Violence Prevention Services

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The Trauma Centre’s Violence Prevention Services includes community theatre, advocacy on a community, provincial and national scale. Furthermore, we also see the need to form partnerships with food security- and economic development initiatives. Engaging with other NGOs, business and government institutions is key to support socio-economic initiatives.

Community Theater

Community theatre is used as a violence prevention strategy to change attitudes on gender-based violence. The performing arts are hugely popular in our communities. Therefore, we utillise the arts to challenge attitudes towards gender-based violence. Research in South Africa indicated that gender attitudes are one of the determinants of Intimate Partner Violence Perpetration in South Africa (Matthews S. et al. 2016. Towards an Understanding in the Direct and Indirect Determinants of Violence Perpetration in South Africa with the View of Enhancing Violence Prevention, University of Cape Town). It therefore makes sense to develop and refine programmes that do challenge current gender attitudes.

In 2021 The Trauma Centre launched the educational theatre programme based on the evidence based Ugandan programme SASA! Raising Voices. We quickly realised the approach of the Ugandan programme had to be adapted to a much more the Western Cape communities, where gender roles are more fluid with mostly female headed households.

By engaging youth to serve as actors, we find that pride of friends and parents in their achievements, made the audiences more open to messaging around the subject.

By engaging the audience in a dialogue, we further encourage them to reflect on their own perspectives on gender and their participation in maintaining attitudes that perpetuates Gender Based Violence and gender inequality. The Trauma Centre has trained various volunteers in Trauma Support Work and will engage and trained these volunteers in conducting dialogues and getting data or shifts in attitudes from participants after the production. As food security is a major issue in the community, we also provide each participant with a sandwich as part of their engagement and to incentivise their participation in the mini workshop at the end. The volunteers as well as actors and will be encouraged to have further dialogues with people in their circle of influence and to record how many people they engage.

Advocacy

Advocacy is part of the DNA of The Trauma Centre. We regularly advocate for our clients in order to insist on better service from our failing justice system. It still happens too often that clients are turned away at police stations when they ask for assistance with domestic violence. The Trauma Centre staff support clients to make sure that victim’s rights are protected and that the Domestic Violence Act 116 of 1998 and the Children’s Act 38 of 2005 are enforced on a community level. The Trauma Centre staff also protest at court on behalf of our clients to put pressure on the magistrate not to give bail to alleged perpetrators.

During 16 Days of Activism in 2022, The Trauma Centre collaborated with The Counselling Hub, Lifeline WC, Famsa WC, Jelly Beanz, MOSAIC and Rape Crisis to call for:

The Western Cape Department of Health and Wellness to fill all the vacant community-based counsellor posts in the province’s clinics and day hospitals.
The Western Cape Department of Social Development to provide funding and posts for social workers who can help tackle the multi-factorial issues.
· The Western Cape Department of Community Security to deploy the necessary resources to Community Policing Forums and Neighbourhood Watch members, ensuring that they can effectively support community members to uphold the rule of law and link them to support services, including the police and courts.
The Western Cape government to engage with the SAPS to ensure that there are functional Victim-Friendly Rooms in every police station and provide further resources to the Western Cape Department of Social Development to ensure that there are paid, trained psycho-social service counsellors to support victims of crime and violence when they present at SAPS.
The City of Cape Town’s Early Childhood and Social Development department to play an active role in providing additional resources in ensuring that there are social workers, and trauma counsellors in city facilities within communities to ensure that there is increased access to psycho-social support. Childcare facilities are a constitutional mandate of local government and counselling should be the base of such care facilities as mandated by schedule 4B of the constitution.

On a national level, we are part of the South African Coalition for Transitional Justice, campaigning for the implementation of the recommendations of Truth and Reconciliation commission in terms of reparations and prosecutions.