Field notes from the PFI Learning Hub webinar with Claudia Christen-Schneider
Martin Howard · 22 May 2026
I sat in on a PFI Learning Hub webinar with Claudia Christen-Schneider — our paths first crossed years back through Sycamore Tree Project networks. She’s now president of the Swiss RJ Forum, on the board of the European Forum for Restorative Justice, and has done more than anyone I’m aware of to build trauma-informed practice into a national RJ service. Her 2025 book Trauma-Informed Restorative Dialogues: The Power of Community (Routledge) is the fullest single account of this work I’ve read; her 2021 IJRJ paper with Aaron Pycroft at Portsmouth is worth tracking down for the empirical groundwork. Her Swiss team only takes serious-harm cases — about 90% sexual violence, the rest mostly homicide — so when she talks about pacing, preparation and shame, she’s drawing from inside the hardest work in our field. Below is what I found most worth carrying back.
Trauma-informed practice is not the same thing as restorative justice — and it matters that we don’t conflate them. Claudia kept returning to this. RJ is a process — facilitated dialogue between those harmed and those responsible, in whatever form fits. Trauma-informed practice is a way of being that applies anywhere — medicine, schools, social services, our work. They share values, but RJ is not automatically trauma-informed. We have to make it so, deliberately.
The prevalence numbers should sober anyone running RJ programs. The WHO data she cited: at least 70% of the global population experience a DSM-5-level traumatic event in their lifetime; 30% experience four or more. In prison populations, between 90 and 93% of those who’ve caused serious harm have themselves suffered serious harm. PTSD sits at around 4% in the general population but rises to roughly 30% inside. And interpersonal trauma carries the highest risk of lasting impact — which is the trauma our participants almost always bring with them.
Her scaffold is the Five Rs plus six principles, but the punchline is relationships. Realise how pervasive trauma is. Recognise the symptoms (often as adaptive coping). Respond by embedding the knowledge across services. Resist re-traumatisation. And — the one she insists matters most — relationships. She was crisp about this: trauma-informed practice isn’t therapy, isn’t magic, doesn’t demand mastery of neurobiology. It’s about learning to be safe people. The six operating principles — safety, trust and transparency, choice, collaboration, empowerment, cultural humility — sit underneath. And safety can never be defined for someone, only with them. She gave a good example against her own assumption: she used to think a calm office was the safest setting, but for many participants enclosed space triggers a flight response, so she now runs whole preparation phases walking by lakes and through woods.
Her “Roy” case was the most powerful illustration. Roy entered an RJ process as the person responsible for serious sexual harm — who had himself been groomed and raped from ages 9 to 11 by a family friend, was alcohol-dependent by 12, and went on to abuse his best friend at 13. Preparation alone took two years, including exchanged video messages and letters before any direct meeting. The takeaway: pacing, choice and consent aren’t gateway questions you settle once. They’re continuous. Trauma is loss of control; restorative work has to restore agency in granular ways — when emails arrive, how long sessions last, where they happen, whether and how touch is offered.
Shame is her parallel framework, and she treats it as seriously as trauma itself. Drawing on Gilligan — shame as a principal risk factor for violence — she mapped the cycle most of us know intuitively: shame unaddressed isolates, isolation hardens into anger, anger becomes violence. She uses Donald Nathanson’s compass of shame in group preparation. Practitioners have to name shame carefully — not pile on with “how horrible” responses or “why didn’t you…” questions that load self-blame onto victims, and not avoid the word either. Following Brené Brown, shame has to be spoken. The piece I hadn’t fully thought through before was her point that the antidote is mutual empathy. Receiving alone can re-shame; giving and receiving together rebuilds relational standing. That’s a big part of why she runs adapted group dialogues alongside one-to-one work.
The Swiss model offers doorways, not a single methodology. Direct victim–offender dialogues for those ready; adapted Sycamore Tree group dialogues for story-sharing in groups; re-entry and family circles for incarcerated people and their support networks. The point isn’t running more programs, it’s meeting people where they actually are. Their STP adaptation puts huge weight on preparation — individual interviews, trigger mapping, explicit consent about touch, and three early sessions building community, safety, empathy and trust before any story-sharing. For settings where direct dialogue isn’t possible (someone asked from Singapore about prisons that won’t allow victim contact), she pointed to victim-impact programs, recorded testimony, and conversations that start from prisoners’ own experiences of shame and victimisation.
The line I keep coming back to is about us. Claudia was direct that vicarious and secondary trauma is not an individual failing to manage — it’s an organisational responsibility. She told the story of a colleague with 36 years in high-security prisons who didn’t recognise his own symptoms; by the time the team noticed, he had to leave the service. Trauma-informed leadership normalises talk about trauma and shame among staff, trains teams to recognise it in themselves, builds peer-support pairings, and provides what she calls compassionate leave — so people can step out without further shame when the work has become too much. I think there’s real work for us in that last piece.
A three-part workshop in January goes deeper into neurobiology, shame–offending links, applied principles and team care. Worth flagging widely.
Further reading
- Christen-Schneider, C. (2025). Trauma-Informed Restorative Dialogues: The Power of Community. Routledge.
- Christen-Schneider, C. & Pycroft, A. (2021). An exploration of trauma-informed practices in restorative justice: a phenomenological study. The International Journal of Restorative Justice, 2021(2).
