Strategic Interventions presents this essential workshop for frontline service providers, including transition house workers, anti-violence advocates, legal professionals, social workers, counsellors, mental health practitioners, and health service workers. This training equips participants with the skills to develop trauma- and violence-informed safety plans that address gender-specific diverse risks and challenges faced by individuals experiencing intimate partner violence.

Workshop Overview:

Safety planning is a critical component of supporting survivors of violence, ensuring they have strategies to reduce risk and enhance their well-being. This workshop explores a broad range of safety issues, including protection orders, navigating risk without legal protections, workplace safety, safety at home and community, safety planning with children, and addressing the safety of companion animals.

Participants will learn how to conduct solid safety, threat, and lethality assessments using an intersectional, trauma- and violence-informed approach. This includes recognizing how victims and survivors interact with family, community, institutions, and systems—both as potential risks and sources of support. The workshop will also cover lethality risks and assessments, helping participants identify high-risk situations, recognize warning signs of escalating violence, and take proactive measures to mitigate the risk of serious harm or femicide.

Learning Outcomes:

• Trauma- and Violence-Informed Safety Planning: Develop victim and survivor-centred safety plans that account for the personal and systemic impacts of trauma and violence.
• Comprehensive Safety Strategies: Address risks at home, in the community, in the workplace or at school, with children, and with companion animals.
• Legal and Non-Legal Protections: Understand the role of protection orders, their limitations, and alternative safety measures when legal protections are not applicable.
• Risk, Threat, and Lethality Assessments: Conduct thorough evaluations to identify immediate and long-term risks, including assessing the likelihood of lethal violence.
• Intersectional Approach to Safety: Recognize how factors such as gender, race, disability, immigration status, and economic barriers impact safety planning.
• Leveraging Community and Institutional Resources: Identify how families, communities, workplaces, and legal and social systems can serve as both risks and sources of support.
• Empowering Survivors: Equip survivors with the tools and knowledge to make informed, strategic decisions about their safety.

This trauma- and violence-informed workshop is essential for professionals working with survivors of violence, providing them with the skills to navigate complex safety concerns while centering the autonomy and lived experiences of those they support.