Help review our Image-based Abuse course for Bloom

Open call for organisations and practitioners with expertise in Image-based Abuse to review our new course

For the past few months, we’ve been co-creating a Bloom course on Image-based Abuse with our volunteers, many of whom are survivors. The lived experience of survivors always informs our work because, at Chayn, we believe that to end gender-based violence those who have experienced it must be at the forefront of change at both a community and global level.

But we also believe in harnessing the expertise of our ecosystem as we develop our materials further. So we want to hear your thoughts about the content we have drafted. Will it be useful for survivors? Should we scrap something altogether? Read to find out how you can get involved.

What’s Bloom?

Bloom is a free online multilingual programme designed to support survivors of gender-based violence in their healing. Co-created by our global team of survivors, allies, and trauma-informed therapists, Bloom contains curated video courses on topics such as Healing from sexual trauma and Reclaiming resilience in our trauma stories. All of our courses include activities, grounding exercises and access to our multilingual 1–1 chat service with members of our team around the world. Bloom empowers survivors with the information and understanding they need to thrive, and reminds them that they are not alone.

Why image-based abuse?

One of Chayn’s priorities for our 2022–2025 strategy is tech-facilitated gender-based violence or tech abuse, and image-based abuse is one of the main ways in which technology is being used by abusers.

Last year, Chayn created a global field guide with End Cyber Abuse, called Orbits, which looked at the nature of tech-facilitated gender-based violence, and how we can address it. The guide focused on intersectional, survivor-centred and trauma-informed design interventions for technology, policy and research.

As a result of this work, we felt the need to create a survivor-focused course on image-based abuse, and as a survivor-facing platform, Bloom naturally became the service where we’ve decided to host this. We firmly believe that any research we produce should end up helping those who most need it: survivors.

What kind of organisations/experts/practitioners should apply?

We’re specifically interested in organisations, experts and practitioners who work with and support survivors of image-based abuse. This might be in the form of direct support such as a helpline or indirectly, in the form of research. Please know that this is an unpaid opportunity, but our course is also available for free for survivors. You’ll be contributing to knowledge production, which is also free to use for other organisations and teams to adapt to their own work. We regularly hold Bloom workshops for this purpose. All our material is available under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial) licence to be reused, re-mixed and published for your own non-profit use, if you attribute Chayn.

What’s in the course?

The image-based abuse course consists of seven scripts for video sessions which will be recorded by our team. Each session is 20 minutes long, barring one particular session. This session unpacks emotions in the form of mini-videos, each one 10 minutes long. Each session also has bonus material, reflective activities and exercises for survivors to use as they work through the course. You’ll be provided access to all the written text and can leave comments on the material.

Our definition of image-based abuse is wide because we’ve included anything which uses images or videos as the means of abuse. For example, we consider dick pics to also be image-based abuse. We try to keep our courses culturally inclusive and relevant for a variety of experiences. Thus, the audience of the course is anyone around the globe who has experienced image-based abuse.

How you can get involved?

We know that there isn’t an in-depth course on healing from image-abused abuse and survivors want this content. We’d like experts to support us in improving the overall content of the course.

Once this course is released, you would be able to send survivors to this free course.

We’d like you to determine if the course feels tailored to the experiences of survivors of image-based abuse and would be helpful and useful for their needs.

We would be making this content available to organisations who work with survivors of IBA as well, so this is your chance to help us make sure the course speaks to all types of survivors, across the world.

All feedback is welcome.

The deadline for comments is 23rd April 2023.

What happens next?

Our Editor, Aiman, will make changes to the course content based on your feedback and ensure that it reflects your valuable insights. The scripts will be recorded as videos and uploaded to Bloom. The course will become available to survivors in Summer 2023.

If you’re interested, please apply using the form here.