Aside from spreading awareness about the impact of trauma and how to get beyond it, through this website and the book I am working on, I also want to apply the knowledge to set real changes in motion. I am delighted that over the past year, I have gone from a powerful but vague sense of how to make a major difference in the world through addressing trauma to a very concrete plan for how I can do something about that in a practical sense. As it turns out, it lies at the heart of the work I have been doing for the past 18 years. Its outline still sounds grandiose and theoretical: Radical child protection reform that goes beyond addressing symptoms and kicking the can down the road. But I have found a simple, practical starting point.
The premise is that to make child protection case management all about identifying and addressing the underlying trauma of everyone in a child’s household can deliver dramatically improved, sustainable outcomes and long-term societal savings. It also has a strong ripple effect through breaking the cycles of passing on intergenerational trauma and reducing the number of hurt people hurting people. Achieving this starts with ensuring that social workers are equipped to recognise and address trauma as one of the root causes of child protection situations. Acquiring the knowledge and skills to do this has to be part of their qualification training.
Powerful as my trauma training programmes are, I am not in a position to go out and train all social workers around the globe. Nor am I qualified to develop the necessary curriculum modules to add to qualification programmes to accomplish that by myself. However, I am able to bring together a diverse group of experts in social work, child protection, and childhood trauma from around the globe to jointly decide what social work qualification programmes should encompass to equip social workers to view and handle their cases through a trauma lens. Together we can bring together and develop the training materials that are needed. This would be step one, followed by advocacy and approaching social work training programmes to encourage them to adapt the materials to the local context and include them in their curriculum.
Not easy, but simple and concrete. Something I can work on. In the coming while, I will be looking for experts in the relevant fields with diverse backgrounds – including those who experienced child protection services in their childhood – who are willing to take part in this initiative. I will also be looking for grants or other forms of funding that enable me to finance an in-person workshop to hash this out together. Ideally, funding would also include sponsoring the travel of some experts from lower-resource contexts to enable their presence at the workshop as well.
I am very excited about this work and the possibilities. If you are interested in being involved, please contact me at [email protected] and I will consider your inclusion in the project. And of course, I will keep you posted on the developments over time.
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