They do not. If it was person centred, the clients would decide what would be an appropriate contract. When we put the contract out to the clients, we showed them the contract for each individual, and some of them were horrified.
I am not saying that they were all horrified Around 20 per cent of clients were quite happy for that information to be shared, but 80 per cent of clients got really upset with our service because they felt as if we were colluding with it by even asking that question.
That is another of our concerns. Survivors who have been stable and okay for a number of years are now starting to feel really chaotic. If you imagine someone coming to a level of stability, and then having all these different questions asked of them, it is confusing and retraumatising. Even the number of evaluations we are doing of everybody is retraumatising. It is as though we are seeing somebody as an object on a bit of paper rather than a human being.
Our core processes are part of the therapeutic work we do with clients because they like to see the distance travelled. They like to see how they said that, in session one, “My relationships were terrible or I felt suicidal” and then, in session 12, that they say “I am feeling a lot better now. I have reduced from most of the time to sometimes. I have made progress.” It is part of the therapeutic process. It is not just so that we can tick a box and have an evaluation. That is the data that I can amalgamate and show significant results that can be audited, if need be.
For the individual data, why does anybody need to know that somebody had a terrible relationship with their family, or that they were really struggling with the issues of their abuse in care? The personal outcomes that we put in place mean that we offer a session of counselling and then come back 12 sessions later and ask, “Does the person still have issues with their family?” How is it anybody’s human right to know what someone’s family is like unless they choose to share that or any of the other personal information that they might feel compelled to share?
I feel really quite distressed by this because they are human beings who we have worked with for 11 years, and they now feel that they are being forced into a system that some of them might not be ready for. I am not saying everybody. We have a client who had an excellent experience with Future Pathways from start to finish, so I am not saying it is everybody.
The model could work if we took away a lot of the things that are really demeaning and demoralising to clients, and if we trusted services such as Wellbeing Scotland, who understand complex trauma and client needs. Let us softly and gently take somebody through the process of being registered if they then want to access support, rather than firing them into a situation in which they have to be registered and they are asked to share information. One of our clients only gave a first name for two years, and that was not even his real first name. The state abused the individuals who we work with. That is the way they perceive it, so they find it demoralising to have to go through a situation of going cap in hand to the state. They need the support of services.
I have always said that if our service was not needed, I would be delighted, because it would mean that there had been recovery. It would be an achievement if our service was not needed any more. We would have walked away when Future Pathways came into being if we had felt that it was the right way forward for survivors, but we need to hang on in there and fight and campaign for our service to remain because people still need us. We will fight and campaign until they do not.
The Scottish Government has said that it does not know about our funding from 2020, yet it was able to confirm funding for Future Pathways to 2021, which admitted that it had significant difficulties in finding its feet. What you are doing is throwing out a service that has 11 years’ experience and bringing in a new, untested service that does not have that experience. Our chair raised with its chair that we are in a demeaning relationship with Future Pathways. It is being modelled on our service. Because they care about their clients, our workers have had to hang on in there for the past three years not knowing whether they will have a job.