Nonviolent Community Safety and Peacekeeping
What is Pt'chang?
Pt'chang is a nonviolent community safety and peacekeeping group that assists community groups and grassroots organisations create safety in a wide variety of areas and situations.
We provide training workshops, material and human support to community groups and can also provide coordinated teams of trained nonviolent peacekeepers upon invitation.
Pt'chang is an all-volunteer and non-profit organisation that seeks to promote and extend the idea that we all can create safety ourselves.
Why?
Pt'chang asserts that we all have a basic right to feel safe at all times and that all of us share responsibility for creating safety in our lives and communities.
Pt'chang sees safety as pro-active - the creation of space where all people can express and experience their life to the fullest - that it is possible to create safety powerfully and nonviolently. It is not something that we should leave to somebody else or to 'the authorities' but something that all of us can do something about.
Nonviolent community safety describes approaches to safety that are community initiated and controlled. It is much more of an 'opening-up' and community building process than the common 'lock-up' and 'power-over' responses to safety that tend to dominate in our society. The annual 'Reclaim The Night' marches, Aboriginal Night Patrols and the many Lesbian and Gay anti-violence street patrols are examples of nonviolent community safety initiatives.
How?
Pt'chang uses co-operative and power-with processes to help create safety in ways that empower and bring people together.
We are committed to active nonviolence, responding to all situations and parties with an open mind and respecting the value and shared humanity of every person.
Pt'chang is an open and inclusive group. We attempt to liaise and build relationships with all groups and maintain a neutral stance in relation to conflicts or differences between groups and individuals. This neutrality reflects our role as mediators in some situations. We seek to remain accountable and responsible to the all parts of the wider community.
Our training is diverse and practical. We learn active listening skills, creative and nonviolent ways of intervening in violence, conflict resolution skills and practise diverse, and effective ways of creating safety and reducing violence in different situations (and we are learning all the time!).
What is Peacekeeping?
Peacekeeping is a powerful way of creating safety, intervening in conflict, interrupting actual violence and controlling our own space. It uses strategies and methods that are safe, effective, creative, empowering, non-heroic, and that do not escalate the overall level of violence or victimisation. It can be used by individuals in many contexts but also used by trained and co-ordinated groups of people in situations that are particularly unsafe or when conflict, violence or repression is anticipated.
All of us can be nonviolent peacekeepers. In our everyday lives many of us already have personal safety strategies and techniques. We often practise techniques that minimise, reduce or interrupt violence, resolve conflict and resist harassment within our lives, sometimes without even realising how effective they are. Nonviolent peacekeeping draws from and is based on these creative everyday skills and strategies.
Peacekeeping is guided by an awareness of 'safety' and 'unsafety' that is centred in our own bodies. This body centred awareness forms a secure, grounded place from which to act that is trustworthy and unalterably ours. Using clear and identifiable 'body alerts' which are part of the bodies automatic nervous system, we can define safety ourselves and act in ways that are safest for us.
Peacekeeping is about using power, but in a way that seeks to work with, rather than against other people. Nonviolent peacekeeping is based on co-operative and open 'power- with' principles rather than the forceful, coercing, discriminating and often violent 'power-over' that is commonly seen in the actions of police and private security guards. This use of 'power-with' is important and something that allows us to create safety in ways that do not exclude, alienate or repress the needs of others.
Indeed, peacekeeping is about meeting people's needs; not only people's very basic need to feel safe but many other needs that may lead to conflict or violence if they are not met. Recognising and helping to meet people's needs for self-esteem, identity, control over their lives (and sometimes actual material needs) forms the basis for nonviolent peacekeeping strategies for creating safety.
In short, peacekeeping is not about curtailing, suppressing or coercing people or their behaviour (which tends to only contain or transfer violence - if not actually escalate it!) Peacekeeping is about creating space, often on a small scale, in which people can express themselves to the fullest. A very common example of this is the peacekeeping practise of active listening that aims to allow an aggressive, angry or upset person to calm down by meeting their immediate need to simply be heard. Active listening also allows us to identify other needs that person may have that we can then, hopefully, help to meet.
Nonviolent peacekeeping is a way of creating safety at actions, protests and political events that is often the most consistent with the aims of the social change group or of the movement as a whole. Actions which challenge prevailing conditions or injustices can seek to create safety and resolve conflict in ways that are just, peaceful, culturally appropriate and nonviolent by developing Peacekeeping strategies. Trained groups of Peacekeepers form very viable and effective, community-initiated alternatives to allowing police or private security to control our 'space' for us.
Pt'chang
Pt'chang was initially formed in 1992 but expanded when combined with the ConFest Safety project in 1996. Pt'chang has grown out of our combined experiences within community safety projects, social change movements, nonviolent activism and work in the human services and community development fields.
To date Pt'chang has...
- conducted Nonviolent Community Safety Projects at several 'ConFests' (large, 8,000 plus, week-long outdoor festivals at a rural site)
- provided peacekeeping at the Indigenous Solidarity Conference (March 1997, Melbourne)
- provided training and peacekeeping at 'Let Them Stay' - a large concert/rally, march and an overnight sleepover in Melbourne in support of East Timorese Asylum Seekers (April 1997)
- provided training and peacekeeping at 'Not the Casino Party' - a large concert/rally organised by the Interchurch Gambling Taskforce to protest the social impacts of Melbourne's Crown Casino (May 1997)
-provided peacekeeping, co-ordinated first aid and community safety initiatives at Roxstop, a large desert action and festival in South Australia to protest Australian uranium mining. (Sept/October 1997)
- trained approximately 130 people through eleven nonviolent community safety or peacekeeping workshops for a variety of groups and situations, of either half-day, full day or two day duration over the past year.
Also, we have received requests to be involved in many other events and activities that we have had to turn down, indicating the high demand for a group such as Pt'chang.
How can I become involved?
Pt'chang has regular meetings, a newsletter, runs workshops and training sessions and is open to working on a variety of peacekeeping and community safety initiatives.
The Pt'chang Report is a fifty-five page account of the ConFest Safety Project providing background, case studies, photographs, how we organised, what we achieved and is an ideal resource for people wishing to create safety at any large event using alternative 'power-with' methods. It is available for $10 plus $3 postage at the address below.
Pt'chang also has a forty page Nonviolent Peacekeeping Handbook that covers a wide range of skills, information and advice for peacekeepers. Available for $2 each plus postage.
If you would like to be involved in Pt'chang as a volunteer, attend a workshop, receive our newsletter or would like more information please contact us at:: Pt'chang! , PO. Box 69 , Brunswick, Victoria 3056. Phone: 015 815 333. Email <[email protected]>
Pt'chang is an unfunded group that relies on fundraising and donations. If you wish to make a donation please send a cheque or money order to the address above. Thank you for your support!
Anthony Kelly