Responsibilities to Texas After Violence Project Team Members

These responsibilities are clear, but frequently unfulfilled

Includes volunteers, interns, staff, students, board members

- Working conditions

- Pay and benefits. (We offend human rights here)

-Training and opportunities for growth

- Risks: vicarious or secondary trauma (used to be called burnout and still many people use the term, overlap in meaning)
physical symptoms - headaches, stomach/gastrointestinal, pains, loss of energy
emotional - anxiety, stress, depression

Our responsibility is to prevent or mitigate secondary trauma.

Paternalism/protection: Necessary? Desirable? Unethical? Let people decide with their feet: if they don't like paternalistic work environment, they don't have to stay.

- Limits on number of interviews anyone can conduct in seven day period
- Availability of debriefing/short term counseling
- Let intuition be your guide - no one should do anything that makes her/him fearful or that's too much
- Comfort is not the same thing as safety. We shouldn't be too comfortable.
- We have discovered that young interviewers are the most effective in the project; young interviewers are also the most vulnerable to psychological abuse by narrators (opportunistic abuse may be deliberate, may be unconscious but still bad)

See Code of Conduct and Self Care