National Closing Event Germany

The CEINAV Closing Event for Germany, “Frames and ethics in interventions against violence” took place in Berlin on June 2-3, 2016. The teams from the University of Osnabrück and DIJuF were joined by Maria José Magalhães from Portugal and Jackie Turner from London. Around 65 experts working in the areas of at least one of the three forms of violence and several interviewpartners attended the conference and discussed together with us the issues of ethics and culture in interventions against interpersonal violence.

The program combined presentations of project results with reflections from “outside” by Prof. Hans Thiersch, University of Tübingen, and Dr. Heinz Kindler, German Youth Institute. The workshops brought the results of the study in conversation with practitioners who reflected on them to initiate lively discussions. We exhibited the artwork the women and young people created and also showed a part of the film the Slovenian team produced with the voices of women, young people, professionals and researchers. Both made quite an impression.

Participants also enjoyed looking at a partial pre-print of the multilingual anthology of stories of women and young people and were very interested to use the finished product in their work. 

The two days ended with a first introduction of the “Transnational Ethical Foundation for Interventions Against Interpersonal Violence” which provoked a profound appreciation as well as a desire to continue the discussions about the various issues covered on the two days such as self-determination, listening to women and children/young people and culture. Making decisions about interventions can be difficult for professionals in their every-day-work and the conference seems to have been a welcomed possibility to reflect those difficulties and talk about ways to handle it in an ethically reflected way.