Seminar RECORDING - Chris Scanlon

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In this presentation I discuss my experience of providing reflective-practice in organisations offering services for victims/survivors of interpersonal violence and cruelty. I will argue that ‘trauma-informed (trauma focussed) practice’ too-often unhelpfully splits-up the victim-perpetrator-rescuer-bystander matrices in ways that lets-loose ‘uncoupled violence/cruelty’ into the organisational dynamics. I discuss examples of how this uncoupled/split-off perpetrator-violence is played-out as cruelty between management-and-frontline-workers; between-frontline workers, and between frontline workers and the victim-survivors that they are tasked to help. I conclude by proposing a conceptual move from ‘trauma-informed’ to ‘cruelty-informed’ reflective practice in order to better enhance our understandings of the ways in which uncoupled/split-off violence and cruelty plays out in services dedicated to helping victim-survivors in order to provide better containment for staff teams and in so doing improve the quality of services for victims-survivivors.