Vikki Reynolds invites a critique of the tenuous, strained, yet hopeful relationship between social justice activism and community work and therapy. She addresses the tensions of community work replicating oppressive practices, and invites a critique of our practice with an aim to move us more in line with our collective ethics for justice-doing. This critique entails addressing our positioning in relation to power, privilege, and disadvantage; resisting neutrality and taking an overt position for justice-doing; naming and beginning to respond to white supremacy and colonialism in our traditions of practice; problematizing our relationship to social control and social change in our work; resisting competition as affronts to our solidarity; and problematizing the role of academia in relation to justice-doing.

In this session, the panelists discuss the use of response-based practice when assisting women who have been harmed by violence: the issues they face in their work and how response-based informed practices assist them in meeting these challenges.

“Stockholm Syndrome” was invented in 1973 after a hostage taking at a bank in central Stockholm, Sweden. One of the hostages, Kristin Enmark, criticized police and government responses as dangerous and disorganized. After the hostage taking, Kristin became the first person said to have “Stockholm Syndrome,” a new label invented just for the occasion.

In this presentation, Dr. Wade will discuss his recent conversations with Kristin Enmark and present original source material to present a quite different and contextual view of the hostage taking and the notion of “Stockholm Syndrome.”

Will Bratt shares his research on how Canadian anti-violence agencies represent violence and victims’ responses to it. Will applies the four operations of language outlined by Wade & Coates in an analysis of the online public information provided by anti-violence agencies on violence and abuse.

In this presentation Cathy Richardson and Cheryle Henry discuss the Islands of Safety model and its use with Indigenous families in child protection settings. This model and process were implemented in a pilot project on Vancouver Island. The presenters discuss the development of the model, its foundations, assumptions and the kinds of questions that are used to assess and plan for safety.

The presenters provide a definition of “social response” and discuss how the quality of the social response relates to the victim’s recovery or ongoing distress. They will each provide examples from their work, highlighting some of the forms of prejudice and structural violence that create barriers for people and often violate their rights.

Since the beginning of 2015 in Australia, on average, two women have been tragically killed every week by their male partner or ex-partner, bringing the current total to 69 as of October. Given the overwhelming prevalence of domestic and family violence and often the negative social responses received by women from authorities, advocates are calling on governments to claim this a national emergency. These horrific acts of violence towards women, often overwhelmingly perpetrated by men, are referred to as ‘femicide’ in countries such as South Africa.

By examining how violence has been used to oppress, harm and dominate both at an intimate and institutional level we can better understand the normalisation of violence within society and the perpetration of hate crimes and genocidal attempts throughout history.

In this presentation of response-based neurology in psychiatry, Dr. Robin Routledge shows how the entire neurological system is a response to the environment. In fact, that we need an active interaction with the environment to develop. It is also suggested that psychiatry itself is a response to the industrial age and that its understandings of adversity have changed in response to events. A response-based understanding of neurology helps illuminate the direction in which psychiatric theory is moving.