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 cor...@interchange.ubc.ca http://www.geocities.com/chris_corrigan * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html =========================================================== osl...@egroups.com To subscribe, 1. Visit: http://www.egroups.com/group/oslist 2. Sign up -- provide an email address, and choose a login ID and password 3. Click on "Subscribe" and follow the instructions To unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@egroups.com: 1. Visit: http://www.egroups.com/group/oslist 2. Sign in and Proceed