2015 : The Trauma Therapy project
The Trauma Therapy Service is a unique provides emotional and psychological support to traumatised victims of race/religious-hate crime in the Greater London area.
Aims of project
The project has two primary aims:
to help traumatised victims of racial and religious harassment develop and implement mechanisms for coping with their trauma to enable them re-establish and repair familial and other relationships that have been adversely affected by the crimes; relieve anxiety and depression; and reconnect and engage with normal everyday activities taken for granted by most of us.
to work in partnership with relevant statutory bodies in the Greater London area to develop best practice to victims at a local authority level.
Background
The Monitoring Group have for the past 30 years been working to improvie services for victims of racial violence. A core value that drives our work is ensuring that services are victim centred and they are agents of change.
Over the past decade we have worked with ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) and ensured that the Police Servies Policy for Tackling Hate Crime acknowledged that hate crime victims face the added trauma of knowing that the perpetrator’s motivation may be an “impersonal group hatred, relating to some feature that they share with others“. The Policy states that a crime that might normally have a minor impact “becomes, with the hate element, a very intimate and hurtful attack that is likely to undermine the victim’s quality of life“.
During 2010 we completed a consultation exercise with a cross section of our clients asking specific questions about their experiences of suffering race/religious hate crime. The consultation excercie consisted of 115 completed questionnaires and 4 focus groups held in four different locations of the UK. (London, Liverpool, Southampton and Plymouth). The consultation found found: 88% of respondents were constantly angry; 60% had difficulty sleeping; 51% were depressed; 44% had to visit their GP as a result of the incident(s) of which 90% were put on medication; 71% said they now make a conscious effort to avoid getting harassed with 76% stating that they did this by only going out when absolutely necessary and avoiding places where they feel the perpetrators may be. Two respondents have left the country after we conducted the interviews and returned home to China because they felt it was too dangerous in the UK.
An overwhelming 94% said that counselling was important with 80.9% stating that it was very important and yet 73% had not gone to counselling because they did not know where to go; due to language barriers as English was not their first language; fear that they may be appointed a white English counsellor who they felt would not fully understand their experiences – 99% of the crimes were perpetrated by white English people.
The Trauma Therapy project was established in 2011 with support from the Big Lottery Project specifically to address the acute absence of trauma support for victims of racist violence.
What we do
The project helps victims who feel unable to cope because they have had a close relative murdered, or have been physically attacked and/or have suffered persistent racial abuse over a number of months/years. Racist abuse attacks the core of a persons indenity and sometimes only a trivial incident can trigger psychologicially disabling trauma.
The project complements the work of our casework service and others in the Criminal Justice systems. Most agencies refer cases to us because victims require support with their cases but they do not have either the remit, skills or capacity to provide the emotional and psychological support that victims require whilst their cases are being investigated and prosecuted, or because the pyschological damage continues long after cases have been settled.