Which are the best strategies to teach language to vulnerable foreign women? How cultural differences may interfere with the language learning process? How to implement language course with psychological support? What are the main skills and competencies for successful integration into the labour market?
We discussed these and other questions during two local roundtables in Italy (and also in other WINGS project partner countries). Theaim was to exchange needs, ideas and good practices among experts in the field of support to women and girls’ survivors of trafficking and gender-based violence at an early stage.
The professionals who participated in the local roundtables highlighted that peer learning should be used as a non-formal method for teaching language to vulnerable groups. According to them, peer learning could allow the beneficiaries to learn from each other in an informal and spontaneous way.
Moreover, workshop set-ups are preferred to frontal teaching. Indeed, frontal teaching might put pressure on those who do not feel confident in a language different from their mother tongue.
Any teaching strategy that takes into account a gender and trauma-sensitive approach need to be built on trust. The trust that is created in a learning process is indeed able to provide a feeling of well-being and safety.
The role of the psychologist during the course is crucial to identify possible manifestations of trauma. However, in order to propose a trauma healing path and ensure women’s wellbeing during the course, individual sessions with the psychologist are also recommended.
Additionally, professionals noted that work activities in the field of child education and care could be suitable for women survivors of trafficking. This because the working hours of an educator are often convenient for those who have a child (from the experience of the experts in the local round a high percentage of the beneficiaries are single mothers). The tailoring sector could also be considered, since for those who are going through a healing process a private and intimate dimension of the work activity should be preferred to front-office kind of jobs.
We provided just few examples of the findings from local roundtables. All findings were summarised in Briefing Papers for Italy, Spain, Greece and Belgium. You can access all Briefing Papers at www.socialhut.eu.
The findings included in Briefing Papers will be used to develop the WINGS generic framework on survivor-centred integration which includes the implementation of a language course integrated with psychological support and an employment counselling programme for the integration of women survivors of trafficking into the labour market, and consequently 4 WINGS local Comprehensive Integration Support programmes that will be run in Italy, Spain, Greece and Belgium in 2023.
For more information about needs and good practices in working towards the social and labour integration of women survivors of trafficking visit www.socialhut.eu and follow WINGS Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WINGSprojectEU.
About the project
WINGS is co-funded by the AMIF programme (DG Home Affairs – Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund) of the European Union.
Partners
- CESIE (Italy, coordinator)
- KMOP (Greece)
- SURT (Spain)
- PAYOKE (Belgium)
- Libera contro le mafie (Italy)
For further information
Read more about WINGS and follow us on Facebook.
Contact Ruta Grigaliunaite: ruta.grigaliunaite@cesie.org.
