South East Community Links is empowering Greater Dandenong support services on responding to sexual violence disclosures.
The City of Greater Dandenong is ranked third in numbers of sexual violence victim reports in the state last year with 307 female reports while City of Casey topped the figures with 579 female reports, above the state average of 70 according to Crime Statistics Agency Victoria.
In a two-way partnership, South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault (SECASA) will train SECL staff and organisations for diverse communities on how to deal with victim survivor disclosure.
Meanwhile, SECL will provide SECASA and interested organisations with training and upskilling to work with multicultural communities.
More than 100 community members and organisations registered for an associated forum, ‘Supports after sexual violence: Responses from specialist, hospital, and police services in the South-East’ on Friday 28 November.
Held within the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, the event hosted SECASA guest speakers, a forensic nurse from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, and detectives from Victoria Police’s Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigation Team (Dandenong).
Up to 20 organisations attended, including Family Safety Victoria, Monash Health, AMES, Orange Door, Victoria Police and Department of Education.
The event aimed to raise awareness around disclosures of sexual abuse and violence especially when working with and supporting women from multicultural and multi-faith backgrounds.
SECL’s head of housing and financial wellbeing, Rachna Bowman says this project also aims to drive the conversations on sexual abuse and allow for more victim survivors to share their stories.
“It’s a topic that is full of shame, stigma, and then you add the cultural overlays on top of that, it just becomes really difficult to talk about it.
“From my perspective, a lot of the agencies, organisations or community service workers are working with multicultural communities.
“So, how do you best support multicultural communities when you put all the additional overlays on top of the trauma that they may have experienced?
“There’s nothing like community connection where you can speak to someone and share this has happened, what do I do?”
SECASA, is the largest sexual assault and family violence service providers in the South East with services like 24/7 sexual assault crisis response, therapeutic interventions and counselling after sexual assault/ family violence, community education and prevention works including in school settings and much more.
Acting manager partnerships and innovations, Vanessa Jones leads the prevention team saying disclosing a sexual assault is difficult for many, even after many years.
She says the project builds on momentum to influence bigger change.
“It’s not an easy task after experiencing sexual assault, to know what to do or where to get help. It’s not easy.
“Sometimes it takes years and years for someone to build the courage and strength to be able to disclose a sexual assault.
“Sometimes there are very many, many barriers towards either how a victim-survivor feels following a sexual assault, and many barriers to them disclosing as well.
“Effective primary prevention requires developing strong foundations to ensure that our efforts are successful or lead to long-term change,” she says.
“For us to be able to do that, it is really important to collaborate, to work with other community stakeholders. Because then we can strengthen our service and reach out to every section of the community or society.”
The partnership will also see SECL operate community focus groups and training sessions, prepare in-language resources for organisations like SECASA when working with multicultural communities through co-designed resources and to have more community events.
“Even within the community sector there’s not a lot of information and knowledge that’s available at this stage and this is what our project is trying to do,” Ms Bowman said.
“It’s also trying to connect with community members, community leaders and organisations so that we can start having this conversation.
“Also understanding, when you’re working with multicultural communities, especially refugees and migrants, there are barriers around language, the fear of police, coercion around visa abuse, financial abuse, economic abuse.
“All of those factors, when you put it into perspective, makes it harder for someone to go this is not OK. So it’s about creating pathways for someone to go seek help.”
Both SECL and SECASA list language and the lack of knowledge about support services available to the community as major barriers for multicultural communities in the South East.
