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Care4Trauma

Care4Trauma ‘Improving support services and access to justice for survivors of gender-based violence through Trauma Informed Care’ is a programme aimed at women survivors of gender-based violence, as well as professionals and organisations working in this field. Its main objective is to improve access to justice for these women, and more specifically, to strengthen the services of organisations offering support to women who have experienced trauma, to promote a trauma-informed approach in more organisations and to broaden the understanding and accompaniment of beneficiaries through the Trauma Informed Care (TIC) approach.

This approach identifies the presence of trauma symptoms and recognises the role trauma can play in a person’s life. Trauma Informed Care aims to change organisational culture to ameliorate the effects of trauma at all levels.

Funded by the European Commission’s Justice Programme (JUST), Care4Trauma will be implemented between June 2022 and November 2024. The project is led by Associazione MondoDonna Onlus (Italy) and partners are: Asociación Bienestar y Desarrollo (ABD, Spain); Italian Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (SISST, Italy); Union of Women Associations of Heraklion Prefecture (UWAH, Greece); Women’s Support and Information Centre (WSIC, Estonia); Autonomous Women’s House Zagreb (AŽKZ, Croatia).

Specific Objectives:

Strengthen the services

Strengthen the services offered by the different organisations that support women who have suffered trauma.

Trauma-informed approach

Encourage the adoption of a trauma-informed approach in a large number of support organisations.

Trauma Informed Care

Broadening the understanding and accompaniment of beneficiaries through the Trauma Informed Care (TIC) approach.

Main activities

Research in each country based on the collection and analysis of data on access to justice for victims of male violence and the use of trauma-informed help and support systems.
Awareness-raising activities on the effectiveness of trauma-informed help and support systems.
Training of social workers, social pedagogues, lawyers and psychiatrists working with women survivors of violence on the Trauma Informed Care (TIC) approach and the creation of a specialised psychotraumatology programme and trauma-informed help and support system.
Design of a manual on access to justice through Trauma Informed Care.
Communication activities aimed at increasing awareness and knowledge of stakeholders on access to justice through Trauma Informed Care and linked to gender-based violence.

Impact and results

Improving access to communicable disease services

Improving access to communicable disease services for consumers by increasing the availability and quality of community-based communicable disease services for consumers, thereby improving their health outcomes and reducing the spread of infectious diseases.

Strengthening the capacity of service providers

Strengthening the capacity of service providers, making them more effective and efficient by improving the skills and knowledge of professionals in the field of communicable diseases.

Greater participation, engagement and trust

Greater participation, engagement and trust of affected communities in health services

Better collaboration and networking

Better collaboration and networking, including service providers, policy makers and affected communities to collaborate in the provision of communicable disease services to consumers.

Motivation / Context:

The Victims’ Rights Strategy 2020-2025 pays special attention to the specific needs of survivors of gender-based violence. In its two-pronged approach, the EU highlights the fact that one of the main objectives presented in the strategy is the empowerment of survivors of crime to improve their ability to report the crime, participate in criminal proceedings, claim compensation and recover, to the extent possible, from the consequences of the crime. An approach capable of providing a safe environment and promoting a culture of empowerment and understanding for survivors of domestic violence can lead to more consistent access to justice for women who have suffered trauma and an improvement in the reporting of domestic violence, the actual numbers of which are still unclear.

Trauma Informed Care (TIC) is an approach that recognises the presence of trauma symptoms and the role trauma plays in people’s lives. TIC is aimed at changing organisational culture to improve the response to the effects of trauma at all levels. ICT has been used to combat the effects of unaddressed trauma and secondary victimisation among organisations. Secondary victimisation, or system-oriented trauma, is a form of re-traumatisation that, as the Victims’ Rights Strategy has also stated, is often faced by survivors of gender-based violence in the process of receiving support and protection and in accessing the justice system.