Safety-and-Wellbeing-for-Researchers-and-Practitioners

A handbook for preventing and countering violent extremism online safely while protecting your wellbeing

Intention and Purpose of Guide

Welcome to this handbook on safety and wellbeing for researchers and practitioners preventing and countering violent extremism online. In the challenging landscape of this field, where researchers and practitioners grapple with risks to both psychological and physical safety, this guide aims to be an introduction to crucial aspects to ensure the security, safety, and resilience of individuals involved in such critical work.

The first section of the handbook “Safety and Wellbeing” frames the problems that researchers and practitioners face and then details the published, evidence-based approaches that have been established.

As this field is still developing, evidence is not available for all the approaches that researchers use. so this should be considered as a guide of inspiring practices to draw from. In addition, we have tried to identify and recognize gaps in the existing evidence base to inform future research.

This handbook was developed in consultation with the members of the Eradicate Hate Global Summit working group “Protecting the Protectors.” The working group was established in 2023 with the purpose of drawing on the lived experiences of P/CVE researchers and practitioners to fill gaps in the field related to understanding mental, physical, and digital well-being while undertaking P/CVE work.

How to use the guide

This guide is intended to be a wide collection of resources for the reader to tailor to their unique needs. The sections are broken down as follows:

• Safety and Wellbeing
  • Framing the problem: Risks to psychological and physical safety when performing this work
  • Digital Safety Resources
  • Physical Safety Resources for Practitioners
• Gaps in the Research
  • Safety and well-being for frontline practitioners
  • Inspiring Practices - Moving Forward
  • Care frameworks for independent practitioners
  • Guides to Psychological Wellbeing
    • Care frameworks for organizations
    • Care frameworks for gatherings (conferences etc.)
  • Approaches for Funders of research and practitioners

Guidelines for contributing to the Handbook

• Edit or create new markdown files in docs/
• If you create a new file you also need to edit mkdocs.yml to add your page to the Page Tree in the right place
• Commit your changes and create a Pull Request