Thursday was a wet and cold day, and people entering the jobcentre where we were protesting against benefit sanctions were more demoralised than ever.

We used to have time to set up our demonstration and get ready but people now wait for us and pop over to say hello, to lend some support and to ask for advice.

We see this as a positive sign because people are becoming slightly more empowered and enlightened. They know the way that they are being treated is wrong.

A woman — a young single mother who had just left the jobcentre — walked over to me. She said that she felt targeted and victimised by a certain jobcentre employee.

I asked for her adviser’s name and it was a name that I recognised. The adviser was the same employee who had tried to target me in the past. They had told this lady that the welfare of her child didn’t matter because the jobcentre is her priority. She was not to make appointments for doctors or the hospital for her child because this interrupted her commitments to the jobcentre.

She was also ordered to look for full-time work when she was seeking part-time work, and like me was also told that she should walk the streets for hours on end in a fruitless search for work.

All this is wrong and with our help she will be challenging this and changing adviser. She said that the employee was making her life hell and it certainly seemed that way.

The woman’s story was deeply concerning because the adviser in question has been disciplined before about making threats to claimants and it obviously hasn’t had any effect.

Rather than being punished, I sense that this adviser was given a pat on the back and told to carry on. Why else would they still be persisting with the same rhetoric?

Another young woman told me that she was sanctioned for not attending two appointments that she didn’t receive letters for. Yes, it’s the curse of the missing letters striking again. She was given a three-year sanction for this while she was pregnant. She has now had her baby and is claiming income support, but initially survived on the kindness of friends and family.

All of this is totally wrong and needs to be stopped. Pregnant women should never be sanctioned. To take their every means of support is to remove the lifeline if their unborn babies. The jobcentre even told my daughter: “You’re pregnant, not ill. Get on with it.”

Well we won’t stop fighting this and to everyone suffering at the hands of this government, I say: “You must carry on fighting. Don’t let them win.”

Another cause worthy of a mention is a local cafe named cafe Seraphina which has started giving away free coffees to anyone who needs one. They are also going to be working alongside us with other exciting projects to help the poor and homeless. Please pay them a visit if you are in Ashton-under-Lyne.

Please keep fighting. I know I am.

Charlotte Hughes blogs at thepoorsideoflife.wordpress.com.