needs to be for a woman to understand her feelings.

In either situation:

• You might refer her to stories by other women who had abusive childhoods and relationships. Women may find these accounts hard to read. Before a woman reads such an account she might want to know what it is about, and if she chooses to read it she might want support. A list of learner-written and non-learner autobiographies of this sort is included in the reading list at the end of this chapter.

Whatever suggestions you make about alternative supports available, whether people or written materials, it is crucial that the woman make her own decisions and retain control of what resources she makes use of. If she feels unable to leave an abusive partner and go to a shelter, or if she chooses not to see a therapist, it is important that you respect her process and do not judge her.

Encourage her to take on what she feels ready to, at her own speed. You may offer a referral to counseling, but she may need time and support before she is ready to speak to someone new. She has already taken an enormous step to begin to talk about her experience. She may not be ready to take another step for some time. The trust built up in the literacy interaction is not necessarily carried over to telling others about the experience.

Set up ongoing tutoring or small group work
A woman might want help to write about her experiences with violence and read about other women's experiences. She might want to have a regular forum for working on these issues. She might find this useful, as well as seeing a counselor or joining a support group. If she is not ready to do that direct work outside the program, she may find tutoring or joining a group in the literacy program a safer place to begin to explore the impact of violence in her life.

You could tutor a woman yourself, find another tutor, or set up a small group, if you think several women would be interested. Detailed suggestions for how this work could be done are included later in the section called "Literacy Work with Memories".

Offer support
Whether a woman works on her issues with a tutor inside the program or a counselor outside the program, she may also appreciate support from others. By support here I mean something less structured than the literacy work focused on abuse suggested in the previous section. A woman may want a listening ear. She may want somewhere to talk about her experiences with a therapist, in a survivors' group, in tutoring or in a literacy group. She may want to be reminded that she is a strong woman, a survivor, and that there are other things in her life besides memories of abuse.

You might be able to offer support of this sort. If you are not in a position to listen and support in this way, you might want to suggest someone else in the program who can be, or you could suggest setting up a support group. A group could include women tutors, staff or learners who felt able to offer support, as well as one or more women who need support.

A support group would need to agree to its own ground rules. You could follow a process similar to that recommended in "Prepare to work together" in "Literacy Work with Memories" to ensure that everyone is respected and feels in control of the process.

If the woman you are trying to support is experiencing a crisis stage, make sure you are not the only support and that she knows the phone number to all the crisis lines in your area. Check "Respond to Crises" in "Literacy Work with Memories" for more about ways to support a woman in crisis.

If you are in the middle of a crisis stage yourself with your own memories, or in your own life, you may not be in a position to offer someone else any kind of support. If so you need to be very clear that you cannot provide help yourself. Explain why you cannot offer support at this time and encourage her to seek other supports. If possible help her to find and use these supports.