Below is an excerpt from the manual that outlines the content and structure. You can download the manual and document containing important reflection questions for engaging the curriculum. 

Download STAR for Sexual Harms Manual
Guide for use of STAR for Sexual Harms Manual

STAR is currently seeking an organizational partner in implementing a pilot project with the materials. If you or your organization are interested, please review the reflection questions and ideal audiences and contact us at star@emu.edu.

Read more about STAR and the work with sexual harms.

91¶ÌÊÓÆ” professor Carolyn Stauffer is leading the development of a new Strategies for Trauma and Resilience (STAR) curriculum focused on sexual harms.

The “Changing the Narrative on Sexual Harms” (CTN) project, which is funded by a JustPax Fund grant, is housed in the STAR program under the leadership of trainer Katie Mansfield and program director Hannah Kelley. Project contributors include Richmond Public Schools manager of school climate and culture Ram Bhagat GC ‘19 and neuroscientist and practitioner Joy Kreider. 91¶ÌÊÓƔ’s Title IX coordinator Rachel Roth Sawatsky and the Collins Center crisis response coordinator Rhoda Miller, a CJP grad student, are also key contributors.

STAR has facilitated trauma and resilience trainings with thousands of participants from more than 60 countries. The curriculum will deepen the program’s work addressing sexual trauma specifically and will engage all affected parties – from individuals to institutions – in proactive, preventative and restorative approaches.

“Worldwide there is a growing admission that the topic of sexual harms is quickly moving from invisible peripheries to conspicuous center stage,” Stauffer said. “The CTN project provides a viable way to be visibly present at a critical time in this important conversation. This proactive approach frames the paradigm shift opportunity offered by CTN.”

The grant includes funding for assembling focus groups in local and international settings, interviewing global practice leaders, and accessing expertise at institutions such as Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

The project is collecting input from survivors across diverse communities, thereby ensuring the inclusion of voices from marginalized and underrepresented communities. In addition to the harmful impacts of sexual violence on individuals, the curriculum will address how power disequilibria can foster cultures of violence in communities and organizations.

“Many organizations do not have processes in place to support individuals in a trauma-sensitive manner nor the impetus to push for proactive policies that prevent sexual violence in the first place,” Stauffer wrote. “Daily we hear of ‘sexual misconduct’ that gains notoriety precisely because institutions are non-compliant with current legislation and ignorant of trauma-sensitive intervention protocols. Such gaps not only compound the profound harms already done to victims, but they also put the integrity, legality and legitimacy of organizations at risk.”

The JustPax Fund focuses on individuals and organizations working for effective change through innovative approaches to societal challenges relating to gender, environmental and/or economic justice. It is administered by Everence Charitable Services through the Everence affiliate Mennonite Foundation.

“This project is the heart of what JustPax is all about,” said Teresa Boshart Yoder, managing director for Everence in Harrisonburg. “We want to reach out to the underserved or vulnerable and begin programs that will bring about effective change.”

This $6,600 grant is the second Stauffer has received from JustPax. A 2016 grant of $10,200 supported a project called “Silent Violence,” which studied strategies of resilience among domestic violence survivors from within communities of homeless women, undocumented Latinas, and Mennonite women from Old Order or conservative church communities.

Bringing a new sense of justice to multiple city venues – neighborhoods, courts and prisons, schools and more – is a challenge that requires focus, patience and an empowering spirit.

“One bite at a time. That’s all you can do,” said 2018 Peacebuilder of the Year Annette Lantz-Simmons at the June 13 luncheon ceremony in her honor during the Summer Peacebuilding Institute.

The executive director of the Center for Conflict Resolution (CCR) in Kansas City, Missouri, is the fourth recipient of the annual recognition of a CJP graduate. She first attended SPI in 2005 and earned a master’s degree in conflict transformation in 2009.

Lantz-Simmons “has led CCR’s commitment to a workplace environment that is reflective of its mission in the community and expanded the traditional work of a mediation center by promoting a holistic mission that focuses on prevention, education and restoration,” said CJP Executive Director Daryl Byler in an announcement of the honoree in spring 2018.

In her acceptance speech, Lantz-Simmons highlighted CCR’s programs. The organization offers neighborhoods and families group facilitation, conflict resolution and mediation training, and trauma and circle workshops; has assisted the city in implementing – and anticipates expanding – restorative justice practices in schools; offered restorative processes and trauma and conflict resolution trainings in prisons, reentry facilities, and courts; and provided various organizations with group facilitation, trainings, trauma awareness and mediation.

Trainings and programs such as these are “planting seeds,” Lantz-Simmons said in an earlier interview. “People often do what they know, even if it doesn’t work or is very uncomfortable for them. We offer a different mindset and practical skills to do conflict in a new way.”

“CCR is an example of what it takes to do real peacebuilding and effect significant change, beyond the boundaries of mediation,” said CJP academic programs director Jayne Docherty, in her presentation of the award to Lantz-Simmons. “It takes long-term vision and teamwork to actually make significant transformation in systems, and not just resolve conflicts. The vision that you have held is a big vision for a less violent and more just city, and that is what we love to see.”

In a video made by CCR staff for the occasion, founder Diane Kyser MA ‘06 praised Lantz-Simmons as having “brought this agency to incredible places because of the vision that she has had and then dedicated [herself] to pursue.”

CCR has strong ties to CJP, as CCR founder Kyser and staffers Gregory Winship MA ’17 and Debbie Bayless ‘18 have completed graduate degrees. Additionally, former CCR education strategist (and Annette’s daughter) Mikhala Lantz-Simmons is a 2015 graduate.

FOR 15 STUDENTS participating in a resilience training at 91¶ÌÊÓÆ”, one role-play activity hit close to home. The small-group skits invited them to learn how their actions might be a result of an emotional response: how, for example, teasing Pakistani refugee Hayat Zahra,16, about her hijab might be a result of their own discomfort in a new American culture.

“That was hard,” Zahra said later. Though the situation was only acting, her emotional response was visible. The high school students, refugees from Africa and the Middle East who are members of a leadership training program, were then able to talk about how words can hurt and how such hurt might cause other negative behaviors.

Harrisonburg High’s Peer Leaders program is a grant-funded project involving partners 91¶ÌÊÓÆ”, Harrisonburg High School and Church World Service (CWS). James Madison University’s Center for International Stabilization and Recovery leads the program.

Monthly sessions alternate between providing information about community and school opportunities and group activities off-campus. Swahili speaker and CJP graduate student Kajungu Mturi, from Tanzania, and Felix Kioko ’17, now a graduate student at CJP, facilitated the group.

In spring 2017, Katie Mansfield, director of the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program, led a day-long workshop about how the body responds to stress and how those responses can lead to unhelpful behaviors.

Gloria Bafunye, a ninth-grader from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, explained it as the difference “between head and heart, how sometimes you think something and your body is because of that.”

Mansfield, who typically works with adults, said she was inspired by the students’ sensitivity, insights and questions. For this day with 30 high-schoolers, she drew upon her first experiences in peace education with an organization called Peace Games. Mansfield offered arts-based activities, small-group sharing and team-building experiences.

91¶ÌÊÓÆ” resources were also tapped in a fall training with a CJP team that included Professor Johonna Turner; Practice Director Amy Knorr; then-graduate students Mturi, Diana Tovar, Jalal Maqableh; and Jacques Mushagasha MA ’16. In a day soon after the U.S. presidential elections, when many questions had begun to surface, the group helped students explore their questions and strategies for engagement.

Though they may not have mastered English and may not realize their own influence, high school-age refugees are vital contributors and leaders within the high school community, said Rebecca Sprague, of CWS. Self-advocacy is another goal, said Laura Feichtinger-McGrath, ESL coordinator at the high school, “both for themselves and their peers 
 recognizing they can’t change the traumas of their past, and they all have traumas, but also not allowing their past experiences to cripple them or close doors to opportunities.”

More than two decades after the war that tore apart the former Yugoslavia, the scars remain. Memorials and ruins stand as physical reminders of the conflict that ran for four years in the mid-1990s; less visible are the emotional and psychological wounds that many residents still bear.

It is these latter scars that drew the attention of and of 91¶ÌÊÓƔ’s (91¶ÌÊÓÆ”) Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Mansfield, director of the program, and Hart, professor of trauma, identity and conflict studies, helped to plan and participated in an international conference on “Trauma, Memory and Healing in the Balkans and Beyond” in July in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The conference, sponsored by the Transcultural Psychosocial Educational Foundation (TPO), had two goals: developing an “archive of knowledge” from the papers presented at the event, and building a network of people who “share ‘best practices’ for psycho-social trauma recovery and the healing of memories,” according to the website.

Mansfield says the goals were largely met, with “a joint effort of scholars, practitioners and activists.”

Mansfield and Hart were on a panel that considered how to integrate psycho-social responses to trauma into peacebuilding work and shared about 91¶ÌÊÓƔ’s STAR program, which began in 2001 to address the trauma of the September 11 events. Hart also presented a paper titled “Multidisciplinary and Cross Sector Approaches to Building Peace after Complex and Violent Conflicts: The Importance of Psychosocial Trauma and Well-being in this Process.” Mansfield facilitated several workshops on the body’s response to trauma and on using play as a method for getting around “stuck-ness.” She also led a daily period of breathing and meditation exercises.

Beyond the formal presentations, they say the conference included sobering moments, such as a visit to the memorial at the Srebrenica genocide site, and heart-warming ones, including the hospitality shown by a local women’s group that works together across ethnic boundaries. Many issues remain for the region, including high unemployment and other economic challenges, growing insulation of ethnic groups, changing gender roles and differing perspectives on the wartime years.

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) has a longstanding presence in the Balkans, and 91¶ÌÊÓÆ” has several connections there as well. Those include former seminary faculty members N. Gerald and Sara Wenger Shenk, who served in the former Yugoslavia with MCC, and ’00, MA ’04, and , MA ’99. Amela, a native Bosnian, is MCC Area Director for Europe and the Middle East and was a keynote speaker at the conference. Since graduating from CJP, the Puljek-Shanks have been creating and facilitating trauma awareness and resilience learning forums throughout the Balkans.

The conference “highlighted the importance of being persistent in continuing to talk about the impact trauma has on generations while also naming that we are not doomed forever due to the traumatic experiences many generations have gone through,” she said. “Resiliency and recovery from trauma are key terms that need to be in the forefront of our conversations. Trauma brings many opportunities for growth and healing. Thus, for us in MCC 
 supporting our partners across the world in their work, learning how they worked on trauma healing and recovery, and exchanging best practices helps all of us build critical yeast that will eventually lean towards peace.”

This was the second conference held on the topic, and both Mansfield and Hart hope the series continues. They praised TPO program director Zilka Spahić ƚiljak, co-organizer of the conference, as “a really impressive and dynamic person” whose energy and vision were instrumental in bringing the event together. The author of Shining Humanity – Life Stories of Women Peacebuilders in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ơiljak teaches at several universities and is currently doing research at Stanford.

“I think it was the right conference as part of the next step,” Hart says. “It’s a building process. I really trust that they’ll take this forward in a dynamic, meaningful way, and we want to be as much a part of that as possible.”

“It’s exciting to think how CJP may be involved in helping to deepen those capacities that are already so powerfully there,” Mansfield adds.

The collection of conference papers is expected to be available in English by early 2017.