Origin Stories

Less known, but also developing in Adelaide at the same time, were unique responses to perpetrators and survivors of domestic and sexual violence and abuse. Alan Jenkins, Rob Hall, Maxine Joy, Alison Newton, Dallas Colley and many others were thinking about what they have come to call Invitational and Ethical Therapy with Restorative Justice Practices with people who use violence and abuse. These practices were developed as counselling responses within progressive community organisations at the time, specifically what is now Uniting Communities and community and then government Domestic Violence responses such as WOWSafe alongside women's workers and advocates. Therapists began exploring how to invite men to cease their violence toward partners, children, and others including other family members and others in the community.

A special focus also began on therapeutic responses to sexual abuses of children with the Mary Street programme looking therapeutic and ethical investigations and responses of perpetrators (including young people) of sexual abuse on children. Concurrently the Childhood Sexual Abuse programme began at Uniting Communities in Adelaide with counsellors responding to people who had experienced sexual abuse and assault. All therapies and responses were supporting people to understand trauma as an effect of violence, harm, abuse and ethical and moral injury perpetrated, including that perpetrated by culture and cultural institutions.

These developments since the 80s and 90s, helped shift the focus of responsibility from victim-survivors to the perpetrators. Though they did not occur in isolation nor were they thought of as belonging to anyone practitioner (as 'guru') or team, but were developed in the context of national and international broader social movements since the 1970s, along with feminism, civil rights, family therapies, community justice and restorative justice approaches specifically for families where abuse had occurred. These practices worked into broader responses in regions where political and violent conflict created contexts for further abuses of power.

All practices serve to uncover the operations of power and abuse, and expose their effect on survivors. Abuses of power can show-up as trapped in narratives, discourses, particular language, actions, and ways of being. If the problem is in the narratives that power constructs, then the remedies are found here also (Foucault).

In 2007, before his death, Michael White established Adelaide Narrative Therapy Centre with Maggie Carey, Shona Russell and Rob Hall. After Michael's untimely death in 2008, his intentions for a small international narrative therapy teaching practice (separate from Dulwich) was continued as Narrative Practices Adelaide, until their retirement from practice in 2020.

Members and colleagues of Narrative Practices Adelaide, Terry Callahan and Sonja Baram endeavoured to recognise, continue and progress the intentions of these developments across our own work at the Collective. In 2023, Terry Callahan passed after a short battle with cancer complications.

Today Narrative and Invitational practices have been taken up in wonderful parts of the world where therapy and therapeutic activism and justice doing is much needed, such as in India, Chile, Mexico, Spain, South Africa and more.

Here in Adelaide, Sonja and her colleagues continue this therapy and counselling with close fidelity and new thinking in narrative and invitational ideas. The basic texts we study, consult and extend are: