TILES www.utas.edu.au/tiles Community Engagement: Refugees - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Community Engagement: Refugees’ Perspectives for Lew Enforcement in Regional Australia

• Dr. Isabelle Bartkowiak-Théron

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BACKGROUND

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• UTAS
• Emphasis on Excellence and Distinctiveness

(qualities that in turn encourage relationships that facilitate Growth and Engagement)

• Leader and facilitator of endeavours that connect

with the wider community

• Encourages appplied projects that link academics

with practitioners and the community

• VC’s Community Engagement Grant
• TILES

“is committed to excellence in law enforcement research. Collaborative research that links academics with practitioners is a hallmark of that research”

PROJECT DESIGN

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• TILES Report ‘A Conversation on Trust’, 2009
• Report allow refugees a voice on

relationships between Police and Refugees

• Problem with report: ‘a framework-only

report’

• Need to design tools to
• Further build bridges between police and

refugees

The situation between refugees & police

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• Not easy (and not police only)
• Relationship of distrust, fear and avoidance
• Triggers a number of problems
• Under-reporting
• Absence of collaboration
• No knowledge of each others’ business &

tradition

• No knowledge exchange between each other
• Talking to the police = corrupt activity
• Particularly problematic in big resettlement centres

SEIZING THE ENGAGEMENT OPPORTUNITY

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• Privileged situation in Albury
• Good networking with government ‘support

agencies’ (NGOs, associations, etc)

• Murray Valley Sanctuary Refugee Groups
• Indication, despite concerns, of good work

by all support agencies AND

• Indication of good relationships between

refugees and police

THE PROJECT: ‘Bridging the Gap’

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Documenting what works well

• in a medium-sized resettlement area
• at a cross-border location
• at a location where further refugee intakes

are expected in the next few years

• from the agencies’ perspectives
• from the refugees’ perspectives

Purpose: constructing the tool box (random ‘MacGyverisms’ into effective instruments for future use in other location, by other partners) and the ‘how to manual’

PRELIMINARY RESULTS

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What are the things that are working well?

• Teaching endeavours that are slow and incremental (Australian

induction )

• Anything that contextualises western governance

paraphernalia

• Anything that implies listening (and interest?) the refugees’

experience

• Anything that builds on their resilience
• Any collaborative endeavours
• Anything fun (& that highlights their skills)
• Going through Elders
• Abiding by the community hierarchy
• Building on traditions of problem-solving
• You’re wrong →‘You’re right… and you’ll be more right if…’
• For young people, strong teaching (didactic?) techniques

PRELIMINARY RESULTS (cont’d): Why are those things working well?

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• Strong collaboration of police officers to the bridging

exercise (AWCC)

• Participation to English classes (in uniform, in plain clothes)
• Police officers realising that ‘they themselves had no idea

traditional problem-solving process could be so similar to ‘our ways’, so sophisticated’ and so respected

• Participation of refugees to police awareness training

“It’s nice to see the refugees excited to be the ones teaching, as opposed to being the ones receiving the information”

• It’s more about reassurance about what is gained as
• pposed to what is lost (different understandings), what is

shared as opposed to what is relinquished

PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS

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This CE engagement process has triggering

• An exercise in reflexivity among participants

‘asking ‘how do you do this?’ ‘show us…’

• Erasing misconstrued differences:

One of the benefits from asking that question ‘what do you do’ and ‘you teach us’ was that they started to understand how and why (…) and to see that perhaps one of the ways that we offered to manage differences of opinion were mimicking what was happening in the community’

• It’s about people rather than systems