In human rights and gender‑equality work, we often ask a lot of people’s hearts without thinking enough about their nervous systems. We want our workshops on GBV, migration or racism to “wake people up”, but if we are not careful, we end up retraumatising survivors, overwhelming participants, or turning other people’s pain into something that feels like “suffering porn”.
For me, making human rights, gender and psychosocial support real in education means working with three lenses at the same time:
- a human‑rights lens (clear about rights, duties, power and accountability),
- a gender and intersectionality lens (who is affected, who is heard, whose bodies are on the line),
- and a MHPSS / trauma‑aware lens (how stress and trauma show up, what helps people stay within their window of tolerance).
Below are a few principles that guide how I design trainings and train‑the‑trainer programmes on these topics.
1. Survivor‑centred: no one is a teaching tool
If your topic touches violence, GBV, or forced migration, assume there are survivors in the room – whether they name it or not. Being survivor‑centred means:
- You never pressure people to share personal stories or “testimonies”. Sharing is always voluntary, and “passing” in a round is always allowed.
- You do not use graphic case studies or photos to shock people into empathy. You focus on patterns of harm and patterns of resistance, not on details of suffering.
- You give participants options: grounding exercises, the possibility to step out, and clear information about support resources if something gets stirred up.
2. Human‑rights‑based: from horror to structure and responsibility
When we talk about violence or injustice only in emotional or moral terms, people can feel overwhelmed and powerless. A human‑rights‑based approach helps transform horror into structure and responsibility:
- You connect stories of harm to concrete rights, obligations and systems (laws, institutions, social norms), not just to “bad people”.
- You invite participants to ask: Who has the duty to act here? What mechanisms exist? Where does our organisation, our role, our community come into this picture?
- You make space for complexity – for example, that institutions can both protect and harm; that people can be both affected and privileged in different ways.
This doesn’t remove the feelings; it frames them, so people can move towards analysis and action instead of freezing.
3. Gender‑transformative: not only “add women and stir”
Simply mentioning women, girls or LGBTQI+ people is not gender work. A gender‑transformative approach asks how gendered power is produced and reproduced in the situations we teach about and in the learning space itself.
In practice this means:
- Making visible who does unpaid care work, who takes risks, who speaks and who is interrupted.
- Questioning narratives that make women only victims or only “strong survivors”, and instead showing their agency, leadership and strategic choices.
- Looking at how gender intersects with race, migration status, class, disability, age and other axes – and adjusting your content and facilitation accordingly.
4. Trauma‑aware: feelings are welcome, but not left hanging
Trauma‑aware does not mean turning every workshop into group therapy. It means recognising how stress, fear and past experiences are likely to show up – and planning for that. A few concrete questions I always ask myself when designing a training are:
- What feelings is this content likely to provoke (in survivors, in helpers, in people with power)?
- What will participants do with what they feel? Will they have time to reflect, regulate and integrate, or do we just drop heavy stories and move on to the next slide?
- Do I build in small practices that help people come back into their bodies and into the present moment (breath, movement, check‑ins, simple grounding)?
- How will we close the session in a way that brings people back to some sense of safety, agency and connection – not in the peak of activation?
When these four elements come together, education spaces on human rights, gender and violence can be both honest and bearable. People can look at hard realities without being thrown back into unprocessed trauma or into helplessness. Organisations can talk about their own role – including their blind spots and mistakes – without collapsing into blame or defensiveness.
In my world‑level work, I support NGOs, networks, universities and international organisations to design and deliver this kind of training: through train‑the‑trainer programmes, curriculum development, and Conflict & Care‑informed facilitation across countries and regions. If your team is working on GBV, migration, human rights or peace and wants to integrate human‑rights‑based, gender‑transformative and MHPSS‑aware approaches into its education work, this is exactly the intersection where I work.
