STAR for Sexual Harms: Manual for Addressing Trauma, Resilience and Sexual Harms

admin — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 17:55:26 +0000

We are excited to announce the creation of a STAR-based manual about trauma, resilience, and sexual harms. A team of authors worked diligently to construct training materials for those seeking to prevent and address sexual harms. STAR for Sexual Harms’ authors include researchers and practitioners: Carolyn Stauffer, Ram Bhagat, Rachel Roth Sawatzky, Rhoda Miller, and Joy Kreider.

Below is an excerpt from the manual that outlines the content and structure. You can download the manual and document containing important reflection questions for engaging the curriculum.

Chapter 1 focuses on understanding how trauma operates more generally and how sexual harms specifically impact us physically and socially. This is done by exploring the cascading effects of sexual harm on body, brain, beliefs, and behavior. Learning about these impacts helps explain what we may experience before, during, and after situations of sexual violence. Naming and understanding these dynamics help affected parties feel safer in their own bodies, as they navigate the way forward.

Chapter 2 discusses the importance of identity and power. Here we examine how privilege, power, positionality, and patriarchy shape social environments. We consider how various forms of structural violence may intersect and disproportionately impact on communities that are marginalized. We also probe the ways sexual violence becomes embedded within historical legacies of harm. Because sexual traumas involve dignity violations, this chapter situates sexual violence within a larger discussion of gender, equity, and just power relations.

Chapter 3 centers on the role of healthy relational attachments. The presence of strong and supportive relationships is key to sexual harms prevention as well as post-traumatic growth in the aftermath of sexual violence. Support networks are critical for the resilience of persons who have been harmed, and also play a vital accountability role for persons who have caused harms. Levels of risk, as well as possibilities for resilience, are all predicated on the presence of these networks. Sexual violence ruptures trust in relationships, and thus providing opportunity for recreating community is imperative.

Chapter 4 gives attention to the role that institutions can play in prevention, advocacy, and/or post-harm restoration. Here we examine the institutional dynamics of either betrayal or fidelity to the needs of harmed parties. We explore what organizational accountability and trauma-informed practices can look like and provide models that identify key policy considerations. We assess organizational protocols, evaluating their outcomes in relation to the harm or healing of all affected persons/communities.

Chapter 5 concludes with the challenge and promise of change. Our mandate in this chapter is to learn about community-based justice and massive resilience approaches. These approaches challenge traditional assumptions of state-sanctioned safety/corrections with the recognition that grassroots mobilizations are critical to addressing the need for broader structural and cultural transformation.
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Download STAR for Sexual Harms Manual
Guide for use of STAR for Sexual Harms Manual

STAR is currently seeking an organizational partner in implementing a pilot project with the materials. If you or your organization are interested, please review the reflection questions and ideal audiences and contact us at star@emu.edu.

‘Changing the Narrative on Sexual Harms’

admin — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 18:31:41 +0000

Professor Carolyn Stauffer, pictured with students in an SPI course, is working with colleagues on a grant-funded project to develop a new STAR curriculum focused on sexual harms.

��ݮ�� professor Carolyn Stauffer is leading the development of a new Strategies for Trauma and Resilience (STAR) curriculum focused on sexual harms.

The “Changing the Narrative on Sexual Harms” (CTN) project, which is funded by a JustPax Fund grant, is housed in the STAR program under the leadership of trainer Katie Mansfield and program director Hannah Kelley. Project contributors include Richmond Public Schools manager of school climate and culture Ram Bhagat GC ‘19 and neuroscientist and practitioner Joy Kreider. EMU’s Title IX coordinator Rachel Roth Sawatsky and the Collins Center crisis response coordinator Rhoda Miller, a CJP grad student, are also key contributors.

STAR has facilitated trauma and resilience trainings with thousands of participants from more than 60 countries. The curriculum will deepen the program’s work addressing sexual trauma specifically and will engage all affected parties – from individuals to institutions – in proactive, preventative and restorative approaches.

“Worldwide there is a growing admission that the topic of sexual harms is quickly moving from invisible peripheries to conspicuous center stage,” Stauffer said. “The CTN project provides a viable way to be visibly present at a critical time in this important conversation. This proactive approach frames the paradigm shift opportunity offered by CTN.”

The grant includes funding for assembling focus groups in local and international settings, interviewing global practice leaders, and accessing expertise at institutions such as Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

The project is collecting input from survivors across diverse communities, thereby ensuring the inclusion of voices from marginalized and underrepresented communities. In addition to the harmful impacts of sexual violence on individuals, the curriculum will address how power disequilibria can foster cultures of violence in communities and organizations.

“Many organizations do not have processes in place to support individuals in a trauma-sensitive manner nor the impetus to push for proactive policies that prevent sexual violence in the first place,” Stauffer wrote. “Daily we hear of ‘sexual misconduct’ that gains notoriety precisely because institutions are non-compliant with current legislation and ignorant of trauma-sensitive intervention protocols. Such gaps not only compound the profound harms already done to victims, but they also put the integrity, legality and legitimacy of organizations at risk.”

The JustPax Fund focuses on individuals and organizations working for effective change through innovative approaches to societal challenges relating to gender, environmental and/or economic justice. It is administered by Everence Charitable Services through the Everence affiliate Mennonite Foundation.

“This project is the heart of what JustPax is all about,” said Teresa Boshart Yoder, managing director for Everence in Harrisonburg. “We want to reach out to the underserved or vulnerable and begin programs that will bring about effective change.”

This $6,600 grant is the second Stauffer has received from JustPax. A 2016 grant of $10,200 supported a project called “Silent Violence,” which studied strategies of resilience among domestic violence survivors from within communities of homeless women, undocumented Latinas, and Mennonite women from Old Order or conservative church communities.

Rhoda Miller – Peacebuilder Online

STAR for Sexual Harms: Manual for Addressing Trauma, Resilience and Sexual Harms

‘Changing the Narrative on Sexual Harms’