Working Seminar in Porto - A major milestone

CEINAV Porto 5 Days Seminar, 28th Sept—4th Oct 2014

From September 28 to October 4, researchers of the Project CEINAV met in FPCEUP, University of Porto, to share preliminary findings of the 1st stream of the research.

Based on a total of 24 workshops with professionals, the five partners wrote working papers on the intervention patterns and approaches to the different forms of violence in each country. These papers will be revised after the discussions in Porto and then made public online.

With an intense and productive work, the team reviewed similarities and specificities among the four countries concerning intervention in domestic violence, child physical abuse and neglect, and trafficking of human beings for sexual exploitation. The debates focused sequences of intervention in different countries, the interpretative frames of the legal and professional practices, and cultural premises that configure the relationship between professionals and survivors in each country.

Public Presentation of CEINAV - October 1, 2014

Within the Porto Research Meeting, a Public Presentation of CEINAV was held in FPCEUP, with - Prof. Maria José Magalhães, national coordinator of CEINAV, researcher in FPCEUP

- Prof. Doutora Liz Kelly, coordinator of research team in UK, researcher in London Metropolitan University

- Prof.  António Magalhães, vice-president of Scientific Board of FPCEUP

- Prof. Fátima Machado, vice-rectoress of University of Porto

- Prof. Emeritus Carol Hagemann-White, Project Leader CEINAV, and researcher in Department of Educational and Cultural Studies, University of Osnabruck, Germany

- Prof. Vlasta Jalusic, coordinator of the Slovenian team and researcher in Peace Institut de Ljubliana Eslovénia

- Thomas Meysen, coordinator of the research team of Heidelberg, researcher in German Institute for Youth and Human Sciences

from left to right in the picture:

Meeting with Associate Partners, October 1 and 2, 2014

The 5 Days Seminar included a Meeting with the Associate partners, held on the 1st and 2nd of October, with representatives from Black Association of Women Step Out Ltd. (BAWSO), Cardiff, Wales; IMKAAN, London, England; Association for Non Violent Communication, Ljubljana; Society KLJUC – Centre for fight against trafficking in human beings, Ljubljana; Association against sexual abuse, Ljubljana Slovenia; IGFH - Internationale Gesellschaft für erzieherische Hilfen (Federation of Educative Communities), Germany; Federation of Women’s Counselling Centres and Hotlines (bff), Germany; Associação Projeto Criar – Association against child abuse, from Porto, Portugal, and UMAR-Association of Women, Alternative and Answer, from Portugal.

In the meeting, researchers and representatives of the APs debated the preliminary results of the first stream of the research, especially with regard to ethical issues that could be explored further, and their implications for next streams, in the pathway to understand the cultural premises in intervention.

Future directions of fruitful cooperation were built having in mind the artistic process that will go parallel with the next streams of the CEINAV research.

Research progressing on time

This week CEINAV is completing almost all of 24 workshops with practitioners in the four countries, a major step forward in the empirical work of our project! Only two workshops had to be re-scheduled for early September. Central aim of the workshops was to explore how decisions are made in difficult situations, and to look at the dilemmas that arise in practice, when conflicting rights, needs or mandates appear. The workshops were very successful, and the participants were enthusiastic about the opportunity to reflect in more depth and in dialogue with other professions on how they deal with the challenges of addressing violence.

The workshops were designed to follow a common structure in all four countries and across the three areas of violence, with open-ended focal-group methodology then allowing the diversity arising from the country context and the differences between frameworks of intervention for domestic violence, trafficking, and child protection to come to the fore.

Through meetings and conversations with the associate partners and among the five research teams, we defined a list of the main areas of practice for each of the three forms of violence, identifying which professionals could have experience in recognizing situations of violence and initiating intervention. Participants were sought who would not work together on a daily basis, often coming from different towns or districts. 

Detailed guidelines for the agreed procedure were written, suggesting key ethical dilemmas that may lie beneath the surface of discussions. Drawing on the expertise of cooperating practitioners as well as on research knowledge, a basic narrative for a paradigmatic case study was developed. It begins before intervention when the signs and signals for possible violence are not yet clear for any professional, and then continues in two stages of probable contact with agencies and indications of more serious harm. In the interest of comparability, six core questions were also formulated that were asked in the same way in all workshops. In the course of two half-day sessions, there was plenty of time to pursue issues and differences important to the participants.

The agreed set of core questions and the agreed narrative arc in all the stories comprising three sequences provided the scaffolding upon which we could hang the tapestry of our diversity. The next step in our work will be to analyse the workshops “two by two”, in order to write a working paper on the shape and patterns of intervention and its dilemmas for each form of violence within the context of each country. These 12 papers will be the material for a working seminar with all partners and all associate partners in the fall.

Who you gonna call?

For our planned workshops it is very important to invite just the right practitioners. They should have a significant deal of experience and should have come across the situations we will ask about. But maybe they should not be in the job for too long either. They will have to be experienced enough so everybody lets each other talk and respects each other, but if they are too experienced younger practitioners might feel intimidated. We want them to discuss cases, so they better have a comparable background framework in order not to start discussing protocols and procedures instead. On the other hand they should not work in the same networks or even city, because that would stop them from opening up regarding actions that might be against protocol. And there are still more reasons, why we have to pick our participants very carefully. Also we need the contacts, networks and experience of our associate partners for this. Last friday the Osnabrück team met with one of our associate partners in Göttingen, discussed who to invite and developed a first draft of a case story.

Bianca Grafe

Country context papers are on track

The last weeks it became quiet in the research team because one by one went on leave. Everybody is back to the desk now and eight researchers and fellow researchers are working on eight working papers called country context and legal context papers. These two papers per country are supposed to bring everybody on the same page about migration history, laws and prevalence data in each of the countries. In order to do comparatative research, we need to know the background of each country. Did your country have an extensive colonial history? From where are the migrants that migrate to your country? Which rights do they have? And so many more questions to ask. The papers are supposed to be desk research collecting and condensing existent research, but they will be of importance for the data analysis later on. Maybe we will not have final versions of all the papers at the initial deadline, but we hope to have preliminary versions of all of them by the middle or the end of january.

Bianca Grafe