9 1Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂ

Professor Karen Fisher is a Professor at the Social Policy Research Centre UNSW. She is a disability and mental health policy researcher in Australia and Asia.

Professor Sally Robinson is Professor of Disability and Community Inclusion at Flinders 9 1Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂ. She does research with children, young people and adults with disability about what helps them feel safe, well and happy at difficult times in their lives. Most of her work is done in teams that include people with disability as researchers as well as asking them for their views. She also works with governments and organisations about how to listen to the things that matter to disabled people. 

For the video recording of this presentation, please see the online symposia page.

Everyday steps to prevent everyday harm

Preliminary findings from fieldwork with young people with intellectual disability and their support workers

Understanding everyday harm

• Consequence of interaction received as hurtful or harmful
• may cause people to feel insulted, degraded, excluded, rejected, threatened, silenced
• intentional or unintentional
• can have cumulative negative effect
• shaped and influenced by organisational policies, practices, rules, culture and wider social attitudes and norms 
   

Why use the term everyday harm?

• Accessible language for daily use
• Reframes microaggression, emotional and psychological abuse to people who find the broader theories inaccessible
• Informed by recognition theory, focus on interpersonal harm and effect on quality of relationships, in organisational contexts
• Opens opportunities for exploring repair and prevention of further harm in the relationship  

Preventing everyday harm

Young people and support workers: 

• Look at each other’s body language, listen carefully and notice if they or another person is upset or has become silent
• Ask each other if they feel upset about something
• Work together to understand what has happened, what to do to make things better and how to prevent harm from happening again

Managers and organisations:

• Explain clear rules about good practice to prevent harm
• Create an open culture that sets a good tone in the way people work together
• Allow time and opportunities for young people and support workers to practise everyday steps
• Support young people and support workers to resolve harm they notice

Addressing everyday harm

Notice harm to self and others:

• Check in and observe: listen and pay attention to body language, ask how people feel, take time to build trust and communicate openly with each other 

Acknowledge that harm has occurred to yourself or someone else 

Address harm

• Talk openly about what happened
• Encourage people in and out of the support relationship to work together to find ways to make things better
• Check during the process that the way of making things better is okay with people involved
• Check how organisational rules and culture might have caused harm. Can these be changed?

Making the future better 

• Addressing harm through the above steps also contributes to better practice for the future
• People learn to check in with each other, care, respect and appreciate each other

Organisational practice to prevent and address harm

Organisational practice is guided by:

• Rules of the organisation – policies, laws and guidelines
• Culture of the organisation – informal expectations about how things are done and how people work together 

Good rules encourage and facilitate everyday steps

• When people understand the reasons for rules and see them as consistent with good culture, they are more likely to follow them
• Organisations check how rules impact people. They change rules that cause harm. 

Good culture encourages and facilitates everyday steps

• Everyone helps create good culture in different ways
• Good culture means being open to improving and doing things differently
• Good culture encourages people to use everyday steps and speak up respectfully about poor practice

Next steps

Interviews with managers and board members

• How is everyday harm acknowledged in policy, gaps in practice
• What resources do they need to prevent and address everyday harm

Resources for everyday steps

• Academic and public summaries about everyday harm – understanding, preventing, addressing and organisational practice
• Guides and resources for everyday steps
   

Our team 

ARC Linkage Project LP210200536 

Flinders 9 1Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂ: Sally Robinson, Jan Idle, Rachel High, Ruby Nankivell, Raffaella Cresciani, Eleanor Watson, Su Su Tun 

UNSW Sydney: Karen Fisher, Heikki Ikaheimo, Ciara Smyth, Anna Jones

Northcott Community Researchers: Hannah Ogden, Tyra Buteux, Emma Wood

Partner Organisations: NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, SA Department of Human Services, Northcott, Mable, Bedford, Novita, GenU, VACRO, Purple Orange, DANA.  
 

Information about the project

Contact us by email: 

Sally.Robinson@flinders.edu.au 

Karen.Fisher@unsw.edu.au