Have a look below to view the VAMHN's podcast, research, policy and visual outputs.

Integrating lived experience involvement in academic research funding: Reflections on evolving practice

This report - written by the VAMHN Lived Experience Advisory Group - provides guidance to ensure that lived experience is safely and purposefully embedded throughout research projects. It is primarily aimed at funders of academic research but is also of relevance to trusts, foundations, commissioners, and others who award funding to services.

​The report outlines the evolution of lived experience involvement in VAMHN grant competitions. It is intended to be a living document, and we welcome feedback and suggestions for refinement from current and potential users. To read the full report click here.

Podcasts

Pulling the Strings: Conversations About Coercive Control

Pulling the Strings: Conversations About Coercive Control, is a podcast series about coercive control, brought to you by the UKRI Violence, Abuse and Mental Health Network. In this podcast, your hosts Dr Kitty Saunders, Anjuli Kaul and Dr Sharli Paphitis talk to academic experts, authors, practitioners, and coercive control survivors to better understand and expose the true extent of coercive control.

Season 1 is out now and features 5 episodes:

1. Defining and Measuring Coercive Control - featuring special guests Dr Lindsay Kelland and members of the VAMHN LEAG
2. Mental Health -  featuring special guest Prof. Louise Howard
3. Economic Abuse -  featuring special guest Nicola Sharp-Jeffs
4. Technology -  featuring special guest Dr Leonie Tanczer
5. Long Term Recovery - featuring special guest Dee-Anne Hardy

Click the links here to listen to the podcast for free on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Policy Resources

Written evidence submitted to the Public Bill Committee for the Domestic Abuse Bill: VAMHN
On the 4th June 2020, the Public Bill Committee met to conduct a line-by-line reading of the Domestic Abuse Bill. The network submitted written evidence and recommendations for the consideration of the Committee with regards to the bill. A huge thank you to the 91 network members and organisations for attaching their signatures to this letter.  To read our evidence submission click here. To follow the journey of the Domestic Abuse Bill click here.

​​Trauma Informed Approaches: Briefing Pack
This briefing pack summarises some of the current literature on Trauma Informed Approaches (TIAs). The pack briefly discusses the key principles of TIA and looks at why they have not been adopted consistently across the UK. It also provides examples of services that have successfully implemented TIAs and how this has been achieved. This briefing pack was provided to attendees of our VAMHN Policy Lab Workshop on the 7th Nov 2019. To download, 
​click here.

Visual Outputs

(Re)Sounding Silence: Active Listening as Activism against Abuse

In November 2022, VAMHN grantholder Dr Alana Harris (King's College London) collaborated with Concetta Perot and Jane Chevous (Survivors' Voices) to host a one-day, informal workshop. The workshop gathered survivor researchers and their allies to explore differing interdisciplinary, scholarly, and socially engaged mechanisms to amplify the voices and priorities of survivors – with a focus on ‘active listening’, ‘receptive hearing’ and the need to co-create contexts for ‘silence breaking’ or ‘supported speaking’. The aim of the workshop was to share reflections and recent experiences surrounding the opportunities and challenges involved in survivor-led co-production, and through this mapping of good practice to offer frameworks and tools, especially orientated to preliminary research design, deriving from our differing disciplinary and epistemic settings. 
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The workshop heard research from participants working in a diverse range of disciplines and sub-fields – encompassing intimate partner violence, child abuse, and gendered violence – around three thematic sessions:

• The evolution of ‘trauma-informed’ approaches to research, especially through the resurgence of attention to ‘affect’ and ‘emotions’ and ‘embodiment’ as legitimate fields of enquiry;
• Cross-disciplinary approaches to qualitative and mixed methodologies which aid ‘deep listening’, including ‘listening to the speaking wound’, holding silence and the limitations surrounding speaking; and
• ‘Hearing’ as a catalyst to action – and the different forms this might take. From embedding these pedagogical insights into educational settings; identification of new multi-disciplinary research agendas; or networked coalitions to amplify survivor life histories and testimonies and thereby identify sites of ‘resounding silence’ and continued structural alienation or violence.

Three infographics summarising the breadth and depth of issues covered, the emotional resonances of the material shared, and the theoretical suggestiveness of ‘active listening’ as a conceptual framework and methodological tool were produced which you can above.​

Illustrations by Jenny Leonard: www.jennyleonardart.com