-
Home
-
European Projects
-
HOPE: Giving hope to victims of abuse through voca..
HOPE: Giving hope to victims of abuse through vocational guidance and counselling
Start date: Oct 1, 2011,
There has been a number of successful European projects, still being used by vocational guidance counsellors, on target groups with labour market difficulties. These include migrants, refugees, older and younger people, women, low-paid workers and, more generally, people at risk of social exclusion. There is, however, a very large group that cross-cuts all social groups: victims of abuse, both men and women, whether domestic, sexual or labour market exploitation. Early research, confirmed by later work, found that “learned helplessness” is experienced by up to two-thirds of victims, leading to fatalism, lack of confidence, self-esteem and motivation. For many who have escaped the abusive situation, it is necessary to (re)enter the mainstream labour market, both for financial and social reasons; but learned helplessness is a powerful barrier. This is difficult not only for the individual but for vocational guidance services attempting to assist them into education, training and work. We intend, therefore, as an expert group, to produce training materials, organised into a curriculum, for vocational guidance counsellors. Materials will include case studies, biographies, links, academic articles, and specialised tools and methods for guiding this target group. All will be freely available on the project web site, and a Good Practice Guide will be published in all the project languages. Through our dissemination and exploitation strategies, we shall reach a large number of guidance services, practitioners, experts, networks and umbrella organisations, not only in the partner countries but throughout Europe, through the Euroguidance Network, our other transnational activities and the involvement of multipliers from non-partner countries at the final conference. From our experience of previous guidance projects, whose sites are still heavily visited, we are confident that this project will have a lasting impact.