Greetings everyone! I write this update off the back of the SVRI (Sexual Violence Research Initiative) conference in Cape Town. This was a fantastic opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and collaborators, old and new, and to meet fellow early career researchers. It served me a reminder of the importance of community.
Last summer, during my LEAD fellowship, I worked in Kiryandongo Refugee settlement in Bweyale with a wonderful women’s collective. This work was part of a wider PhotoVoice project on social support for displaced women in humanitarian settings (led by my mentors Ilana Seff and Lindsay Stark). We presented this work at SVRI, and I finally got to meet one of the co-investigators, Melissa, face-to-face. I also got to meet several folks in-person with whom I have now worked for several years from afar. It struck me that we had our own sort of women’s ‘collective’ – a cross-continental group of researchers, connected through shared interest and technology, and a willingness to support each other’s endeavors.
My ACHIEVE proposal was built from this community, and my project seeks to engage with survivors, researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in the sexual violence space. Over the past few months, I have been conducting formative interviews and reaching out widely to hear perspectives, learn from experiences, and get suggestions regarding search terms and definitions; the first part of my project is a systematic review of the barriers to individual accountability for sexual violence in LMIC. The second part of my project, which will be conducted next year, looks to then begin to bring back the outputs of this review to the community. The conference was a wonderful space to begin to prepare for the snowball sampling!