Community Organisation Prioritises Individual Counselling

CASE (Community Action towards a Safer Environment) is a unique NGO located in the Hanover Park community on the Cape Flats. This is an area ridden with gang violence. In the short time that I have been marginally involved with this organisation, (since August 2010) there have been two major outbreaks of violence. Unfortunately, it is often young children who get caught in the crossfire. But the whole situation used to be much worse. The improvement could well be due to the existence of this organisation, which is housed in a few cream-coloured containers in the grounds of Mountview High School. The person who provides the firing passion behind this community-development-engine is Lane Benjamin, a clinical psychologist, mother of two, currently completing her Ph.D. She started CASE about 10 years ago while still working at the Trauma Centre.

End of year graduation party of the Literacy Group

On 28th September 2011, CASE went public. They launched a series of Training Manuals and Workshops hoping to spread their development model to other community organisations.  

So what makes them special?
I think what distinguishes this organisation is 1) they start with individuals and their personal development, 2) they incorporate an understanding of the impact of trauma on learning and 3) expertise develops and remains within the community.

I would guess that their premise - that to break the cycle of violence you have to start with individuals and their personal development - might not be very popular currently with government or with funders. The theory that informs this is that most South African communities are traumatised firstly by the degradations of the past, which have been passed on to later generations through intergenerational transmission of trauma, and secondly, by the continuous violence in the present. The major ways in which this is manifest in each family is through dissociation, addictions, family violence and learning difficulties
At the launch, there were about 20 women and 1 man, who came into CASE from the community as clients and who have progressed through training to become counsellors themselves - a new version of the "barefoot psychoanalyst". All the volunteers at CASE for their various community programs are required to go through  a short personal development training.

Lane's guide for educators: "The Impact of Trauma on Learning", should be a reading requirement in every teacher training course in the country. Here is just a snippet:
   A learner that is in a state of persistent fear will find it difficult to learn complex cognitive information. In other words, if the cortex is not active, it will not store information. The learner will be focusing on non-verbal cues of the teacher. The teacher's body movements, facial expressions and tone of voice become significant information to be processed. The learner will be searching for threat and storing that information, not the words which accompany this. Only when the brain is in a significantly 'calmed' state will these children be able to learn and take in verbal information. 
Using current brain research to show why traumatised children behave the way they do in the classroom and why they have difficulty learning, she also provides a number of helpful tools teachers can use to enhance the capacities of their learners.

Expertise develops and remains within the community. There is very little of the colonial idea that counselling requires professionals, which inevitably means bringing in people from the outside. And there is nothing grandiose in their philosophy - they know that the kind of change they want to effect, happens family by family, generation by generation. In a society riddled with hopes of a 'quick fix ', CASE is in for the long haul if they can survive financially.