VSE Annual Conference 2022 | Call for Contributions

Dear Members,

We are deligthed to announce that the VSE Annual Conference 2022 Call for Contributions is now open! We invite you to submit your workshop proposals before Tuesday, 15 March 2022.

This year’s Conference “The Age of Resilience” is an opportunity to discuss the different routes we can take to reach recovery and resilience. The discussion aims at highlighting the ways to achieve resilience, individual, social, and structural, by sharing resilience strategies and approaches to contain systemic threats.

Priorities for workshops

With this in mind, this year’s Conference will explore the ways we can take to build resilience within ourselves, our clients, our structures and our communities in order to face the constantly evolving drivers of victimisation.

It will focus on all victims of crimes but will also have a specific focus on challenging our notion of vulnerability, emergency and collective events, victims of hate crimes, terrorism, cybercrime, gender-based violence and cild victims of violence.

We invite practitioners, researchers, experts, lawyers, academics, victim support organisations, police, criminal justice officials and any other persons working in the field of rights and services for victims of crime to submit proposals for a workshop.

Key priorities for contributions under the themes mentioned above in the visual are listed below:

1. Self-Care: Healing the helper

In this theme, we are interested in workshops dedicated to the topic of healing the helper – attending to the self-care and resilience reinforcement of all of us who have been both directly and indirectly affected by Covid-19.

All service providers who in the face of a pandemic shifted to on-line care giving, increased their hours ten-fold, took a reduction in salary or provided community care without payment. A huge emphasis has been placed, and rightfully so, on the professionals titled ‘front-liners’. The primary focus was placed on the medical profession and little attention has been veered towards other professionals in the health care system, including therapists, social workers, police officers, emotional support workers, victim support professionals including administration and many more.

2. Victim-Care: Adapting the service

The workshops under this theme will focus on how have we and can we continue to adapt our services to reach more victims. Helping victims be more resilient. How to create individualised support plans which include a range of interventions to help build resilience in victims. This includes emotional and practical support, advocacy with other agencies, crime prevention advice and restorative justice if appropriate.

3. Social resilience: Supporting the support system

How do we build social resilience? How can we expand our services to support the support system? The workshops under this theme may cover various aspects of  social resilience:

1. Coping capacities: the ability of social actors to cope with and overcome all kinds of adversities;
2. Adaptive capacities: their ability to learn from past experiences and adjust themselves to future challenges in their everyday lives;
3. Transformative capacities: their ability to craft sets of institutions that foster individual welfare and sustainable societal robustness towards future crises.

4. Macro contribution: What do we need from our governments?

In this theme, we are interested in workshops that focus on the extent to which resilience can contribute to the primary theoretical frameworks adopted by policy researchers and, thus, make it possible to design better policies.

Why resilience and robustness can be interesting for policy design? How resilience as a policy concept can be applied in governmental actions to deal with policy shocks and anomalies.

5. Building resilience of specific types of victims

We are also interested in hearing about how organisations and experts are creating new approaches to building resilience of specific types of victims:

• Building resilience in victims of hate crimes
• Building resilience in victims of terrorism
• Building resilience in victims of cybercrime
• Building resilience in victims of gender-based violence
• Building resilience in child victims of violence

Procedure and Deadline

A workshop session is 1.5 hours in duration and has to be given in English. Please note, several presentations may be combined within one workshop session, therefore accommodate the duration of your presentation accordingly.

We most welcome interactive and creative working methods. For example:

• Debate session (debate with expert panel and participants),
• Short training or instruction sessions (introducing skills or tools),
• Educative games or simulations (roleplaying, quiz, association cards),
• Short movie/documentary presentation,
• Casuistic session (discussion of relevant issues using real life cases or victims’ stories).

Workshop proposals can be submitted by filling out this form. Deadline of submissions is 15 March 2022.

The Programme Committee will review the proposals using the following criteria:

• Conformity with the overall theme and focus of the VSE conference,
• Interactivity and creativity of the proposed workshop format or working method,
• Equal representation of all the topics in the programme.

All submitters will be informed after the review and selection procedure is completed. We aim to inform all submitters on a rolling basis and final contributors will be informed by the 1st of April at the latest. The workshop programme will be published on the conference website after all submitters are informed.

If you have any questions, please contact vseoffice2@victimsupporteurope.eu.