All about Cyfannol

What it means:
We recognise the challenges people face and their unique situation, responding with unconditional positive regard.  

How we live it: 

• We listen without judgment and act with kindness and patience. 

• We engage with others in ways that promote dignity, autonomy, and individual strengths. 

• We create safe and reflective spaces for learning and growth. 

Why it matters:
Compassion is at the heart of trauma-informed practice. It helps us build meaningful, trusting relationships through every interaction. 

What it means:
We act with honesty, transparency, and accountability in everything we do. Integrity guides our decisions, our relationships, and our commitment to doing what is right. 

How we live it: 

• We keep our promises and take responsibility for our actions and decisions 

• We are open and honest in our communication 

• We make decisions guided by ethics, not convenience. 

Why it matters:
Integrity builds trust. It ensures people feel safe, respected, and confident in our work.  It means that Cyfannol remains credible, principled, and grounded in our mission. 

What it means:
We are committed to fairness, inclusion, and justice. We recognise and focus on the specific barriers faced by women and children, while also supporting people of all genders where appropriate within our services, including men, trans and non-binary people. We strive to create an environment where everyone feels seen, heard, and valued. 

How we live it: 

• We challenge structural inequalities and discrimination, especially those that disproportionately affect women and children. 

• We tailor our approaches to meet individual needs and remove barriers to access and opportunity. 

• We foster a culture of inclusion, amplifying underrepresented voices, sharing power, and embedding equity in our everyday practices. 

Why it matters: 

Equity enables us to address the root causes of domestic and sexual abuse, harm, and violence. By centring the experiences of women and children, while remaining inclusive where appropriate, we ensure our services are just, accessible, and relevant. Applying these same principles internally helps us build a stronger, more compassionate, and more inclusively representative organisation. 

No.  You can get in touch with us on 03300 564456 to self-refer into our services. There is no requirement to be engaged with any other agencies or forms of support, or to have reported the abuse you’ve experienced.

While domestic abuse is mainly perpetrated by men against women, we acknowledge that men can also be survivors of abuse from men and women. As a Women’s Aid organisation, we are committed to creating safe spaces for women, but we also believe that everyone should be able to access the support they need.

Although we specialise in supporting women and children, some of our domestic abuse support services are also open to all people, where services are commissioned on this basis. This includes our Caerphilly and Blaenau Gwent support services and the Tabw project, which provides support to victims of police-perpetrated domestic abuse and sexual violence. All support is offered subject to risk and needs assessments, and on the basis that individuals feel our services are right for them.

Our Sexual Violence Services are available to people of all genders and we also offer specialist support to children and young people of any gender.

We welcome referrals from anyone whose gender intersects with that of women, who believes it’s the right service for them. All support is offered subject to appropriate risk and needs assessments.

Cyfannol Women’s Aid is founded on feminist principles. For us, this means striving for equality and embedding fairness, equity and inclusion through our empowering, person-centred approach. Within this, we recognise the gendered nature of Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (VAWDASV) and will actively promote VAWDA services for women and recognise the ungendered prevalence and nature of SV.

We know that we can only hope to achieve our vision – that everyone is empowered to flourish in a life free from domestic abuse and sexual violence – by keeping the voices of people impacted by VAWDASV front and centre and ensuring equality and diversity are at the heart of everything we do.

We are committed to the following principles:

• Promoting inclusion by fostering a safe and welcoming environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging.
• Striving to ensure fair access to support, taking responsibility for removing the barriers to our services to make them as accessible as possible.
• Valuing diversity and recognising that different people bring different viewpoints, ideas, knowledge and cultural perspectives.
• Encouraging ongoing learning through training and awareness programmes focused on diversity, biases, and the benefits of addressing equality in service design and delivery.
• Upholding fair employment practices by implementing fair recruitment, promotion and development processes to ensure equality of access and opportunity.

We have women’s only spaces, so that women accessing our services feel secure in their environment; whether they are coming for a drop-in appointment or staying in our refuge.

Women-only spaces in both refuge and the community allow women accessing them to feel safe, understood and free from judgment.

Violence and abuse can affect anyone, including men and boys. However evidence shows that over 90% of violence and abuse is experienced by women and girls at the hands of men (ONS, 2020).

It is important that we focus on this disproportionality so that we can challenge and change attitudes that allow male violence against women and girls to continue.

When we focus on male violence against women and girls, we are able to recognise how power and control operates in intimate or family relationships, and how this is harmful for both women and girls, and men and boys.