Dr Sarah Kendall1,2, Ms Jessica Lakeman2
1Griffith University, Australia, 2Queensland Law Reform Commission, Australia
Biography:
Dr Sarah Kendall is a Research Fellow at Griffith University’s Disrupting Violence Beacon. Prior to joining the Beacon, she led the Queensland Law Reform Commission’s review of the non-fatal strangulation offence. Sarah is an interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in justice responses to violence. She is particularly interested in trauma-informed justice approaches for victim-survivors of gender-based violence.
Abstract:
Growing calls for researchers to embed the voices of those with lived experience into their work has resulted in increasing engagements with victim-survivors, particularly of gender-based violence. Despite this, there is a lack of guidance for researchers on how to do this in a way that minimises potential re-traumatisation. This presentation explores how legal researchers can take a trauma-informed approach when working with victim-survivors, drawing on the authors’ experiences working on the Queensland Law Reform Commission’s Non-Fatal Strangulation Review. In that review, the team conducted empirical research with victim-survivors and also engaged with victim-survivors in consultations. To ensure the team took a trauma-informed approach, a novel victim-centric, trauma-informed law reform conceptual framework was developed. This framework was then applied to generate concrete practices for the team to employ when working with victim-survivors.
This presentation will take the audience through the novel conceptual framework and provide examples of how it was applied by the review team to generate trauma-informed practices. The primary purpose of this is to address critiques that there is little guidance on how organisations can embed trauma-informed principles into their practices, particularly in legal contexts. Not only will the audience come away with a set of practices they can use, but they will also be armed with knowledge of how to translate conceptual principles into practices to begin to build their own collection of trauma-informed practices. The presentation will appeal to researchers, law reformers, lawyers and those working in policy.