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Posted: Thu 3 Aug, 2023 Author: Silvie Bovarnick and Mariana Meshi

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Blog written by Silvie Bovarnick and Mariana Meshi. Silvie is a Visiting Professor at Stiftung Universität Hildesheim in Germany and Visiting Research Fellow at the Safer Young Lives Research Centre. She has studied violence and abuse issues in the UK and internationally for over 20 years and her most recent research has focused on the ethical involvement of affected young people in participatory research and advocacy. Mariana is the Director of Different and Equal - a reintegration service based in Albania for victims of trafficking and their children. Different and Equal provide a range of services and are committed to the participation of young people affected by sexual violence and trafficking in advocacy and research.

The importance of including the perspectives of children and young people with lived experience in sexual abuse research is widely recognised yet poses a range of ethical and practical challenges. This arises from the perceived ‘heightened vulnerability’ of the target group and sensitivity of the topic. Typically, sexual violence researchers access research participants through relevant support services. Research-practice partnerships therefore play a pivotal role in facilitating sexual violence research that seeks to be informed by lived realities.

This blog unpacks some of the complexities underpinning research-practice collaborations by exploring some of the benefits and challenges for individual partners. It presents the perspectives of an academic researcher (Silvie Bovarnick) affiliated with the Safer Young Lives Research Centre (SYLRC) and the director of Different & Equal (Mariana Meshi) - a highly specialist reintegration centre that provides trauma-informed support to victims of violence and abuse in Albania. Our reflections draw on eight years of working together, and in collaboration with young people with experience of sexual violence and trafficking, to promote their role in advocacy and research. Our most recent venture is the SYLRC’s Learning Together project which is exploring how to safely and ethically involve children and young people in sexual abuse research. In this blog, we argue that strong and sustainable research-practice partnerships play a critical role in supporting and promoting this.

Here we consider the following questions:

• Why do academic researchers, services and young people work in collaboration? What are the potential benefits for individual partners?
• What are the challenges and inherent tensions of such research partnerships?
• What do mutually rewarding partnerships between researchers, services, and young people look like?

Why academics, services, and young people with lived experience collaborate

Research-practice collaborations mirror an increasing, broader trend across the social sciences based on a recognition that it is vital to include the perspectives of those directly affected by the issues we seek to understand, as well as those who work directly with target populations. As Zimmerman et al (2016: 95) note:

“Unlike laboratory-based studies, research into social problems requires not only exploration of the intervention outcome of interest (e.g. intimate partner violence), but also demands explicit recognition of the context in which events occur... Attempts to understand multifaceted interactions have led to more research partnerships between academic institutions and local implementing organizations.”

In short, tapping into ‘tacit’ knowledge and combining it with ‘explicit’ knowledge (see Zimmerman et al., 2016: 98) is essential for relevant policy and practice development aimed at preventing, and responding to, violence and abuse.

Benefits for researchers

For child sexual violence researchers, the gains of engaging young ‘experts by experience’ are poignantly surmised by a key informant interviewed as part of a global scoping review on the participatory involvement of children and young people in sexual violence research:

“We are getting information from the horse’s mouth” (Bovarnick et al., 2018: 21)

Eliciting children and young people’s perspectives ensures research relevance and strengthens our understanding of the issue (Ibid: 21-22). From a researchers’ perspective, practice partners perform three pivotal functions:

1. They act as a critical point of contact through which target groups can be accessed;
2. They possess the expertise and skills to risk assess and provide wrap-around support necessary for the safe involvement of ‘vulnerable’ children and young people in research;
3. They hold valuable practice knowledge, helping to contextualise and complement information gleaned from service-users.

Benefits for practice partners

Academic-practice collaborations can offer services rare spaces for reflection and discussion, fostering organisational learning and reflexive practice. Partnering with a university can enable services to hone their research skills and increase organisational capacity to monitor and evaluate services. Academic researchers can provide guidance on research ethics and methods, thereby adding rigour, and support participatory work:

“...we are practitioners, we give direct assistance, we have good intentions to develop good methodologies but we are under time pressure. We feel lucky to have cooperation with an academic institution like you, we appreciate the focus on participation, your focus on the safe and ethical ways you use….We have safeguarding policies, but you are really rigid and strong and you make us even stronger in safeguarding and ethical participation… The tools and methodologies that you developed even before we started cooperating and during our joint work, they make our processes stronger, I appreciate it, it added value to the work that both of us [our organisations] do.” (Mariana Meshi)

The association with an academic partner (who is expected to keep up with the latest research evidence about what constitutes ‘good practice’) may be perceived externally as a form of endorsement of the service’s quality - potentially increasing organisational credibility. Practice partners can also use joint research outputs, such as research briefings or reports, to substantiate their awareness- and fund-raising, advocacy, and lobbying work.

Benefits for research participants

Taking part in research offers children and young people - especially those who are ‘marginalised’- opportunities to express and forefront their views. Depending on the level and type of participatory involvement that is on offer, young ‘victim-survivors’ may be invited to collaborate in other aspects or stages of the research process[1], beyond solely providing information. This contributes towards research democratisation and strengthens children and young people’s participation rights, providing opportunities to influence how their perspectives are represented in professional and academic discourses.

An evaluation of SYLRC’s Our Voices Too youth advocacy project showed that engaging in research and participatory initiatives can provide positive learning experiences for participants, enhance confidence, skill development, and capacity building (Bovarnick and Cody, 2020). Young ‘victim-survivors’ often highlight their motivation to help others, promote prevention, and raise awareness. The prospect of turning a traumatic experience into something positive for others - coined by Judith Herman (1998) as “survivor mission”- is often experienced by participants as the greatest reward, overriding potential personal gains (Bovarnick and Cody, 2020: 34).

What are the challenges?

Power dynamics

Support services are commonly viewed (and somewhat feared) by researchers as gatekeepers. Services have the power to ‘make research happen’. Yet, services can feel instrumentalised when they are seen as a mere “conduit to access study populations” (Zimmerman et al., 2016: 107), rather than as an equal partner who shares influence and power with academic researchers. Tensions can arise from overt or covert ‘hierarchies of knowledge’ that prioritise learned expertise over lived or practice-based expertise. Services may feel that their skills and knowledge base is not sufficiently valued and recognised by academics.

The division of labour and definition of roles and responsibilities across academic-practice partnerships requires ongoing negotiation and recalibration. Academic partners are often the budget-holders who lead on the research design, process, and outputs. Services, on the other hand, control access to, and shape interactions with, the target population. Even in research labelled as ‘youth participatory’, it is typically the young people involved who are the weakest link in the partnership power triangle. Even where they possess first-hand knowledge of the issue, their expertise and skills are often less valued than those of adult professionals. In comparison to their adult counterparts, youth participants and collaborators are typically granted less decision-making power and say over research processes and outcomes.

Prioritising the wellbeing of children and young people

Services play an instrumental role in assessing and managing the risks linked to engaging children and young people with abuse histories in sexual violence research. Agencies tasked first and foremost with child protection and trauma recovery may have concerns about potentially unethical and exploitative dynamics emerging in the research process. For example, they may worry about researchers asking participants inappropriate or insensitive questions or misappropriating personal and deeply painful stories of abuse for their own gains without considering what participants could be offered in return.

The ‘ask’ of services

A common critique from services is that researchers tend to underestimate the time, skill, and resources needed to prepare children and young people for research activities and to provide the wraparound support necessary to mitigate the associated risks. Research projects can place an additional burden on already overstretched staff and services are rarely adequately compensated for this essential work.

What do mutually rewarding partnerships look like?

Appreciating the different ‘worlds’ we live in

Academics, practitioners, and service users - as well as the social groups, institutions, and wider professions they represent- often operate in different worlds. Our views are informed by our life experiences, training, and the individual and structural constraints we face - both personal and professional. This may mean that we do and see things differently and subscribe to different paradigms. New partnerships can be a source of anxiety and frustration if not enough time and attention is paid to sharing, and thereby enabling others to appreciate, our realities and considering what connects us.

Developing a partnership identity

Strong partnerships have a shared identity, understanding, and common values. There are practical steps that can, over time, help to promote these key ingredients. Dedicating time and space at the beginning of a new project to get to know each other, to articulate individual priorities and expectations, and to discuss how the collaboration can be developed in ways that feel equitable and mutually rewarding was, for us, an important first step towards establishing a common vision and partnership ethos. At the beginning of our partnership, we initiated an ethical protocol for our first joint project which involved two additional international practice partners. It outlined a comprehensive set of core ethical and trauma-informed principles that all partners were expected to adhere to. The process helped to clarify expectations, articulate core values and to define minimum ethical and professional standards. A ‘living document’, the ethical protocol continued to be revised over the course of two subsequent joint projects. While centrally guiding our joint work with young people to date, it fulfils three other critical functions:

1. It acts as a repository of lessons learnt (including mistakes that offer important learning opportunities);
2. It documents our learning journey to date and captures how our understanding and practice in relation to youth participation has changed; and
3. It serves as a joint mission statement underpinning our partnership.

The dynamic and dialogical process of developing a joint protocol not only embedded ‘ethics’ as a central and ongoing consideration in our work but also promoted a shared understanding and alignment of core values across the partnership. In other words, the more we discussed and reflected on ethics together as a team, the more our views and practices started to align.

Investing in relationships

Building a partnership takes time. It requires establishing a safe space where everyone feels heard and can express doubt, share mistakes, and show vulnerability. It entails acknowledging and valuing what each party brings to the table. In our partnership, we achieved this by regularly carving out time from our busy schedules to talk things through, to share ideas, ask for advice, learn from each other, and offer support. Due to the geographic distance, conversations were often held online. Virtual modes of communication, however, are no substitute for meeting in person. Spending time face-to-face and bonding during ‘social’ hours, for example over an evening meal at the end of a long workshop, was key to building relationships and a strong partnership culture. This has helped us to cope with unexpected challenges that are part and parcel of working with children and young people who have experienced trauma. Below we share an example of how the preliminary steps outlined above equipped us to flexibly respond to challenges arising during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mirroring genuine partnership working in sexual violence research with children and young people

We propose that investing in partnerships not only benefits us as researchers and practitioners but that it also positively frames the way we, as professionals and organisations, work with children and young people.

The pandemic required us to swiftly adapt a complex youth-led participatory action research project. Given the travel restrictions, we decided to use a hybrid facilitation model whereby Silvie (the academic partner based in the UK) virtually joined weekly workshops that Mariana (the practice partner in Albania) and her colleagues facilitated face-to-face with a group of young researchers. Although far from ideal, we managed to overcome the logistical, technical, and language barriers because we had already established effective ways of communicating and working together. We could draw on a shared understanding and common values. One of the project facilitators reflected:

“…there is a strong resonance of values, it resonated, you (Silvie) are modelling our values, I really feel that resonance, we share a similar perspective, you can see from the interaction, everything went smoothly, even though we worked from different countries, you can really feel the synergy of values.”

The high level of trust and comfort between us as partners filtered through to the work with the young people who collaborated in the project. The group dynamic between the young researchers soon mirrored our partnership ethos, demonstrating principles of care, compassion, mutuality, and respect. During the project, we were able to witness first-hand how a strong partnership culture can positively shape work with young people in the context of sexual violence research.

Concluding thoughts

Effective research-practice partnerships play an instrumental role in facilitating and supporting the ethical involvement of children and young people with lived experience in sexual violence research. They can model core values and positive behaviours, such as care, respect, mutuality, and a collaborative approach, that ‘set the tone’ for research and participatory activities with children and young people; supporting research practice that is safe, ethical, and meaningful.

Although building strong partnerships requires time, patience, commitment, and resources, we consider these worthwhile investments that pay off in the long run. Carving out space for bonding, reflecting, and discussing together may seem like a luxury, yet these actions help to foster trust, a shared understanding, common values, and a joint identity. They lay the foundation for sustainable partnerships based on respect, mutuality, and genuine cooperation. Such partnerships create an environment where all partners can learn, grow, and benefit.

References

Bovarnick, S. and Cody, C. (2021) Putting Risk into Perspective: Lessons for children and youth services from a participatory advocacy project with survivors of sexual violence in Albania, Moldova and Serbia. Children and Youth Services Review. 126, pp. 1-11.

Bovarnick, S., and Cody, C. (2020) ‘They need to see the people they are affecting by their decision-making’: Developing Participatory Advocacy with Young People on Sexual Violence in Albania, Moldova and Serbia. Monitoring and evaluation report. University of Bedfordshire: Luton. Available at: https://www.beds.ac.uk/media/zqcjvpie/they-need-to-see_me-report-ov-too-youth-advocacy-project-1.pdf

Bovarnick, S., Peace, D., Warrington, C., and Pearce, J. (2018) Being Heard: Promoting children and young people’s involvement in participatory research on sexual violence: findings from an international scoping review. University of Bedfordshire: Luton. Available at: https://www.our-voices.org.uk/assets/documents/UoB_BeingHeard-report.pdf

Herman, J.L. (1998), Recovery from Psychological Trauma. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences. 52, S98-S103.

Zimmerman C., Michau L., Hossain M., and Watts C. (2016) Rigged or Rigorous? Partnerships for research and evaluation of complex social problems: Lessons from the field of violence against women and girls Journal of Public Health Policy. 37 (1) pp. 95-109.

 

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[1] They may, for example, be asked to help define research questions or priorities; interpret research findings; identify the most relevant messages from research from a young person’s perspective; or determine suitable formats and channels for dissemination.