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.

Iterview with Manuel Albano, rapporteur for Human Trafficking in Portugal

For the CEINAV project the portuguese team conducted an interview with Manuel Albano, rapporteur for human trafficking in Portugal.

The following is an extract from the interview, read the full Interview here.

CEINAV: Dr. Manuel Albano, can you identify the diverse tendencies that concern Human Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation?

MA: There are tendencies - note that these are not European tendencies, but mostly national tendencies -  that try to push this issue away from the area of equality, because they consider that this is a criminal problematic, not a gender equality issue. This is against the Palermo Protocol, which clearly states that the focus must be given to equality issues, to gender issues. That means that trafficking must be viewed and worked on from a gender perspective.

Therefore, it’s important to realize that the problematic and the gender view for this doesn’t have anything to do with any theorization. It has to do, objectively, with the main target affected, which are still women. The number of men and children trafficked has also increased, due to trafficking for labour exploitation purposes, such as mendacity. When we work with victims, female and male, we understand that the dynamics are completely different. In other words, a man, when he’s found in this situation, mostly wants to quickly return to his home place. He’s not very concerned with the support that may exist here, what he wants is to go out, to be free, to return back home. A woman has completely different characteristics: she appeals for a more specific support, a more continuous and differentiated help on this level.

The 1st National Plan against Human Trafficking came out from the experience of the Project CAIM. We presented the first draft. We also managed to have the discernment to call someone from the outside, Dr. Fernanda Rodrigues, the project consultant. There were hours and hours, days and days of discussion, in order to achieve something, so we could have the guideline we now have, to establish all those dynamics. This was a process down to top. That’s why people, a lot of them, identified themselves with all the created instruments, because they built them. It wasn’t a process that someone imposed, no, people identified with it. I’d say that, in Portugal, this project is striking and makes a difference in this area, fully; I have no doubt about it.

An example of that was the documentary sponsored by CIG, at the end of last year: it was something that made people think and reflect about this. People talked about these issues in day-by-day situations.

CEINAV on the ENGV conference and meeting the president

Four members of the CEINAV team attended the European Network on Gender and Violence Conference in Malta April 21st-23rd, attended by 100 people.  The network provides a supportive and expert space for established and new scholars to present their work. We discussed papers from many perspectives and national contexts and Liz Kelly from CEINAV gave one of the keynotes on approaches to prevention, drawing on a conceptual framework from a previous EU project some of the partners had worked on together.  This framework suggests prevention efforts need to be more strongly theorised, targeting specific pathways that connect the structural, normative and biographical.  After the meeting Carol Hagemann White, the Director of our HERA project met the recently appointed president of Malta who has a personal interest in our topic.

Liz Kelly

"Data" is the hot topic around violence against women these days

On March 6, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency presented their EU-wide prevalence survey to an audience of an estimated 400 in Brussels, very many of whom represented governments, NGOs, international organisations. I was astonished how many speakers in this well-informed public declared themselves “shocked” by the findings, since the new prevalence figures are not very different from what national surveys have uncovered. Or were they hoping to shock their governments into finally taking the problem seriously?

 Just two weeks later, the European Institute for Gender Equality invited some 50 experts from across the EU to discuss the results of their study on the availability of administrative data on violence against women. Unsurprisingly, since institutions and regulations differ quite a lot among member states, not much of the data is comparable across countries, and of course administrative files only capture violence that is reported to the police, social services, or (much less often) the health care system. As the FRA study showed, less than a third of all victimized women reported even the most serious incident to the police or to some other agency or organization. (A third talked to someone they know, a third had told no-one about it.). 

 What do we need the data for?

 

The interesting thing would be data that told us what statutory agencies DO about the cases they do hear of, for example, what percentage of cases recorded by the police ever goes to court?

In its “victims rights“ Directive (October 2012), the EU – to my great satisfaction – finally defined a victim as someone who has suffered harm irrespective of whether a perpetrator has been identified, charged or convicted, or of whether she makes a criminal complaint. Finally EU policy steps out of the narrow box in which the right to support and protection depends on criminal proceedings. 

But only one step. The Commission takes care to ask member states to train the providers of specialist support services to encourage and facilitate reporting to the police. Services, it seems, are expected to teach victims to trust the police and the criminal justice system. Indeed, we would all like to live in a world like that, and in many countries, the police are making impressive efforts to be worthy of victims’ trust. But it is the mandate of support services, would it even be ethical of them, to try and convince reluctant women to denounce their husbands or partners to the police? 

In how many states can a rape crisis center honestly assure women that they have nothing to fear from being witness in a rape trial? About a year ago, when a prominent rape case was being dragged through the German media, a former national prosecutor declared, in a talk show, that if his daughter were raped, he would strongly advise her not to go to the police, because the defense would inevitably attack her credibility and her character. Yes, when a woman has decided that she wants redress, wants to see her tormenter prosecuted, support her by all means – but encourage?

Do more data make better policy?

But back to data. There seems to be a notion floating around that the modern state ought to be informed about every case or incident of abuse or hurt. Every victim of violence in close relationships, it is said, ought to be “assessed” to decide if she needs special protection measures. (Why is no-one talking about the perpetrator? Surely it is the person posing a danger who needs to be assessed.). In the same Directive, member states are asked to provide administrative data regularly, systematically, and in comparable frameworks. It’s not easy to see what this has to do with victims’ rights.

Do more data make better policy? How, exactly, does that work? Awareness-raising is likely to increase the proportion of incidents that are reported, poor agency responses are likely to decrease that proportion, but the numbers won’t tell us whether awareness has risen or whether the agency responses have improved or deteriorated. 

I’m finding the “hype” about data, and more data questionable, especially since the data are all being collected from the victims, and that is, we might remind ourselves, a very intrusive process. If my handbag is stolen on the train, of course I go to the police (if only because I need the file number to get all those plastic cards we live with replaced), and their questions center on the perpetrator. I don’t have to answer questions about whether I am feeling depressed or whether I am pregnant. 

Seems to me that any institution that wishes to collect data on people who have done nothing wrong, just had the bad luck to be victimized, should be required to justify specifically why the data are needed. A general claim that data collection is “an essential component of effective policy-making” is too little. Numbers don’t make policy.

Carol Hagemann-White 

CEINAV presented to the Slovenian public on 27th February 2014

On February 27th 2014, the CEINAV project was presented to the Slovenian scholar's and wider public.  Vlasta Jalušič, one of the principal investigators of Cultural Encounters in Interventions against Violence at the Peace Institute,  has spoken about the content, methods, results and project partnership. 



 
Three other Slovenian HERA projects were introduced at the event which was organised by the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and attended by the representatives of the Slovenian Ministry of Education, Science   and Sports. The audience, mostly young scholars, has shown most  interest in the  projects development and partnerships. The representatives of the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports have announced the third HERA tender.

Vlasta Jalušič 

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