Safeguard and support children who have experienced abuse
Specialist training for professionals working with children, young people and families in responding calmly and confidently to child sexual abuse, domestic abuse and other forms of trauma.
What topics and training packages can Imara deliver?
Understanding and Responding to Child Sexual Abuse: The Essentials (CPD Accredited)
This CSA Essentials training is CPD-accredited and can be delivered over 2.5 hours and is designed for all members of a team, providing an overview of understanding the effects of trauma and supporting a safe environment for children to make a disclosure.
Understanding and Responding to Child Sexual and Domestic Abuse: The Trauma-Informed Essentials (CPD Accredited)
This CSA and DA Essentials training is CPD-accredited and can be delivered over 2.5 hours and is designed for all members of a team, providing an overview of understanding the effects of trauma and supporting a safe environment for children to make a disclosure.
Understanding and Responding to Harmful Sexual Behaviour between Siblings (HSB-S) (CPD Accredited)
Our CPD-Accredited HSB-S training is delivered over 3 hours and will build professional confidence in response to disclosures, understanding the specific challenge of HSB-S and the need for effective partnership working and assessment of behaviours to ensure safety and mitigate the risk to the child who has harmed and the child who has been harmed, alongside an effective response to the family network.
Understanding and Responding to Child Sexual Abuse: Deep Dive (CPD-Accredited)
Our CPD-Accredited Deep-Dive training is a 4-hour training package designed for roles with specific responsibility for safeguarding, wellbeing or pastoral support, such as Designated Safeguarding Leads, to build a deeper understanding of child sexual abuse and how to respond effectively to disclosures from children and young people. It covers more specialist topics including barriers to disclosures; tackling stereotypes and assumptions; the stigma surrounding child sexual abuse; attachments; safe relationships and safeguarding. The training also includes a range of creative, play-based and expressive therapeutic approaches to work with young people.
Online Child Sexual Abuse: Grooming, Digital Harm and Survivor-led Responses (CPD-Accredited)
This 1 hour session is designed to provide professionals with a deeper understanding of the grooming process, the human reality of digital harm, and how to provide a trauma-informed response within a child-centred setting.
Vicarious Trauma with professionals
This 3 hour training session is aimed at helping professionals identity, notice and support themselves and their team through vicarious trauma. It aims to cover: what vicarous trauma is, trauma responses, trauma dynamics, how vicarious trauma affects different personality types, how to respond to vicarious trauma and prevent it from happening.
Imara’s 'Using Immersive Technology within Therapy' Training
Imara’s “Using Immersive Technology within Therapy” training is a 2-day training. An innovative approach developed alongside Imara’s Art Psychotherapists and Anomie, a company that created a visualisation tool using VR for wellbeing practitioners. This training teaches practical skills of using the VR tool and supporting clients who are less likely to seek traditional therapy e.g. clients who are neurodivergent, with severe anxiety disorders, agoraphobia, or communication difficulties.
How much does Imara’s training cost?
These are the current trainings that we have CPD accredited. The prices are for online group trainings of up to 30 people. In-person training will incur additional travel and venue hire costs.
| Understanding and Responding to Child Sexual Abuse: Essentials | 2.5 hour workshop | £600 |
| Understanding and Responding to Child Sexual and Domestic Abuse: The Trauma-Informed Essentials | 2.5 hour workshop | £600 |
| Understanding and Responding to Harmful Sexual Behaviour between Siblings (HSB-S) | 3 hour workshop | £850 |
| Understanding and Responding to Child Sexual Abuse: Deep Dive | 4 hour workshop | £980 |
| Online Child Sexual Abuse: Grooming, Digital Harm and Survivor-led Responses | 1 hour Webinar | £300 |
Please email in**@*******rg.uk to request training for your team.
Imara offers a range of open training sessions which you can book onto as an individual – see here for upcoming dates and prices.
Imara can also deliver bespoke training for your team. Prices depend upon the format of training you’d prefer, whether it is in person or online, as well as the size of your organisation.
Training we can also offer at bespoke prices:
- Vicarious Trauma
- HSB/Peer on Peer
- Immersive Technology and therapy training (VR Therapy).
If you are a trainee or working for another charity or voluntary organisation and are not in a position to be able to afford Imara’s training at our rates, we are still keen to hear from you. We are occasionally able to offer reduced rate training and may be able to consider alternative arrangements such as skill swaps. Please email in**@*******rg.uk for more information.
Who is the training for?
Imara’s training is designed for any professionals who work directly with children, young people or families. This includes schools, social workers, youth workers, police, therapists, counsellors, health professionals, legal professionals, community leaders, and many more.
What does it mean by 'co-produced with young people with lived experience'?
Imara’s mission as a charity is to empower children and families to move forward from the impacts of sexual and domestic abuse, and our purpose is enabling a child’s voice to be heard. We take care to ensure that the voices of children, young people and families are heard throughout our organisation and their views and experiences are instrumental in shaping the design, delivery and direction of our charity and services. Imara is privileged to work with a Participation Group made up of young people who are experts by experience, who have previously accessed Imara’s services and now volunteer to act as a steering group and work with Imara on various projects. Imara’s Education Co-ordinators work closely with Imara’s Participation Group to design training, creating educational resources and content including video and audio clips and to co-deliver training virtually or face to face.
What is the format of the training?
Imara offers a range of open training sessions which you can book onto as an individual – see here for upcoming dates and details.
Imara can also deliver training for your team, either online or in person. Our bespoke training can vary in length depending upon the content you want to receive and your preferences
Please email in**@*******rg.uk to request training for your team.
Imara training involves a range of information sharing and awareness raising, as well as creative, experiential or reflective exercises that allow you a gentle, trauma-responsive opportunity to interact with the material and integrate the learning into your professional practice in a meaningful way.
Can Imara adapt or tailor the training for me or my team?
Imara can develop a bespoke educational package or standalone training event for your team. We will aim to have an initial discussion with you to understand what you are looking for. We can plan with you the length and format of the training based upon your requirements and availability, and provide a quote as to what this will cost. We will usually recommend a pre-training survey to all training delegates to assess current knowledge and learning needs, which allows us to tailor the training based upon where your team are starting from and what you all feel would be most beneficial for your work.
Why should I choose training from Imara over another provider?
Imara is a charity, and all proceeds of Imara’s training is fed back into funding delivery of direct services to children and families that are recovering from child sexual and domestic abuse. You and/or your team will benefit from the practical expertise of Imara’s 10+ years of working with survivors of trauma, and will also be supporting essential services to support survivors.
Most of Imara’s training is co-produced by young people with lived experience of sexual and domestic abuse, ensuring the information is relevant and accurate, passing onto you the knowledge that they wish the professionals supporting them had known.
Imara is a CPD certified organisation and most of our training is CPD certified, providing high quality professional development.
Many of Imara’s training sessions use a range of creative and experiential activities, rather than lecture style presentations. This is because we know creativity offers a gentle and trauma-responsive way of approaching difficult topics, and understand the importance of providing space within training sessions for you to reflect and integrate the learning into your professional practice in a meaningful way.
Imara’s training is designed and delivered by our team of multi-disciplinary experts, including therapists and CHISVAs. We use our practical experience of working with survivors of sexual and domestic abuse over the past 10+ years to equip you with resources, tools and techniques that are tried and tested in real world settings with real children, young people and families, that we believe will be realistic for you in your workplace.
These essential elements of Imara’s education programmes fit with our values of creative empowerment; holding our ground; compassionate commitment; acceptance; seeking justice.
Why does Imara deliver training for professionals?
At Imara we invest in education and awareness raising as it helps us to empower all professionals who work with children to respond to them by listening, staying curious about what has happened to them and reacting confidently and compassionately. This includes our staff, our partners and our widest stakeholders as we know that the more we raise awareness about the issue of child sexual abuse the more of a chance there is that all children will be helped to speak out early and kept safe.
Our mission is to empower children and families to move forward from the impacts of sexual and domestic abuse. Young people tell us that it is important that professionals who respond to disclosures of abuse do so in a careful and non-blaming manner and by raising awareness Imara can help educate them about trauma-informed approaches.
Imara has a vision of a world where a child receives the support they need, where abuse ends and children are free from harm. We believe that by educating everyone we have a chance to prevent child sexual abuse and domestic abuse from happening to any child.
The importance and impact of education:
- Raising awareness in society of child sexual and domestic abuse, helping every family and community to identify issues earlier and prevent further harm
- Empowering young people with lived experience to feedback into system change – supporting their recovery and agency and influencing policy change from within the criminal justice system
- Increasing the capacity of other professionals working with families, improving safeguarding and responses to disclosures across all professionals that children may interact with
- Helping to create more safe spaces across society for children to disclose earlier – protecting more children and preventing more abuse from occurring
- Improving awareness in schools to identify issues earlier, and resourcing schools to become more trauma responsive for the welfare of their young people and their staff
- Amplify children’s voices, further our mission of children being believed and listened to across society
- Educating children with developmentally appropriate information about safety in relationships and online, empowering them with knowledge to identify if they feel unsafe and what to do
- Improving understanding of trauma across society, reducing the stigma felt by survivors and reducing the incidence and impact of vicarious trauma among professionals
What experience do Imara’s trainers have?
Imara’s training is designed and delivered by our team of multi-disciplinary experts, including therapists and CHISVAs. We use our practical experience of working with survivors of sexual and domestic abuse over the past 10+ years to equip you with resources, tools and techniques that are tried and tested in real world settings with real children, young people and families, that we believe will be realistic for you in your workplace.
Imara has been delivering bespoke training to a range of professionals (health, education, social care, residential fostering services) and organisations over the last 14 years, including newly qualified and experienced art therapists, Nottinghamshire Police, Nottingham City Social Care teams, fostering support teams, Nottinghamshire County Council and independent organisations (Wild Things; The Apple Tree Centre).
Imara practitioners deliver specialist training as associate trainers of:
- The Bluestar Project, improving access to best practice pre-trial therapy and support services
- Psychology Associates, teaching the CATT model (Children’s Accelerated
Trauma Technique) - NSPCC, teaching the DART groupwork training (Domestic Abuse Recovering Together)
The Imara team has experience delivering training on:
- Understanding & Responding to Child Sexual Abuse
- Pre-Trial Therapy
- Trauma: Impact on the Brain, Behaviour & Development
- Harmful Sexual Behaviour Between Siblings
- EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique)
- Training for mentors including practical skills, safeguarding and goal setting.
“I liked the flow of exercises between experiential, small group, using objects, using the art materials etc. It felt like a really well balanced training to me.”
“A good training event. It provided a good overview of working with victims of sexual abuse. It was interesting to have the cases to put the work in context. I also liked choosing a representative item from the treasure chest to open up thinking around the subject.”
“I really enjoyed the mix of presentation and creative/interactive activities. The most interesting and useful thing I learned from the training was understanding traumatic sexualisation, stigmatisation, betrayal and powerlessness”
“Friendly space and people, informative slides and talk well set out with case studies, art making and interaction, relaxed social lunch – all good. Thank you”
“The session was absolutely critical in bringing home the pressing need to improve victim's services to all the delegates in attendance. [The young person’s] contributions were extremely powerful and insightful, highlighting how collaboration, clear communication and basic human empathy all have a significant role to play in serving victims better. The work you have done to bring inadequate performance and strategies for improvement to light cannot be understated, and your contributions at conference will, I am sure, have energised all our attendees to consider their approach to victims with greater thoughtfulness.”
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