SHINE Victim Prevention Programme

In a nutshell

SHINE Victim Prevention Programme through post trauma intervention promotes resilience and confidence building among women and teenage girls who experienced any form of trauma in their lives.

What we do

The SHINE Victim Prevention Programme is a posttraumatic growth programme which provides female victims who were emotionally and/or physically abused with posttraumatic support to empower them to regain their confidence and also become role models in their communities - thus building resilience. 

How we do it

A growing body of work that identifies post-traumatic growth as a salient feature of this experience contribute to this discourse by reporting on the experiences of 29 African women and teenage girls from Kempton Park/Tembisa (Gauteng) and Kalahari (Northern Cape) who were mostly victims of violent crimes and had all undergone the SHINE Victim Prevention Programme.

A significant part of the SHINE Victim Prevention Programme is fashioning a narrative together with the trauma survivor (through storytelling) that respects the horror of trauma while at the same time opening areas of change and development and encouraging an appreciation for the paradoxical in the trauma experience, so that vulnerability can be strength and loss is a change that can also be positive.

The researchers worked as a research team in three urban districts in the Gauteng and Northern Cape Provinces, South Africa. The study concentrated on issues around experiences of women and teenage girls as victims of violence before and after they were empowered through the SHINE Victim Prevention Programme. A convenience sample consisting of twenty-nine women and teen girls from different backgrounds took part in the focus group discussions.

What we have achieved

The programme Results seen in people that have experienced posttraumatic growth include some of the following: greater appreciation of life, changed sense of priorities, warmer, more intimate relationships, greater sense of personal strength, and recognition of new possibilities or paths for one's life and spiritual development.

Two personality characteristics that may affect the likelihood that people can make positive use of the after-math of traumatic events that befall them include extraversion and openness to experience. 

What we have learned

The main lessons learned around the facilitation Shine Programme are:

• Collaboration with Government Departments and Local Municipalities are vital in the delivery of this programme
• Funding to support the peer educators on ground level  as well as administrative cost are the biggest need in delivering the programme on ground level
• Mentorship of all peer educators is vital because of secondary victimisation
• Victim Offender Mediation should form part of the programme