Future Leaders Fellowship Renewal

The project seeks to consolidate a decolonised approach to domestic violence and abuse (DVA) that acknowledges communities' religio-cultural worldviews, integrates religio-cultural parameters more substantively in the ecological model of violence and leverages on religious resources to reverse pernicious attitudes and norms that maintain DVA or tolerant attitudes around it in international development contexts and among migrant and ethnic minority communities in the UK and other high-income societies.

The FLF renewal project will expand the novel decolonial and partnerships-based research and intervention model that was developed and implemented successfully in East Africa and the UK in the past three years to other contexts, namely Poland and Egypt, and will seek to translate the cross-regional findings into improved policy and practice for the UK's DVA sector. It will provide the time and resources to materialise the impact pathways outlined in the original FLF proposal and to maximise the project's impact by better responding to the diverse needs and contexts of migrant and ethnic minority populations affected by DVA, facilitating their better integration in UK society and economy.

More specifically, the FLF renewal project will seek to integrate research and interventions to DVA in migration with research and interventions to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in displacement, which FLF research demonstrated to be interconnected. As a result of the war that erupted in northern Ethiopia, engulfing also Eritrea, our team developed new expertise in fragile contexts and assumed a leading role in supporting humanitarian actors to respond to DVA in conflict-affected areas.

Through new project activities in the UK, Poland and Ethiopia, we will develop faith-sensitive and culturally appropriate interventions that can better respond to the complex trauma of DVA victims and survivors fleeing conflict-related SGBV and other forms of violence.

In Ethiopia, the project team will streamline a trauma-sensitive approach to DVA trainings for clergy and seminarians in post-conflict northern Ethiopia by integrating trauma content in a theologically-informed DVA training model that was successfully developed and implemented with Ethiopian Orthodox clergy in the previous two years. We will also expand our work to other multireligious contexts in order to develop joint DVA trainings for Christian and Muslim clerics.

With inclusivity and equality aims in mind, we will develop training materials that can guide DVA providers in designing and delivering inter-faith trainings for multireligious community contexts in the UK, Ethiopia and Egypt.

Our on-going research in the UK has shown that the DVA sector responding to migrant and ethnic minority communities has yet to substantively engage religious beliefs and faith-based resources, which can alienate ethnic and religious minorities. In the next three years, we will develop a more concrete roadmap for DVA providers to build religio-cultural sensitivity and competency and to collaborate better with faith-based DVA respondents.

We are also keen to explore accreditation options for faith-informed DVA specialist services, including in counselling settings, informed by our on-going work with spiritual psychotherapists in Ethiopia.

In parallel, we will strengthen connections to policy makers and statutory services in the UK that work on DVA, migration and diversity issues to promote cross-sectoral and integrated responses and to foster collaboration across statuary, charity and humanitarian stakeholders in the UK, Europe and internationally. This will be facilitated by an academic centre that will produce and publish related open access research for researchers and practitioners, combined with a spin out enterprise that will specialise in knowledge exchange engaging statutory service providers and policy makers in the UK and internationally.