Blog by Elizabeth Peterson, Soroptimist of the Americas North Atlantic Region Governor, Connecticut Shoreline Club.
Survivor-Centred Group Counselling Approaches
UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70), 17 March 2026; panel led by UN Domestic Violence Consultant Melissa Scala.
Collaborative research conducted in Australia and Canada highlights the importance of designing in-person, survivor-centered group counseling that challenges systemic and cultural barriers while prioritizing the lived experiences of victim-survivors. These groups create a powerful space where silence is broken, allowing participants to collectively process not only the violence itself, but also the responses of institutions and the broader cultural forces shaping their lives. The approach calls for shifting away from rigid, checklist-driven systems toward models that center personal impact and restore agency moving from “power over” survivors to “power for” survivors. Establishing shared ground rules at the outset helps foster trust and respect, while discussions are guided by what survivors identify as most urgent, such as child visitation rights or navigating child protective services. This framework recognizes women as
the experts in their own lives, encouraging them to shape the questions, language, and direction of the group, including how they define their experiences and identities. Ultimately, effective counseling must align with what survivors want and need within reasonable bounds rather than being dictated solely by institutional requirements, ensuring a more respectful, empowering, and responsive support system.
Depicted in the photos above, the group turned the traditional Cycle of Violence into a 3D model, applying real time inputs into the model resulting in empathetic and equitable outcomes for DV survivors and their families. Added to the original 2D Cycle of Violence model are systematic and cultural forces of entrapment social structure inputs including religious institutions, lack of affordable housing, laws that are not implemented for accountability and victim blaming by friends, family and community. Also, coercive control inputs are taken into account including magnitude of male privilege, intimidation, isolation, using children, minimizing – denying – blaming, emotional and economic abuse, coercion and threats, power and control.
