-
Home
-
European Projects
-
Training in Sexual Education for People with Disab..
Training in Sexual Education for People with Disabilities
Start date: Sep 1, 2015,
End date: Aug 31, 2017
PROJECT
FINISHED
The project “Training in Sexual Education for People with Disabilities – TRASE” with partners from DE, BE, NL, PT, LT, and UK focuses on training adult educators, multipliers, counsellors, staff, and parents of people with mental disabilities. The TRASE course will enable these target groups to perform sexual education for people with disabilities (final beneficiaries).
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities emphasises amongst others their right to have equal access to programmes and information about sexual and reproductive health (Art. 25a). Different studies show that people with disabilities are at a significant higher risk of experiencing sexual violence than people of the same age without disabilities. This is amongst others due to a lack of sexual education for people with mental disabilities (see i.a. WHO World Report on Disability (2011)). Without sexual education people with mental disabilities often lack expressions to talk about assaults as well as the ability for sexual self-determination. The majority of professionals working with people with disabilities have not been trained to talk about sexuality or even to acknowledge the sexual and reproductive rights and needs of their clients.
To improve this situation the LLP Grundtvig project SEAD created a tool kit for sexual education for people with mental disabilities. There has been a great interest in this tool kit. However the target groups showed insecurity in using the tools and adapting them to the needs of their specific settings.
This is why TRASE aims to develop a training course for the users of the SEAD tool kit.
TRASE aims to develop new approaches to strengthen the education and training paths of prospective and practicing educators and caretakers, equipping them with all competences and skills needed to deliver high quality services and address increasingly diverse needs arising by acknowledgement of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006). TRASE contributes to the access to sexual and reproductive programmes and information of people with disabilities as stipulated in this Convention. Therefore the following results will be created:
a. An extended and adapted SEAD Tool Kit (incl. approx. 3-5 new tools and 10 revised existing tools).
b. A training course handbook (incl. curriculum and manual) to qualify professionals and parents to conduct sexual education for people with mental disabilities focussing on an adequate language, awareness of the impact of their own values and sexualisation, and most importantly appliance and adaptation of the SEAD Tool Kit depending on the respective settings.
c. Accreditation of TRASE for the curricula at different universities in the participating partner countries to improve the education of prospective professionals in the field.
d. Dissemination of TRASE to different multipliers and organisations in the field which train active professionals to conduct sexual education.
e. Establishment of a TRASE homepage and e-learning platform providing all documents (i.a. TRASE handbook, extended SEAD tools) as well as e-learning modules for professionals and parents who do not have direct access to a TRASE training course.
In order to design such a training course all six well chosen partners (two universities, a day care centre, an umbrella organisation for people with disabilities, an education network, and an expert in new media solutions for people with disabilities) contribute with their own expertise and in close cooperation with their National Focus Group (3-5 professionals from partner organisations in their country) to its development. All partners are assigned the lead a specific parts of the project (intellectual outputs) .To ensure effective trans-European collaboration all decisions will be made consensually and the partners will meet four times during the project process for face-to-face workshops. Additionally, the two involved universities (DE and NL) will meet twice to intensively work on the main project outputs: the TRASE curriculum and TRASE manual.
In order to promote and evaluate the training course different multiplier events will take place in all partner countries as well as on a European basis during the project lifetime. Approximately 300 participants (e.g. adult educators, professionals, parents, policy-makers, media and people with mental disabilities) will be reached by these events and will give valuable feedback on the quality of the training course as well as function as multipliers in their organisations and networks.
The long term benefits of TRASE will be:
- awareness raising of the sexual and reproductive rights of people with disabilities,
- trained staff to support people with disabilities in being aware and making use of their rights,
- public awareness for the rights of people with disabilities,
- improved institutional settings to enable training of staff and sexual education for clients with disabilities.