Advocacy
Submission to the National Inquiry into the relationship between domestic, family and sexual violence and suicide.
ShantiWorks made a submission to the National Inquiry on the relationship between domestic, family and sexual violence and suicide. Women’s Services Network (Wesnet), national peak body for specialist women’s domestic and family violence services, supported our submission.
Our overarching recommendation is to implement a social and systemic entrapment framework as part of all recommendations, which include:
1) A National Minimum Data Set on family violence victimisation and suicide. The data set should include demographic information, such as age, gender and sexual orientation, and any history of self-harm, ideation, attempts
2) Strengthening multi-agency approaches to assess and manage victim-survivor suicide risk. We refer the Committee to Women’s Refuge (Aotearoa New Zealand) resource on family violence and suicide as a comprehensive practical application of a social entrapment framework. Within this multi-agency approach, information sharing between and within organisations and advocacy are critical.
3) Developing postvention guides with a family violence lens. Organisations should be resourced to implement postvention guides with a family violence lens.
ShantiWorks welcomes conversations and connections to address suicides in the context of family violence.
Submission on the Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement Review interim report.
ShantiWorks made a brief submission to the Productivity Commission on the Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement Review interim report. Safe and Equal, Professor Heather Douglas AM and Stefani Vasil endorsed our submission.
We recommended that:
1) the next agreement integrates with the National Plan to end violence against women and children 2022-2032,
2) the next agreement articulates the complexity of suicides, including coerced and tactical suicides, in the context of family violence for children and adults,
3) the specialist family violence response sector and Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission are part of governance mechanisms to address family violence-related suicides, and
4) a nationally consistent approach to data collection and sharing about family violence-related suicidal ideation, self-harm and attempts, and suicides.
Training and workshops
-
Coercive Control and Social Entrapment
-
Exploring Families Through a Social Entrapment/Coercive Control Framework
-
Working with fathers who perpetrate family violence
-
Reflective Supervision: Developing and Enhancing your Practices as a Supervisor
-
Narrative Conversations With Children & Families Affected By Family Violence
-
Challenging Racism - Examining Whiteness
-
Challenging Sexism
-
Exploring the dominant discourses of Consent
-
Foundational Family Violence Training - Exploring Ethics and Frameworks
Reflective practice and supervision
Team reflective practices/supervision establishes a context for negotiating and re-negotiating staff experiences by deconstructing their taken-for-granted thinkings and practices. The ShantiWorks team work from a feminist, post structuralist and collaborative therapeutic approach and present frameworks and create spaces to explore theories for practice. This approach offers a supportive line of enquiry, facilitating respectful and reflective questioning processes from within the group and explores power accountabilities and gender relations.
We work with a number of services across the community sectors (domestic and family violence, community legal, housing) in offering reflective space to explore theories and frameworks; ethical dilemmas, tensions and struggles; practice work; and nourishment.
The use of critical reflection in collaborative practices increases the chances of the learning being relevant and meaningful to professionals. Therefore worker’s engagement in reflection can assist them in making sense of themselves, their learning experience and preparation for future work.
For enquiries…
Counselling
ShantiWorks offers supportive and nourishing conversations with people about their experiences of pain and hurt.
ShantiWorks specialises in working with people of all ages who have experienced violence by a family member. The ShantiWorks team hope to create a space that allows for women and children to make sense of their experiences, to develop an understanding of why people they care for hurt them and the many ways in which women and children attempt to stay safe and better their lives.
Through these conversations the ShantiWorks team often challenges mainstream ideas that tend to place responsibility for violence on women and children, that reduce women and children’s experiences to simple ideas such as ‘choosing to stay’ with someone who uses violence. We also bring forward the care and acts of strength and resistance of women and children who experience violence which is important in the process of healing from such pain.
For enquiries…
Our new and developing work
-
Gender Audit Tool
The ShantiWorks team can assist organisations to create a more gender equitable and diverse workplace by working alongside management and staff to implement the ShantiWorks Gender Audit Tool. This is a flexible and negotiated process that enables organisations to:
Focus on visible and invisible mechanisms of power, privilege and influence and how these form culture within the workplace.
Embed gender equality and diversity in organisational policies and procedures.
Assist organisations to adopt new initiatives that enhance gender equality.
Apply a gender equality and diversity lens to organisational partnership choices
The ShantiWorks team is happy to provide a project brief that is constructed to maximise participatory action by all levels of the organisation as research has shown that this brings about more successful and sustainable change. Each step of the process can be adapted to meet the needs of an organisation.