Know Your Human Rights

Our original tool was funded by the Legal Education Foundation and is particularly relevant for people with mental health or mental capacity issues, and those who advocate on their behalf, including formal advocates, families and carers.

We then received additional funding from the Tech v Abuse initiative to create a branch of the platform specifically for women survivors of domestic abuse.

To design and develop this tool, we worked with women survivors of domestic abuse, and the staff that support them, to create an online tool which will support women to know their human rights and the duties of public services to respect and protect these, not only to keep them safe (which is vital) but to also help rebuild their lives.

The views and needs of women were central to this project. We mapped and tested directly with women and VAWG groups that directly support women. We wanted to ensure the tool provides women with all the information they need, in their pockets, for meetings with housing staff, education, social workers, police and others, enabling them to have the power of legal language in what are often difficult interactions.

Too few public services (and their frontline staff) know what their legal duties are to meet people's human rights, including to the right to choice, to be heard, to well-being, participation in the community, to be able to enjoy their home, and to not be discriminated against. However, these rights are all vital to enable women to rebuild their lives following domestic abuse.

We’ve all heard the saying “knowledge is power” a million times. This is of course true; having knowledge about our human rights is the essential starting point. But when we have past experiences which might impact our confidence or possibility to stand up for ourselves or we are in a situation where there is a perceived or real power imbalance (for example, when an individual is interacting with a public service), we need to have more than just the knowledge. We need to know how human rights work in practice and have the confidence to use them.

That is why “lightbulb” moments are so important – because truly, where do we, as ordinary people or as professionals supporting women or providing public services, really learn about our human rights and what they mean for our life and work? We frequently ask this question at BIHR and overwhelmingly we hear that human rights knowledge and confidence just isn’t part of our general education or training and development in our jobs.

We hope through this project and the Know Your Human Rights Tool, more women survivors of domestic abuse and the people supporting them will feel empowered to stand up for their human rights.

This was seed funding to help us use a participative approach working directly with women survivors and support groups to develop the first version of a human rights self-advocacy website for survivors of domestic abuse. Most of this work was carried out during the Covid-19 pandemic, which made it significantly more challenging for the women we worked with (and BIHR) to produce this tool.

However, we know from the survivors who have shaped it that this tool has an important place to help women rebuild their lives after abuse, empowering them with the language to rights and duties when seeking the support they need from public services.

We very much hope this is the first stage of this site and are committed to seeking further funding to help us continue its development with survivors.