Client Curveball No. 321 -- how would you do it?

Chris Corrigan corcom at interchange.ubc.ca
Fri Sep 8 12:21:25 PDT 2000


One thing I love about doing this work is that you never know what is
going to come down the pike.  My miind has been racing over a question
put to me by a client today, and I promised to share it with you
folks...

My client is a government department responsible for funding "victim
services" -- that is, agencies in the province who provide services to
victims of crime.  As part of the regular business they conduct a lot of
consultations with the agencies they fund and with people who use victim
services.  They have recently been introduced to Open Space Technology
and we held a very successful OS meeting a couple of months ago.  They
like the process a lot.

Now they are in the process of planning for youth services, and they
have contacted me to use OS.  The idea is to hold a couple of OS
meetings in the province to bring youth (13-19 or thereabouts) together
to get from them a sense of their needs in the victim services field.
We still need to identify who will be invited and why and what they will
be asked about, but a tricky question has come up, and I'm suffering
from a bout of either/or paralysis.

As you can imagine, or maybe you already know this, young women and
young men have very different experiences with crime.  Studies generally
show that the genders experience different types of crime, and of course
with sexual assaults, harrasment and intimindation there is a profound
difference in the experience, and even the perception of what
constitutes a crime.

As a result, the client and I are mulling over options with respect to
holding separate consultations with young men and young women.  I see a
lot of pros and cons to either, but my question for you as experienced
OS practitioners, is what do you think this gender experience will do to
discussions in the process?

I am of two minds, as I have said.  I advised my client that if we were
designing separate services for boys and girls, then seperate
consultations would seem useful.  On the other hand, and I think this is
closer to the case, if the consultation is about youth victim services
in general, then what do we lose by having separate consultations?
Certainly we lose the diversity of having boys and girls voices together
contributing to the enterprise.  But I wonder about safety too a little,
as it is likely that the consultations participants will include victims
of crime, some of them perhaps sex crimes, like assault, harrassment and
stalking.  Boys and girls in general have different percpetions of
things like "date rape" for example, but generalizations don't capture
the full picture.  It is equally likely that in a women only
consultation there may be participants who, for example, don't believe
that rape is an issue.  Also, in an all male environement, gay boys may
have a different experience of assault, which might not find a
sympathetic ear in an excluisvely male meeting.

What I'm leaning towards is "trust the process."  (Big surprise
there...).  But I'm still wrestling with the above questions, a lot of
which depend on the people we invite and the things we ask them to talk
about.  There are a lot more questions in my mind about this, and
probably yours too.  Anyway, I'm enjoying the challenge of thinking this
one through, and thought I'd pass it along to you folks for further
thoughts.

So?  Whaddya think?

Chris

--
CHRIS CORRIGAN
Consultation - Facilitation
Open Space Technology

108-1035 Pacific Street
Vancouver BC
V6E 4G7

Phone: 604.683.3080
Fax: 604.683.3036
corcom at interchange.ubc.ca
http://www.geocities.com/chris_corrigan

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