Learning about resilience from those who need it most

| May 9, 2020

This week 24 million Australians are living with profound uncertainty. Many of us don’t know when or whether our jobs might resume; if our superannuation savings will recover or crash further; when we will next be able to visit family interstate.

For most of us that’s an unfamiliar experience. It can leave us feeling insecure and uncertain of how to act. It can make us lash out at those we perceive as threatening our security – witness those Facebook videos of supermarket meltdowns.

But for many families, insecurity is the daily norm. For people who live in poverty in an expensive city like Sydney, there is simply no expectation that life will be predictable from day to day.

A precarious tenancy can be lost overnight, setting in train other consequences: new schools for children, loss of property that cannot be moved and stored, new bus routes that might not get someone to work on time.

People’s behaviour, sometimes linked to their mental health, can fracture family bonds. Family violence, often committed by people who themselves have grown up in an insecure and frightening home, makes it harder still to feel any sense of safety.

We know that the fear created by the coronavirus, and the stresses of quarantine and economic disruptions, will affect families, and we can expect that in the weeks and months ahead we will see the consequences in increased need for family services, including support around family violence.

When Australia eventually moves beyond this current crisis into recovery, there is an opportunity to model our national response on what we know works best for families who live routinely with stress and dislocation.

At Jannawi Family Centre we work with families where there has been trauma, neglect or abuse. It is not a short journey; typically it might continue for a year or more as parents acquire new skills to support their kids and learn confidence in their own ability not to fall back into damaging old patterns. We want parents to be resourceful, consistent, available to their children’s needs.

That’s something that can be modelled through example. At Jannawi we go to great lengths to ensure people have what they need – whether that is a school uniform, help with a Centrelink application or support through a court hearing.

In return, we make parents accountable for their actions. The deal is: people show up, treat our staff with respect, and commit to doing better by their kids. We take people seriously.

Struggling parents who have been brushed off by service agencies all their lives, channelled through ill-fitting processes and marked off as statistics, drop their guard and begin to work in their family’s best interests. Our clients sometimes tell us that they feel heard for the first time.

That doesn’t work unless the basics are in place. As the government and the non-profit sectors try to meet the needs of traumatised families in the months ahead, the first focus will need to be on physical safety, shelter, food, a dependable source of income.

Security at this fundamental level gives people the psychological space to recover from their experiences and work on their own behaviour and responses.

Then we will have a chance to create a system for helping people through their trauma based around long-term, reliable support, mutual trust and personal growth.

Jannawi’s model has shown this can work phenomenally well at an individual level. Now we need to scale it up and apply this thinking at the heart of our service systems.

Jannawi will host a free online panel discussion of these issues to mark the United Nations International Day of Families, featuring Biljana Milosevic, the Director of the Jannawi Family Centre; Gillian Calvert AO, the inaugural NSW Children’s Commissioner from 1999 to 2009 and Annette Michaux, the Director of Policy and Practice at the Parenting Research Centre.

The session will be held on Friday May 15 from 1pm to 2pm AEST.  Visit jannawi.org.au for more details and register for participation here.

 

 

SHARE WITH: