Are you aware of the messages that you convey to children through your body language? How do you support children to open up to you as a professional and share their traumatic event? What can you do as a practitioner to ensure that children’s voices are heard in court?
Many practitioners working with children victims of sexual violence will have developed the skills related to such questions through hard work and experience. Is there space for improvement though?
JudEx+ training programme seeks to encourage self-reflection for all those professionals whose work encompasses or focuses on supporting children victims of sexual violence. You may be a social welfare officer, a doctor in a local hospital, a lawyer, perhaps a judge or a teacher? Have you ever had to deal with a case of sexual violence against children and wondered what else could be done to make the post-violence experience better for them? You may also be curious about how such cases are addressed in other countries of the European Union where the Lanzarote Convention is in place or has just been ratified.
JudEx+ training programme for professionals will support you in sharing reflection with other practitioners, from your field or others, approaching the issue from a multidisciplinary viewpoint, and offering insights from 6 European countries.
The institutions collaborating through the EU-funded project JudEx+ have been developing a curriculum for the training course for practitioners, and have met just this past week, between October 12th and 14th, to fine-tune the curriculum and its contents, with the aim of making it as relevant as possible for all professionals involved, in one way or another, in judicial proceedings focusing on sexual violence against children.
JudEx+ has collected real life experiences of judicial proceedings from practitioners and from the victims themselves, focusing on the issues identified by the very same professionals and victims through focus groups and interviews, and building on the good practices collected in Cyprus, Sweden, the UK, Italy, Slovenia and Bulgaria. The training programme draws on the experience and learning acquired by the partnership through the direct involvement of those same professionals targeted by the programme.
The training programme will be piloted with a group of practitioners in Linköping, Sweden, in March 2017, and later implemented with 50 professionals in each of the project countries.
Do you want to take part in the training event? Contact Noemi De Luca – noemi.deluca@cesie.org – and show your interest in enrolling in the event.
In the meantime, you can learn about the findings of the research undertaken in the different countries by reading the country reports on the experience of the children in judicial proceedings in cases of sexual violence against children. The Report from Italy can also be accessed in Italian and in English from CESIE’s Digital Library.
Want to be updated on the latest developments of the JudEx+ project? Subscribe to the JudEx+ newsletter by writing to noemi.deluca@cesie.org.
The JudEx+ project website is also constantly updated and offers useful resources for professionals and for child victims and their families.
JudEx+: Towards a justice suitable for children in cases of sexual violence against children is a two-year project co-funded by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme of the DG Justice of the European Commission.
You can request more information on the project by contacting Noemi De Luca – noemi.deluca@cesie.org, +390916164224.
“JudEx+: Towards a child-friendly justice in cases of sexual violence against children” has been funded by the Rights, Equality & Citizenship Programme of the European Union. The authors are solely responsible for the contents of this article. It does not represent the opinion of the EU and nor is the EU responsible for any use that might be made of information contained in it.
