Trauma-Informed Redress: Direct Personal Response
This one-day interactive professional development training provides the information and skills institutional personnel need to engage in effective redress processes.
The National Redress Scheme, a recommendation of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, commenced on 1 July 2018. It includes the option of a direct personal response for all people experiencing institutional child sexual abuse. Others, not applying to the scheme, may also separately seek an apology or other form of meeting with the institution in which they were harmed.
People who were abused and betrayed within institutions often struggle to feel, and be, safe. They can experience strong emotions, and have challenges regulating their emotions and levels of arousal, especially when re-engaging with institutions. Effective redress requires all personnel to be trauma-informed to minimise the risks of destabilisation and re-traumatisation, and to support healing. All institutions offering a direct personal response must understand the redress process, dynamics of institutional child sexual abuse and challenges of providing redress to people harmed in institutions.
This training provides participants with the insight, tools and skills to carefully plan and comprehensively provide a direct personal response which delivers optimal support and best meets survivor expectations.
By participating in this professional development training, participants will:
- Demonstrate an understanding of the components and key principles of Redress in relation to the impacts of the complex trauma of institutional child sexual abuse
- Analyse the stress response and survivor coping strategies to develop trauma-informed strategies which enlist verbal and non-verbal communication skills for supporting emotional regulation, optimal arousal and safety, and minimising re-traumatisation
- Define and articulate the importance of individual/institutional defence mechanisms and evaluate the parallel processes of institutional abuse
- Delineate the importance of trauma-informed practice and apply a trauma-informed framework to plan the key tasks of Redress including attuned apology/redress meetings
- Recognise and address content and process dynamics as well survivor expectations for apology/redress meetings
Material presented in the training will draw on the research from Blue Knot Foundation's Practice Guidelines for Treatment of Complex Trauma and Trauma Informed Care and Service Delivery www.blueknot.org.au/guidelines and other relevant research.