Annual Report:
2001/2002

Victim Empowerment Programme

"The high levels of interpersonal, group and community violence in South Africa demand a shift from policy to practice. Balancing the needs of victims, communities and offenders within a restorative justice framework remains a priority for the Programme."

Naomi Hill, Programme Manager

All South Africans are vulnerable to victimisation. Many people traumatised during the Apartheid era have not received support to help them deal with their experiences. Awareness of the effects of trauma and the availability of support services are essential for the nation's collective mental health.

Goals

The Victim Empowerment Programme has two primary aims. The first is to contribute towards victim empowerment initiatives through training and capacity building, research and advocacy. The other is to alleviate the effects of violence through the provision of trauma counselling and management to adult and child survivors.

Strategy

During 2001, the Trauma Clinic repositioned itself as the Victim Empowerment Programme. During its ten-year lifespan, the Trauma Clinic developed considerable expertise in trauma work and has become a national leader in clinical interventions and trauma management education. The emergence of the Victim Empowerment Programme consolidates this work. It encompasses a broader perspective to ensure that victims in South Africa are treated with respect and dignity and explores the nature of victimisation in a transitional society. The strategies employed by the Programme are varied.

• Direct services are provided to trauma survivors, including individual, group and family counselling, debriefing and crisis intervention.
• Through training and capacity development in the awareness of and containment of trauma at different levels of sophistication, the Programme aims to ensure that individuals, groups and communities are supported to deal with the consequences of trauma, and to break the cycle of violence. Thus training and education is targeted towards frontline workers as well as specialists and professionals working in the field.
• Research in the programme includes the tracking of trauma cases to assess trends in victimisation, developing appropriate therapeutic approaches and exploring specific aspects of trauma and victimisation.
• The insight into the experiences of trauma clients informs the writing of effective policy and practice.

Major highlights

A high point of the year was the launch of Themba Lesizwe, (formerly the South African Network of Trauma Service Providers). It is a European Union-sponsored initiative established to consolidate the trauma sector in South Africa. The launch was the culmination of two years active involvement by CSVR, as a founder member, in the launch of this initiative. The Trauma Clinic Manager, Mary Robertson, served as Interim Chairperson, and the Programme is now represented on the board, thus retaining an active role in the body's development.

The goals of Themba Lesizwe are to:

• Promote accessible mental health care services for survivors of violence
• Develop standardised training programmes for frontline workers
• Conduct research and advocacy
• Develop a reliable client information database

The launch of Themba Lesizwe coincided with the Healing through Creative Arts Conference, organised by Sherbanu Sacoor and colleagues in collaboration with the Protestant Development Services (EED) of Germany. Held at Museum Africa in Johannesburg, one hundred and eighty delegates from Africa, Europe, the United States and Australia met for three days to learn, share and challenge creative and artistic methodologies for dealing with individual, communal and societal trauma. As part of the conference an impressive art exhibition bore witness to the powerful impact that art and art therapy can have in transforming pain and suffering into creative healing. The Healing through Creative Arts Conference represented one of the first endeavours in Africa to bring together practitioners from different disciplines- artists, traditional healers, social workers, psychologists and community workers.

Highlights

World Conference Against Racism

The CSVR trauma counsellors played a vital role in the Voices Programme presented at the Third World Conference against Racism, 2001. The South African Human Rights Commission and the International Human Rights Law Group invited the CSVR staff to attend this programme. Counsellors assisted twenty-two victims from various countries to document and recount their experiences through the provision of support and debriefing. Ntsiki Masilo and Smangele Mayisela represented the Trauma Clinic at the conference.

Therapeutic and Counselling services

A range of counselling interventions including individual therapy, play therapy, group therapy, debriefing, court preparation, psychiatric management, psychometric assessment and both family and parental counselling were provided. Counselling was offered to one thousand and two hundred clients presenting a range of trauma-associated problems. Frances Spencer, psychiatric nurse, facilitated psychiatric assessments by the Clinic's part time psychiatrist, Ugesh Subramaney.

Marivic Garcia explored models of intervention with refugee women living in a shelter. Boitumelo Kekana complemented this by rendering services to refugee children through art and drama therapy. Counselling was closely linked to advocacy to uphold the rights of refugees and to build referral networks with relevant service providers. The exclusion of refugee clients from state service provision remains a thorny issue, as does the culture of xenophobia, which impacted particularly on school-going children attempting to integrate into a learning environment.

Nomfundo Mogapi, Lindiwe Mkhondo and Gloria Hlophe, supported by researcher Helen Hajiyiannis, undertook pioneering work with a group of ex-combatants. The development of appropriate interventions for these marginalised clients, once community heroes and now frequently social outcasts, has presented significant challenges, as has sourcing appropriate responses to the ex-combatants' wide range of socio- economic needs

Training and capacity building

A second tender for the Training of Primary Health Care practitioners in Mpumalanga, Northern and North West provinces was awarded to Themba Lesizwe with the CSVR fulfilling a coordinating role. The Programme's network partner, the Kwazulu Natal Programme for Survivors of Violence, conducted the training in Mpumalanga. This contract was in recognition of the success of the pilot training programme that was conducted between 1999 and 2000 when one hundred and eighty primary health care practitioners were trained in the three provinces.

A training programme was developed and implemented for professionals seeking knowledge on trauma counselling and management. This allows for standard setting using the model for trauma counselling developed by the University of the Witwatersrand, Psychology Department and adopted by the Trauma Clinic.

As in previous years, the Programme provided an internship and student placement programme for a counselling psychology intern and three social work students. This provides a dynamic link between theoretical knowledge and practical experience. The CSVR worked in collaboration with tertiary institutions to develop future service providers who are well equipped to respond to the mental health challenges of South African society. Katharina Ley from Switzerland joined the Programme for a two year local consultancy.

Challenges

• An ongoing challenge for the Programme is to engage constructively yet critically with government programmes to help ensure improved service delivery on the ground. Roles and responsibilities need clarification, both between and within the state sectors as well as between the state and civil society. Only then can notions of partnership, which form the basic premise of victim empowerment, be realised.
• An additional challenge is finding ways to include the volunteer staff more meaningfully in every aspect of the Programme's extensive work, and to develop them as ambassadors of victim empowerment in their own communities.
• The secondary victimisation that occurs within the Criminal Justice System needs to be carefully monitored and challenged at every stage from reporting a case throughout the court process and associated support systems.
• There is a need to shift from policy to practice. This is apparent from the high levels of interpersonal, group and community violence in South Africa. Balancing the needs of victims, communities and offenders within a restorative justice framework remains a priority for the Programme.

Future Directions

The Trauma Clinic will be incorporated into the Victim Empowerment Programme in 2002. This will require strategic planning and internal flexibility to ensure that new goals complement the existing projects.

During 2002, the CSVR will further define its strategic role in Victim Empowerment, at a local, provincial and national level. Independently and as a partner of Themba Lesizwe, the commitment to accessible, integrated victim empowerment service delivery will continue through training programmes directed at both the community and professional service providers.

The wealth of experience and data collected in the Programme will be transformed into research products that offer further insight into the nature of trauma, and the empathic responses required to bring about healing. The increasingly complex nature of the trauma experienced by clients calls for an evaluation and review of the intervention models.

As a Themba Lesizwe partner, the Programme will promote the development of accessible trauma service provision, particularly in under-serviced rural areas and poverty pockets. The challenge remains to give recognition to the voices of victims in South Africa and to support their quest for the development of adequate and effective responses to victimisation.

Education and Media Unit