A Place To Call Home Exhibition - SEREDA

What is the SEREDA project? 

My project is the SEREDA project and it looks at sexual and gender based violence in the refugee emergency. What we've been doing for the last five years is trying to understand the experiences of forced migrants who have been escaping persecution in the Middle East and North African regions. The project spans Australia, Sweden, the UK and Turkey and recently we've engaged in other work in Ukraine and Poland. What we've been trying to do is to understand the experiences of sexual and gender based violence from displacement until the point at people access refuge. And we've been looking at what makes them vulnerable and what makes them resilient at that time.

Why is this research important?

Our work is important because firstly, this is probably the biggest project that's been undertaken on sex and gender based violence across what we call the continuum of violence, the experience that individuals have of sex and gender based violence from before conflict, before they're displaced, through displacement that's on flight in camps, and once they're in refuge, so we take into account the whole experience. We've interviewed more than 300 survivors in six, I think maybe seven now different countries. And we continue our work and our focus is not just on what happened, but how could we make things better. So that's really, really important. It's not just a piece of work that's going to sit in an ivory tower somewhere. This is all about changing lives and uncovering these really unpleasant, very difficult experiences, very complex in ways that are accessible to politicians, policymakers and the general public.

What does home mean to the people involved in your project?

The people I work with who are victims and survivors of sexual and gender based violence really struggle to identify what home means. Many of them have left what you might consider to be home. The home country. Or even their house, their family. Because of persecution, potentially persecution within that home by an abusive partner, abusive family, abusive politicians. So I guess what they're trying to do is to seek safety. But just safety alone does not mean that you feel at home. You need to be able to be yourself. You need social connections. You need to be self-sufficient and you need to feel connected to a place, to a culture. You need to have purpose in your life. So for many of the individuals that we work with, I guess they're in a process of trying to work out what home might potentially mean in the future, but they're still in the process of seeking that home. And in the first instance, I guess the first priority is safety. But that alone does not make home.