What makes IDVA training intersectional?

Many IDVA courses now describe themselves as intersectional, and the word appears in job adverts, service specifications and funding bids across the sector. For a practitioner choosing training, the question is what the word means in the training room, in the assessment and in the casework afterwards.

A political analysis

Intersectionality comes from Black feminist thought, from Anna Julia Cooper in 1892 to the Combahee River Collective and Kimberlé Crenshaw. It names how racism, sexism, class, disability, sexuality and migration combine to shape the harm a survivor experiences and the response they receive from services. At its heart, intersectionality is about social location and where a survivor stands in relation to power. Social location shapes lived experience, the support a survivor receives, their access to services and their access to justice. Training that takes this seriously treats intersectionality as an analysis of power, and asks learners to apply it to every decision in a case.

Risk assessment

In IDVA practice, risk assessment is an area where an intersectional analysis can make one of the biggest differences to a survivor’s safety. Insecure immigration status, a history of criminalisation or a community’s distrust of the police can all create risks that a checklist score misses. Intersectional IDVA training teaches practitioners to look at the whole of a survivor’s context, including the systems that shape their safety. Our Intersectional Risk Tracker Tool (IRTT) gives learners a structured way to do this, and the Office of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner has endorsed it.

Synergised advocacy

Our training teaches synergised advocacy, our own approach to the IDVA and ISVA role. It connects independent advocacy with the survivor and institutional advocacy that challenges the systems they navigate. Synergised advocacy means that what advocates learn on the frontline drives change in those systems, so each case informs the response the next survivor receives. The approach is grounded in our Friedom Framework, a six-level model with three navigational principles: cultural competemility, anti-racism and intersectionality.

Who designs and delivers the training

We are the sector’s first and only Black and Black mixed-heritage IIDSVA training provider, and Black feminist scholars author our course content. Learners work with trainers who have done the casework themselves, and they are invited into honest conversations about race, power and their own assumptions.

Foundations

Our programme opens with a Foundations block covering anti-racism, intersectionality, cultural competemility, Black feminist praxis and power. Every later unit builds on that grounding, from Understanding Domestic Abuse through to the IDVA unit and the ISVA unit.

Questions to ask a provider

• Who wrote the course content, and whose experience does it draw on?
• How does the course apply intersectionality to risk assessment and safety planning?
• Is anti-racism taught in one session, or across every unit of the course?
• Is the training accredited, and at what level?

Our Intersectional IDSVA programme is accredited IDVA and ISVA training at OCN London Level 3. You can find the dates, units and costs on our Intersectional IDSVA Training page.