Resumen de Silent Harm: A training manual for service providers and interpreters who work with deaf, refugee, and migrant women and girls who have experienced gender-based violence
María del Carmen Cabeza Pereiro, David Casado Neira, Brian Conway, Lucy Clark, Maribel del Pozo Triviño, John Flanagan, Caitriona Freir, Lucy Garahan, Lorraine Leeson, Beatriz Longa Alonso, Sinéad Molony, Leonie O’Dowd, Silvia Pérez Freire, Lianne Quigley, Haaris Sheikh
The handbook presented here is one of the results of the Justisigns2 project, which was developed to address an important interpreter-mediated communications gap, namely: the need to share information about how to communicate effectively, via interpretation, with deaf and migrant women, refugees or asylum-seekers, victims/survivors of gender-based violence (DSGBV) who use languages other than the official languages of their host states. This gave rise to an analysis of need on the part of service providers and the creation of resources to support service providers working with victims/survivors across a range of sectors (e.g.police-court, social-health and NGO settings) and the interpreters who mediate the communicative exchanges with these victims/survivors. The Justisigns2 project was funded by the Erasmus+program (ref. 2019-1-IE01-KA202-051558) and was carried out by the following project partners: Interesource Group (Ireland), European Union of the Deaf, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, An Garda Síochána,Heriot-Watt University and the Universidade de Vigo, with support from a number of organisations and individuals (associate partners). This handbook builds on the results of a survey that was conducted in 2021 (Napier et al. 2022) that invited engagement from interpreters and a broad range of service providers working with deaf or migrant DSGBV victims. This yielded extensive and varied data on the needs of such groups in the three countries surveyed (Ireland, Spain and the United Kingdom). For the purposes of this publication, the focus is on violence against women and girls. It is important to acknowledge that DSGBV is violence directed against a person because of that person’s gender or violence that affects persons of a particular gender disproportionately. Given that sociolinguistic contexts and legislative frameworks vary in the different project partner countries, a general definition of DSGBV is first provided and then the differences that exist in the 3 countries surveyed (Ireland, UK and Spain) are discussed. For example, the term gender-based violence is not widely used in the UK where the term Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) is in use. As a result, the term Domestic, Sexual and Gender-based violence (DSGBV) is used here
