Centering Lived Experience: Survivor-Guided Design of a Trauma-Informed Education Intervention

Background and Purpose:
Institutional child abuse remains a widespread and often overlooked crisis within congregate care settings, including therapeutic boarding schools, wilderness programs, and residential treatment centers. Too often, social workers and allied professionals unknowingly contribute to this harm—whether through referrals to abusive programs or through clinical practices that dismiss or invalidate survivors' experiences. This project represents the initial phase of a broader intervention: the development of a CEU-accredited training for helping professionals, designed to prevent institutional harm and improve the quality of care provided to survivors. Rooted in the profession’s commitment to dignity, cultural humility, and social justice, this research seeks to ensure that survivor voices are centered in both the design and content of the educational intervention.

Methods:
We conducted qualitative interviews and focus groups with 35 adult survivors of institutional abuse. Participants were recruited through survivor networks and shared their perspectives on what social workers and other helping professionals should understand to better serve institutional trauma survivors. A grounded theory approach guided data collection and analysis. Importantly, survivors were not only participants but also research partners. Survivor-scholars played an active role in project leadership, research design, interviewing, coding, interpreting data, and shaping the emerging framework, ensuring that the themes were responsive to the lived reality of survivors rather than imposed from a purely academic lens.

Results:
Across interviews, survivors consistently emphasized the need for helping professionals to acknowledge and confront the systemic nature of institutional abuse. Participants described how seemingly neutral clinical actions—such as reliance on diagnostic labels or historical records, or dismissal of a client’s account as treatment resistance—can mirror and reinforce the disempowerment experienced in institutional settings. They called for education that directly challenges professionals to examine their roles within larger systems of power and control.

Survivors also identified key components of ethical, trauma-informed practice. These included affirming survivor autonomy, avoiding pathologizing language, and understanding how structural violence shapes both survivor behavior and healing. Many recommended that social workers be trained not only to support survivors but to resist becoming complicit in referring vulnerable clients to for-profit and unregulated programs. Participants emphasized the need for training to be grounded in real stories and practical examples, delivered in a format that centers compassion, humility, and accountability.

Conclusions and Implications:
This project positions professional education as a critical intervention to prevent future institutional abuse and to improve care for survivors of institutional child abuse. The resulting CEU curriculum—shaped collaboratively with survivor-scholars—offers a model of participatory curriculum design that is grounded in lived experience, trauma theory, and social work ethics. As the next phase of this project evaluates the training’s impact on provider knowledge and behavior, this formative phase demonstrates that educational interventions can do more than build skills; they can challenge complicity, promote justice, and help repair broken systems of care. In centering lived experience throughout the research and development process, this work sets a precedent for more ethical, responsive, and survivor-informed social work education.