In February we’ll be holding another London training seminar, funded by Comic Relief, in how to understand psychological research and use it to support traumatised women seeking asylum.
Our first training seminar was in London in February 2010, and it seems fitting that what may be our last open access free seminar will also be in London. Since that first one, we’ve held seminars in Manchester, Cardiff, Glasgow, Sheffield, Brighton, and Newcastle, as well as an inspiring workshop at the annual conference of the Rape Crisis Federation of England and Wales. Many of these have been oversubscribed, with waiting lists as long as the list of bookings.
The seminars have been well received, too – nearly everyone who has come along has found the discussions and presentations interesting, stimulating and useful. It’s hard to write this, really, because it sounds too good to be true – and not very modest. And to be honest, we’ve been surprised (as well as pleased of course) by such overwhelmingly positive reception – I mean, we think our research is exciting, fascinating and useful, and we hope we’re good at conveying this to others. But we hadn’t really hoped for quite such enthusiasm.
Participants in the training have told us how helpful it was “having a mix of therapists, doctors and lawyers all in the same room”; that it was “important to have new ways of organising the facts I already knew, such as the reasons why women have special difficulty with the asylum system, new ways of classifying ideas about memory and post-traumatic stress, and several useful new references.”
After the training, organisations have successfully used our research to assist in individual cases; cited our research when advocating with the UK Border Agency; incorporated our training and research findings into their own staff and volunteer training; and notably Freedom from Torture has shared our research findings throughout their network of medico-legal report writers.
Of course our training isn’t perfect – we’ve taken a lot of feedback on board and adapted the workshops/seminar as far as we can to try to get a balance between delivering information and vital discussion time. And we’re tweaking the content all the time...
So I’m looking forward to running the seminar one more time on 7 February 2012. This is probably the last training session in this programme – so if you work with traumatised women seeking asylum, don’t miss this chance to sign up for your place.
Contact: c.cochrane@csel.org.uk as soon as possible!
