Making changes to your life includes keeping safe and being free from harm by others. Everybody has the right to be safe. If you have a learning difficulty or a mental health problem, you may find it more difficult to protect yourself from being treated badly or being abused by other people. Abuse is very serious.
If you have a mental health problem, you may need to be safe from harming yourself.
Or you may be in a bad relationship, where a partner threatens you or harms you.
It's important to keep safe in other ways too. If you are out in your local community, can you keep your money safe? What would you do if someone asked you to give your money to them? Sometimes it's easy to know the answer, but more difficult to carry it out, unless you have a lot of confidence.
What about your safety at home? One example is having proper locks on doors and knowing who you can let into your home and be safe with.Sometimes it can be confusing, knowing who are good friends and who are people that intend to cause you harm in some way.
If you have a physical disability, you may benfit from aids and adaptations to your home to help with keeping you safe, if you do not already have these.
Keep safe. It's your right.
If you are unsure about your personal safety or just want advice about how best to keep safe, you can have support from Acorn.
Support can be with any aspect of your safety:
Giving you advice on keeping safe at home and out in the community
- Supporting you to develop skills in keeping safe
- Supporting you to contact other agencies that could help you, if you are not able to keep yourself safe
- Understanding the risks there are to you and other people (e.g. knowing how dangerous fire can be)
- Keeping risks as low as possible (e.g. by doing or not doing certain things)
If you think you are at risk and you would rather talk with people from another service or agency about your safety, Acorn can support you to to do this, if you wish.
