Victims and survivors of domestic and sexual violence deserve the very best from those organisations, teams and individual professionals who directly and indirectly provide care and support. Professionals, teams and organisations want to provide high-quality, victim-centred care. However, we must recognise that this is a challenging area within which to work. Bridging the gap between the commitment to do right by victims and survivors, and how this is done in practice, is why we embarked on this project and have developed this toolkit.
Our four organisations came together to share our expertise and experiences. Our aim is to provide practical, good quality and adaptable training and learning tools that can be applied widely across many sectors and countries and which will improve the transfer of knowledge from courses into practice. The Leonardo grant stream, which has sponsored this project, is part of the European Union Life Long Learning fund. So this project is based on the principle of shared learning – our direct experiences – and also on the collation of and response to learners’ views in each of our countries and with whom our organisations have worked to provide training. This is not a research project. Its methodology is deliberately based on the experience of learners and trainers in the field, the barriers they have told us they faced when becoming skilled in this subject, and the methods and tools they told us that were most useful to them.
We hope the toolkit will also contribute to raising awareness about domestic and sexual violence, both by its existence and also by widening the knowledge base through those who benefit from using it.
The first stage of evidence gathering was to collate the experiences and views of learners, both those with advanced knowledge of the subject and those new to it. The range of learners included doctors, nurses, counsellors, psychologists, psychotherapists, care workers and advocates. It included those for whom domestic and sexual violence is the principal sector in which they work and those who require baseline information to help identify victims and provide immediate support and ongoing referral and signposting. We wanted to know what had worked well in their training, what had not worked well, what was missing or could have been better, what barriers they faced to implementing what they had learnt and how they had applied it in the workplace.
This led to a series of themes around which we could then develop this toolkit. The important findings were:
– There was a lack of organisational commitment either to understanding the importance of supporting learners in applying their learning in this field or enabling their learning to make a practical difference when back in the workplace.
– The emotional challenges of attending training in this subject could make the learning itself difficult or its application challenging. There was a consistent view that applying what had been learnt in the workplace needed sufficient opportunities for ongoing support, such as clinical supervision and peer review.
– It was felt, particularly at the team/organisational level, that sufficient background data, evidence and information was required to embed the importance of the subject but that actual training should focus on practical tools and be delivered by experts working in the field with the credibility to speak from knowledge and experience. Notably, although in many areas of training, learners often dislike role playing, ours felt overwhelmingly that learning by doing – being observed and receiving feedback – was essential for this subject.
Our detailed needs assessment is included for reference in Appendix 12b.
Using the core themes in the needs assessment, we developed draft tools focusing on organisation/team needs, trainers’ needs and learners’ needs. We piloted these across our four countries before finally revising them into the set that now constitutes this toolkit.
We have deliberately kept the range of tools wide and varied. We anticipate users of the toolkit will ‘pick and mix’ according to the constraints of their training schedules, their own needs and objectives, the extent to which particular barriers exist for them and the learner audience they are addressing.
The tools range from generic ones that could be applied to training in almost any subject, through to those that are specific to training in domestic and sexual violence. Generic tools focus on organisational commitment such as budget allocation and training reviews through to training request forms that identify the justification for learning and its application in the workplace. These have been included because our learner needs assessment identified that the challenges presented by this subject require the basic bedrocks of training management more than most subjects might. Staff attending time management training, for instance, would be highly unlikely to face any barriers to implementing their learning in the workplace. In our needs assessment, learners identified again and again that organisational barriers were amongst the greatest obstacles to following through in their workplace.
At the other end of the spectrum, our subject-specific tools have been designed to identify and provide practical solutions to the emotional and personal challenges that domestic and sexual violence learning can bring. This set of tools is structured to normalise the subject, making it as easy, we hope, to apply back in the workplace as the example of time management training would be. Having trainers who work in the field managing emotional reaction and personal disclosure during training and providing ongoing support post-training is about providing care for the individual learner. This care and support for workers is essential to ensuring we can all be as good for tomorrow’s client as we are for today’s. Acknowledging the impact that working with the trauma related to domestic and sexual violence can have on the worker, and providing the appropriate support during learning and beyond, iscentral to our objective of providing the highest possible care for victims and survivors.
Our four organisations have brought different strengths and experiences to this project and the process resulting in this toolkit. S.I.G.N.A.L. e.V. is a Berlin-based organisation which supports and develops interventions in the healthcare sector to address gender-based violence. The University Clinic for Medical Psychology, Psychotraumatology and Trauma Therapy department, Austria, has provided expert psychological input for our project and is leading the rollout of screening and early identification work across nursing teams at the Innsbruck Hospital. Gerencia Regional de Salud, SACYL, is a regional health service. In 2008, it launched a project to detect gender violence and care for victims across primary care services in their region of Spain. The Havens in London are the UK’s largest 10
Sexual Assault Referral Centre service providing direct care to victims of rape and sexual assault, from forensic medical examinations through to medical and psychological follow-up care
When we refer to intimate partner violence and sexual violence in the following text, we are mainly referring to the situation of women who have experienced such violence. This is because of the differences between the genders regarding prevalence and the consequences of intimate partner and sexual violence and also the differences in how survivors are affected by the violence. In addition, there is limited research evidence available on men who experience intimate partner violence or sexual violence and on their support needs. However, when providing training, the situation of men experiencing violence needs to be considered and – where possible – addressed.
Appendix 12a has more information about the work of our organisations.