‘For the sake of my daughter and the new generation’

Migrant women exposed to interpersonal violence often face barriers toaccessing essential support, and can be hard-to-reach for support services.One way to bridge the gap between vulnerable persons and supportprovisions is the peer-to-peer approach. This article explores how suchsupport can be provided in an ethnic minority context by analysinginterviews with volunteers in the all-female NGO ‘Sister Supporters’. Theanalysis is structured around the nine-phase ‘Sarah Waller’ help-seekingmodel, showing how the shared backgrounds between the volunteersand the women they support facilitate trust-building. Their shared back-grounds include diverse cultural and linguistic competencies and thevolunteers commonly being abuse survivors themselves. In the earlycognitive phases of the help-seeking process, volunteer outreach providesvulnerable women with information and emotional support. In later help-seeking phases, users of Sister Supporters take overt action to leave theirabuser. In these phases, NGO volunteers often pass cases on to NGO staffmembers, who engage in advocacy activities and bridge-building to sup-port providers within the mainstream public service system. When reach-ing the final ninth ‘restoration phase’ of the help-seeking process, someusers of Sister Supporters decide to become volunteers themselves. As theNGO’s work challenges established gender hierarchies in some ethnicminority contexts, volunteers must circumnavigate considerable resis-tance from conservative co-ethnic forces. However, the NGO providesa community that supports the volunteers in dealing with such resistance.Sister Supporters’ peer-to-peer approach constitutes a novel and promis-ing approach to doing social work with vulnerable women in ethnicminority contexts.