Course making a difference
6/17/2009 2:37:54 PM
By Kip Bonnell
Special to The Telegram
Just as the provincial government was rolling out a new initiative to combat violence against women last week, Ashley Crocker was preparing for a class with a similar theme.
Crocker, a social worker who helps immigrant children make the transition to a new country and culture in her work with the Association of New Canadians in St. John’s, signed up for College of the North Atlantic’s violence prevention program in early May, after growing frustrated with what she was seeing at work.
“I was experiencing issues in my job where many of the young people were engaging in violent behaviors and bullying at school,” she said.
“For many, it’s a total culture shock for them being here, in a new school… and some have never actually been to school before,” said Crocker.
“For some youth, they come from countries where they are considered an adult, then arrive here with the added pressure of being a teenager here in Canada,” she said.
A co-worker told Crocker about Andrew Safer, a member of the Coalition Against Violence, an action group in St. John’s.
Soon after, Crocker found out that Safer was teaching a course in violence prevention, designed for people who work with children on a daily basis.
Sessions began on the Prince Phillip Drive campus last month.
Now, having just finished her last class, Crocker said she’s had important realizations about the nature of violence.
“What I’ve learned most is that anger is often a second emotion,” she said. “Quite often, there’s something else going on with a person that makes a person truly angry. It’s often a direct result of either being hurt, embarrassed, frustrated or confused.”
The origin of Safer’s violence prevention course reaches back almost 20 years, to an event that shook him profoundly – the Montreal massacre of 1989, when Marc Lepine, then 25, killed 14 students at Ecole Polytechnique before turning the gun on himself.
“That was a huge event that showed the world that male violence against women is a major problem,” said Safer. “After I heard about the killings, I found out about Men For Change, a community group that had formed in response to this horrific event.”
Then a freelance writer based in Halifax, Safer contributed to an article to The Chronicle-Herald newspaper about the group’s efforts to get funding reinstated for a local treatment program for batterers. Following this, he helped develop Healthy Relationships: A Violence-Prevention Curriculum – a program that’s been used to confront issues of violence in schools.
The violence prevention program at College of the North Atlantic features two main elements in its weekly session: activities from the healthy relationships curriculum, and a “world café” format where students meet in small groups to discuss issues such as recognizing abuse and creating media literacy skills.
With enrolment from across the community – participants include a counselor in a group home and a neuroscientist – the course provides an atmosphere where students learn from each other.
“We’ve all had such difference experiences,” Crocker said. “It’s been really great to have a safe and non-threatening environment where I can bring up examples of things that happen in my workplaces and get an outside perspective from others. We can discuss the issues and apply them in our careers and lives.”
Safer and his wife moved to Newfoundland last summer. Initially, he pitched a non-fiction writing course to the college, but it was his passion for helping youth and addressing violence that captured the administration’s attention.
“I told him that there’s a genuine need for that, and with his background, he was such a good fit,” said Mary-Lou Johnson, the business development officer at the college’s Prince Phillip Drive campus.
“As soon as I brought this to the course-selection committee, they were really excited, and they, too, thought there was a need out there.”
Safer admits that preventing violence is a wide-ranging and often difficult topic, but he hopes to inspire students to tackle it in a thoughtful and original way.
The violence prevention course is currently running until June 30, on Tuesdays, and will be offered again in October. For more information, call 709-758-7531.
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For more information (media) contact:
Roger Hulan
Communications Specialist
College of the North Atlantic
(709) 643-7938
roger.hulan@cna.nl.ca
Re-run with the permission of Kip Bonnell