Rape Crisis - Hope and Heroines

Last month I gave a workshop at the annual conference of the Rape Crisis Federation of England and Wales. It was amazing and inspiring to be among these women who dedicate their lives and free time to supporting women surviving experiences of violence – especially as they do it all on a shoestring.

The CSEL workshop aimed to introduce some facts about women seeking asylum in the UK and to get participants talking about how rape crisis centres can support women seeking asylum in the UK.

The Refugee Council has estimated that as many as 80% of women refugees in the UK have experienced sexual violence; and many women seek asylum in the UK having fled from countries where rape is commonly used as a weapon of war. Yet women find it very difficult to talk about experiences of sexual violence – as our own research has shown – as has research into this phenomenon amongst non-refugee women in the UK, and refugee women in other countries (Marion Tankink has written an excellent and really interesting paper on why women stay silent about these experiences). So you can imagine there’s quite a need amongst refugee women in the UK for the specialist services of organisations like rape crisis centres.

Yet many rape crisis centres and other sexual violence services report that they don’t see a lot of refugee women.

Some rape crisis centres have addressed this problem proactively: Bradford Rape Crisis has set up Project Jyoti, which is run by and for Black and ethnic minority women; Leicester Rape Crisis has changed its name to Jasmin House and recruited Muslim women to do outreach work with Muslim women’s groups in Leicester; and another project is planning to train refugee women as specialist councillors to work particularly with women seeking asylum.

See what I mean about inspiring?

Clare

c.cochrane@csel.org.uk

Taking Care of Ourselves

The last module in our training seminar is about self-care – how to look after yourself; prevent burnout and traumatisation in yourself; and spot the signs of it beginning. The module begins with a quick overview of the difference between ‘burnout’ and the kinds of traumatisation effects that you can experience when you work closely with traumatised people, discussed in this text on ‘compassion fatigue’ (if you decide to buy the book, go through the button on the CSEL website!) This is a chance to get a discussion going in the group about how we can spot the signs, or even better, prevent burnout – and what personal and professional solutions there are.

We include the self-care module because we think it’s vital to understand that these things can happen, learn to recognise the symptoms, and share ideas of how we can take care of ourselves and take preventive action.

Usually training groups are quite mixed and include a few therapeutic professionals, who have extensive experience of formalised structures to help, such as regular supervisions. But many smaller, grassroots, or traditional voluntary sector organisations don’t have these structures. Some really creative ideas have come out of these mixed group discussions, for example, the suggestion that organisations in one region get together and hold an away day focused on self-care and peer support.

I know that this part of our training is vital, because however long I schedule for this session, and however careful I am to make sure we have time to discuss it at the end of the afternoon, there is still never enough time. People always want to talk for longer than we can carry on!

Well nearly always... At one session I encountered almost the opposite phenomenon: after talking about the difference between ‘burnout’ and ‘secondary traumatisation’, I opened the topic for general discussion about taking care of oneself. A couple of people spoke, then – silence. And then the group began to discuss something completely different. I wondered if this was a kind of collective avoidance tactic – changing the subject rather than talking about something sensitive and difficult.

What all of this suggests – both talking as though the floodgates have been opened, and avoiding talking about it – is that looking after ourselves is a much bigger topic than we are even able to acknowledge.

For more information about compassion fatigue, see Charles Figley’s website.

Clare Cochrane
c.cochrane @ csel.org.uk

Taking stock - taking suggestions!

We’re just starting our third year of the Dissemination Project for Refugee Women, and as I’m finishing our annual report to Comic Relief, it’s a great time to look back on what we’ve achieved, and what we still plan to do...

I’ve just got back from training refugee support workers , counsellors and volunteers in Wales, and I’m about to go back to Manchester to run a training afternoon with more people there. So far the project has trained more than 120 community-based workers and volunteers supporting refugees to understand CSEL’s psychological research.

We’ve presented at conferences in the UK and in Brussels; given talks about our own work and sat on panels. In September in Brussels at the Meeting of Ministers of Immigration CSEL’s trustee David Rhys- Jones and Executive Director Jane Herlihy met partner organisations and made contact with UKBA officials.

We’re exploring ways to bring our training to busy legal professionals working within the time-pressured fast-track process.

We’ve produced readable summaries of our research to go along with our training, and we’re thinking about other ways to make our resources available to people who aren’t psychology or legal professionals.

Now we’re planning the last part of the Dissemination Project – and we’d love to hear from you, if you think there’s something we could be doing that we aren’t, or you’d like us to come to your region and run training.

Get in touch with me: c.cochrane@csel.org.uk