A brief refuge from gender-based violence
The Catholic Worker Farm is a temporary home for destitute, asylum-seeking women: a last safety net, underfunded, unsupported, but there.
This post is adapted from the most recent issue of Passio Magazine: our limited print edition which comes out twice a year. You can order a copy, and most back-issues, in our shop.
Our world is full of stories of displacement, and questions of belonging. The UK is no exception: every year, tens of thousands of people arrive here with tales of war, persecution, and grief, often risking their lives in the hope of something better.
Instead, in many cases, they face continued hostility, loneliness, and an atmosphere of distrust. Caught in a cycle of precarity, they live lightly, almost invisibly—unable to put down the smallest of roots, while the Home Office slowly digs through the backlog of cases. Due to the Immigration Act of 2016, the men and women in this limbo can’t work, can’t get benefits, can’t get loans to study, can’t get married, can’t own property, can’t rent private property—under the threat of a large fine, or even a jail sentence. It is disempowering, in the truest sense imaginable. For women in particular, often with their children in tow, this powerlessness can lead them into horrifically vulnerable and violent situations.
Yet there is another Britain at work beneath the dehumanising machinery of the ‘hostile environment’: people working to welcome and befriend the ‘stranger’. This is why a handful of women every year—after hitting rock bottom—may come to find themselves transported away into a quiet corner of Hertfordshire, a dirt road hidden behind a sleepy town: although barely outside London, it may as well be in another universe altogether. This is the Catholic Worker Farm, where Scott Albrecht and a small crew of volunteers offer them a free place to stay.
The central Farmhouse is a charming brick building; wonky corridors with low doorways lead into warm, well-lit communal spaces. The bones of the house date back to 1309; Scott tells me that it needed a huge amount of work to be liveable, when they started renting it.
The grounds around the house feel vast to me: there’s a ‘peace garden’—until recently used for growing vegetables; a small cabin looking out onto a lake; and the most eye-catching feature is a large, empty stage, where the farm holds its own music festival once a year.
It’s quiet here: perhaps it’s just the day we’ve visited, but walking around feels like we’re stirring ripples on a still pond. We sit outside, enjoying a rare moment of British summer sun, and there’s an almost idyllic peace in the air. Even the sound of machinery—the farm has had to install an enormous BioDisc water treatment tank—gets swallowed up by the space, and the murmur of insects and birds. A little below the surface, though, there’s a fragility to that silence: and the churn of apocalyptic upheaval, the weight of what the women here have been through.
The Farm calls itself a ‘House of Hospitality’, which is a term taken from the Catholic Worker movement founded by Dorothy Day in the 1930s. Houses of Hospitality provide free accommodation to those who need it (principally the homeless) no questions, no strings attached. Christian anarcho-socialist principles, particularly the practice of ‘welcoming the stranger’, are the engine of the idea, although the phrase and the methods have been adopted by other organisations, Christian and otherwise.
The original House, which opened in New York in 1933, housed 15 women. The Farm, which opened in 2006, accommodates 18 individuals at a time—women and children only—providing a bed, food, English lessons, and access to other services such as counselling or legal advice. Dorothy Day, in her matter-of-fact way, said they were “only doing what the great Saint Peter called for—working for a new heaven and a new earth, wherein justice dwells.”
As for the women at the Farm—nicknamed the Sisters—even the outlines of their stories are not easy to hear. For a start, to be referred here means they are classed as destitute: unable to meet their most basic needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed. They are usually referred to the Farm by refugee agencies, social services, police or others, after becoming street homeless. Even before that, though, these are women who have battled through horrendous circumstances, along with their children; abusive relationships, attempted honour killings, and torture. Many have lost loved ones along the way.
Although the stories of disenfranchisement and poverty are shocking enough, choosing to house only women here places the Farm at the locus of another global, omnipresent issue: male-on-female violence, and the social norms that see women as objects to dominate and exploit. The Farm is one of the places that reminds us of the human toll of all this: it sits at the heart of some of the most pressing, and revealing, problems of our time. It translates all our everyday sexism, all our socially-accepted racism, into the stories of human beings who didn’t ask to be here, and didn’t ask to be spokeswomen either.
As Scott walks us around the two-acre site, the first woman we encounter, Clotilde*, declines to talk or be photographed. As it turns out, she has just had her application to stay rejected by the Home Office. Now, she has to decide between returning to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or escaping into London, where there’s a good chance she’ll end up sleeping rough again, or worse. It’s a chance some take, though, depending what is facing them back home.
“Almost all our Sisters have received Indefinite Leave to Remain,” Scott clarifies, but in an awful case like this, the Farm has to surrender their efforts. “The trouble is, we only have 18 beds, and they’re very precious,” Scott grimaces. “If we were to say to people that have no potential to stay in the UK, that they can stay here—they could be tying up that bed for years, and we’re prolonging something that’s very inevitable, that we can’t control.”
The pain is, perhaps, particularly acute given that the Farm had been quite far along with plans to transform a vast barn space into a new building that could more than double their number of beds—until the donor involved tragically died, and his family axed the project.
“Last Monday I had five phone calls asking us to take in more women,” Scott explains unhappily. “This morning I’ve already had two. We probably get six or seven requests a week—and these we’re saying no to, because we’re already full. We’re desperate for space. For Clotilde, I can’t just keep her here for the rest of her life; that would mean saying no to hundreds of other people.”
Although a couple of the women we meet are happy to be photographed, Clotilde isn’t the only one to refuse; some seem to have had brushes with this kind of thing before, and are politely, but firmly, guarded. I’m hyper-conscious that I’m a tourist for the day, and I’m no journalist, or even the most natural conversationalist. I opt for the approach that nobody here owes me any time.
On average, people will stay at the Farm for four or five months, which means the social landscape is always changing. The Farm began with three women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, like Clotilde; right now, the majority of the beds are taken up by Ukrainian families.
“Working in this place, you learn to experience joys and sorrows,” Scott puts it. “We get these joys—experiencing the birth of a baby, or somebody getting their papers. And we do try to help the women to have other joys when we can.” Communal meals, activities and games together: the staff take a light touch, but they try to offer more than just a waiting purgatory. They strive to maintain a restful, respectful space, to provide some semblance of stability in a tumultuous time. “Eating together is really important; I’m always talking about it. It helps with people’s mental health; often people can be socially anxious, too, when they come here.” There are plenty of Festival celebrations, too: Christmas, and also Diwali, Halloween and other touchstones that accommodate others’ cultures.
Nonetheless, the sorrows are close behind, and the emotional toll is a challenge. “It’s a rollercoaster. These are painful stories. And then being rejected by the Home Office, or somebody’s husband getting brutally hurt in Ukraine. People don’t want the sorrows part, but it’s real life.”
Author Nikesh Shukla popularised the phrase “the good immigrant” to describe the internalised need to justify one’s presence.
It stems from that sense of judgement in the process of assimilation: why do you deserve to be here? This brings up two contradictory but true rebuttals: firstly, that most UK industry would creak and collapse without our immigrant workforce (and that point is controversial enough); but secondly, is this really how we want to talk to refugees, to human beings in need?
As Thomas Frost wrote in the Catholic Worker recently, “the people most desperately in need of refuge will rarely be those to whom it is most convenient to give it.” People are coming to the UK regardless. Certainly we should remind one another why that is a good thing. But the real question “is whether we treat them as human beings once they’re here.” As it is, the women at the Farm occupy a grey space, their unsettled immigration status making them unable to access basic levels of protection which should apply under the Human Rights Act. That’s quite the implication.
There’s a parallel to be drawn with the Farm itself, existing in a limbo of public perception. The government offers them nothing, effectively washing its hands of the situation despite the clear need. Again, the first response is to say but it works; and yes, as Scott points out, almost all the women here go on to happier and more successful endings, and the Farm plays a part in that. The other truth is that the Farm is the antithesis to those metrics. It averts the question: its job is to keep the beds full, provide a safe environment, and love the people in front of them while the system spins its wheels. The analogy might be an unpaid carer: undervalued, underfunded, and yet holding the system together.
That definitely comes with its own burdens. “I know it sounds crazy, but the hardest thing is the finances,” Scott says. “Trying to come up with the money to do the things that we have to do. And we can’t get outside jobs with all the work we’re doing here. So we rely on donations.” Even as we talk, Scott is clearly haunted by the fact he’s had to pay out a huge amount on the BioDisc system, despite his hands being tied on the decision. The immediate problem is that they can’t pay their (quite hefty) rent; he can hear others’ criticisms lining up.
Granted, a project like the Catholic Worker Farm doesn’t make commercial sense. If capitalism is your worldview, your religion, the Farm is a nonentity. But from another angle, like Dorothy Day said, it’s a statement of belief in the life of the world to come, just as the Apostles refuted their possessions and “distributed [them] to anyone who had need”. This is one example of what those ancient principles look like in practice: self-sacrificial love, a cycle of receiving and giving, serving others at great cost without demanding anything from them, and without any promise of stability yourself. It’s the recognition that our loyalties lie with those Day called “God’s poor”—those who are hungry, unclothed, unhoused, or strangers in a strange land.
You can support the work of the Catholic Worker Farm here. Pick up a copy of Passio Magazine Issue 14 here while stocks last.
*Names have been changed.
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