TOAH-NNEST
NATIONAL SEXUAL VIOLENCE CONFERENCE 2026
31 August - 1 September | Tākina Wellington Convention and Exhibition Centre
Workshops
Please see a list of Kaupapa Māori and Tauiwi workshops for the conference below, along with a short workshop description. Some workshops are still to come and will be added shortly.
Workshops will run for 40 minute time slots, times and dates will be added soon.
There is no need to register for workshops this year, please take note of which workshops you would like to attend.
Kaupapa Māori workshops
Te Kawa o Ngā Atua Wāhine: Awakening Ancestral Intelligence to Navigate from Kahupō to Toiora - Tina Maree Kaipara
"I te tīmatanga, ko te Kore. I takea mai te Pō. Ka puta ki te Whai-Ao, ki te Marama."
To guide our whānau out of Kahupō and into the radiant, unclouded expanses of Toiora, we do not look to external frameworks; we return them to their original, unblemished form. This interactive workshop introduces the foundational, pure-light architecture of Tāreikura Wānanga: a living, indigenous ecosystem designed to awaken and anchor Ancestral Intelligence within girls, teens, women, and kuia.
Beyond Surviving to Thriving – Lived Experience as Kaimahi -Ninakaye Taanetinorau and Shearna Brown
Ninakaye Taanetinorau (Ngāti Maniapoto) has a one on one koorero with Harmful Sexual Behaviour Specialist Shearna Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngati Kahu, Ngati Kahungunu me Rongowhakaata) on what it means to be someone who has survived lived experience of kahupō throughout early childhood, and now maintains a lifestyle and mahi practice with mokopuna whaiora today, that is centred around toiora.
Introduction to Black Rain - Faye Pouesi
This presentation introduces Black Rain, a spiritually grounded and culturally responsive kaupapa developed through more than 30 years of working alongside Māori whānau impacted by family violence, sexual violence, and intergenerational trauma. Developed by Fay Pouesi (Ngāruahine, Te Ātiawa), Black Rain supports individuals and whānau to move from trauma, disconnection, and violence toward healing, restoration, connection, and wellbeing.
The presentation will explore the origins of Black Rain and the lived experiences that shaped its development. Emerging from both personal healing and decades of practice, Black Rain was gifted through spiritual encounters and developed as a kaupapa that creates space for whānau to understand the deeper roots of violence across generations. Rather than functioning as a clinical model or structured intervention, Black Rain is relational, intuitive, and spiritually led. It supports people to reconnect with their stories, identify patterns of trauma within their whānau, and begin pathways toward transformation.
Reclaiming Rongoā Māori as Whānau Healing - Sorrel Kemp and Awhina Mitchell
This interactive workshop explores rongoā Māori as a pathway to reconnection, restoration, and collective wellbeing for whānau impacted by sexual violence. Participants will experience practical, kaupapa Māori approaches that strengthen regulation, identity, and connection through reflective kōrero, sensory activities, and healing practices grounded in whakapapa, taiao, and whanaungatanga.
From Āwhina Wāhine to Te Korowai Aroha: Carrying the Kaupapa Forward - Dr. Moana Mitchell and Pania Mitchell
What happens to a kaupapa when an organisation transitions? This presentation traces the journey from Āwhina Wāhine, a pioneering kaupapa Māori sexual violence service, to Te Korowai Aroha Whānau Services. It explores how a kaupapa of healing, mana wāhine, and whanaungatanga can endure across generations through the people who choose to carry it. Through storytelling, whakapapa, and lived experience, participants will reflect on the resilience of Māori-led organisations and the enduring strength of wāhine and whānau who continue to uphold this kaupapa.
Holding Space Before Crisis: Kaupapa Māori Early Intervention with Rangatahi - Dr. Moana Mitchell and Waimirirangi Wikitera
How do we prevent harm before crisis occurs? Drawing on the lived experience of HUA Rangatahi, a youth hub based in Kaitaia, this workshop explores how relationship-based, kaupapa Māori practice creates safe spaces where rangatahi reconnect to identity, belonging, and hope. Participants will leave with practical insights into early intervention, relational practice, and community approaches that strengthen resilience and reduce pathways towards harm.
Haerenga Motuhake: He Ara ki te Toiora, He Ara ki te Mana Motuhake - A Pathway to Wellbeing, A Pathway to Self-Determination - Krystal King, Tennilee Hori and Taryn Taunt
Haerenga Motuhake: He Ara ki te Toiora, He Ara ki te Mana Motuhake - A Pathway to Wellbeing, A Pathway to Self-Determination is a hands-on reflective workshop that brings together tikanga, creativity, and practice reflection. Participants will use the art of tukutuku to consider how their values, skills, and relationships contribute to supporting whānau through a holistic, kaupapa Māori approach.
Ngā Rere o te Wairua - Marina Morris
This experiential workshop explores the journey of wairua as a pathway to healing and transformation through movement, rhythm, sound, and embodied practice grounded in Te Ao Māori. Through a guided hāerenga drawing on whakapapa, mauri, tikanga, tapu, and kapa haka, participants will explore connection to identity, emotional expression, and spiritual wellbeing. Particularly relevant to the harmful sexual behaviour (HSB) space, this approach supports reconnection with wairua, identity, and embodiment in culturally meaningful ways, fostering self-awareness, emotional regulation, accountability, and restoration of mauri.
System Mapping - Carrie Tairua Savage
As a fierce cycle breaker and a staunch advocate for the liberation of intergenerational maemae, one of the healing modalities I draw on within my practice is System Mapping, a gentle and accessible approach for exploring inherited and often unseen intergenerational entanglements within whānau and wider systems. This modality supports participants to self-resource, transform wounding into wisdom, and restore balance, order, and a sense of belonging within their wider system.
For over ten years, I have utilised this modality to support the healing of myself, my whānau, hapū and eventually invited to facilitate this mahi for my iwi and within wider hāpori spaces.
Over time, this work has grown organically, with other whānau pou becoming trained facilitators, ensuring the practice remains embedded, sustained, and held within our own
people.
This interactive workshop aligns with the conference theme From Kahupō to Toiora – The Journey to Wellbeing and is grounded in Te Ao Māori, guided by the Poutama model, which recognises healing as a step-by-step, relational process shaped by culture, context, and lived experience.
Little Matters, Collective Change - Sherilee Kahui, Rachel Harrison, Melanie Calvesbert and Rebecca Whiting
This Q&A panel will explore how sexual violence prevention practitioners and other skilled practitioners can work collectively to shape behaviour change communications that support the prevention of sexual violence. Using ACC’s Little Matters campaign as an example, the panel will discuss how prevention expertise, communications practice, cultural knowledge and community insight can come together to create messages that are safe, strengths-based and grounded in evidence. The kōrero will consider what meaningful collaboration looks like, how different forms of expertise are valued, and how practitioners can work together to strengthen prevention efforts across whānau, communities and systems.
Wheako Tipuranga and Takatāpuitanga: Moving Towards Identities of Mana in Kaupapa Māori HSB Practice - Angelo Libeau
This wānanga introduces wheako tipuranga as an innovative kaupapa Māori ‘tool’, developed for use within a kaupapa Māori harmful sexual behaviour context through the work of Korowai Tūmanako. Participants will be encouraged to explore how wheako tipuranga can support a deeper understanding of sexual and relational development, particularly in relation to mana tipua and mana takatāpui, recognising that every person is bound together by their connection to ira tangata.
Drawing from its use within kaupapa Māori harmful sexual behaviour mahi, this wānanga will offer a brief overview of wheako tipuranga and open space for whakawhiti whakaaro on its use in practice. This will include discussion about how wheako tipuranga can be used effectively, and what kaupapa Māori practitioners may need to consider when engaging a lens that hāpai identities of mana. Consideration will be given to how identities of mana are held, understood, and experienced in diverse and evolving ways, with kōrero exploring what supports the use of wheako tipuranga in ways that are tika, pono, and uphold mana tipua and mana takatāpui within kaupapa Māori practice.
Reflections on the medicalisation of trauma and navigating pathways through to healing from sexual violence -
Gay Puketapu-Andrews and Lisa Chua-Holden
An industry has arisen around the idea of “trauma” which has elevated and made visible human suffering and changed the helping professions. However, the idea of trauma is not neutral and the biomedical model on which this is predicated, presents some challenges. It sits invisibly underneath; obscuring both violence and resistance, informing our practice and feeds the (often unjust) structures that we work within.
Through the presentation of ideas, the benefits and limitations of the concept of trauma will be highlighted and the western medical model will be critically examined. This workshop will ask participants to question, where do these ideas come from? And what are the edges of their usefulness? What is the lens with which I am viewing wellbeing? Are there alternatives? How do I position myself with people who come from a different worldview? Do I have a responsibility to act in order to challenge unjust structures?
Gay and Lisa both come from indigenous worlds in which overall wellbeing is the lens and connection between is the force. We have both spent much of our adult lives working with people who have had acts of violence perpetrated upon them, both interpersonally and systemically. We currently spend most of our time as counsellors in the ACC sensitive claims space, as clinical supervisors or spending time with whānau. In our work, we are consistently awestruck by acts and commitments to love and care, of campaigns of resistance and stories of thrivingness.
We view the ongoing journey of healing as very much including the ongoing learning and development of those facilitating healing. We also acknowledge the wider context within which healing takes place, which is required to be nurturing of healing and upholding of the mana of whānau. In a world where the experience of sexual violence has been pathologised and the responses to the experience has been colonised and medicalised, it is imperative that practitioners are alert to being drawn into this view of whānau they are supporting. It is also essential to ensure that the more wholistic ways of healing, such as those embedded in Te Ao Māori are integrated into the approach to the practices they are engaged with and to direct whānau to where they may be better served.
Tauiwi Caucus Workshops
Walking the Walk, Step by Step: From Insight to Action in Family and Sexual Violence Prevention - Mikayla Cahill
How do you turn community insight into meaningful violence prevention action? Together, we'll explore how findings from a Community Readiness Study informed the development of trauma-informed family and sexual violence prevention initiatives, including disclosures training, youth outreach programme, and a violence prevention Theory of Change Model. Participants will gain practical ideas for translating community insights into prevention strategies that reflect the strengths, needs, and readiness of their own communities.
Optimising Primary Prevention: A Tool for Enhancing Prevention Projects - Tallulah Cardno
Join a guided workshop using Tallulah Cardno’s new tool, ‘Optimising Primary Prevention’. The tool is designed to help practitioners develop sexual violence primary prevention projects/campaigns etc, whilst ensuring they align with key theories of primary prevention to increase the efficacy of the project. The tool is a dual purpose tool, both practical and educational, and can be used by those new to the sexual violence prevention sector and experienced practitioners. Participants will work in groups and use sample project briefs to complete the tool workbook. Participants will leave the workshop with:
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Theoretical knowledge of primary prevention
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A practical planning tool for future projects
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A hard copy of the theoretical framework and the workbook.
How can the sexual violence sector mobilise with communities? - Lesley-Ann Guild and Sacha Harwood
How do we create lasting, community-led change in preventing sexual violence, family violence, and child sexual abuse. This interactive workshop brings together practitioners, leaders, and communities to explore what it truly means to mobilise with communities, not to or for them.
This will be a collaborative space for anyone engaged in sexual violence prevention. It is an invitation to share successes, challenges, and inspiration. We invite you to come prepared to share your experiences so that you can connect with others working in similar spaces. We’ll be asking everyone to share projects and actions small or large answering the quesitons:
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What?
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With who?
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An insight, highlight or light bulb
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What surprised you?
This could include: theatre, music scenes, youth/peer leaders, organisations, supporting activists, communications intersection with SV prevention, digital spaces and solutions.
A Seat at the Table: Practical Models for Meaningful Youth Engagement - Imogen Stone
This practical, solutions-focused workshop responds directly to a key question from the sector: How do we actually work with young people in ways that are safe, meaningful, and sustainable?
Drawing on current youth insights and practice-based experience, this session explores what effective youth engagement looks like in real terms. It will examine common barriers, such as tokenistic consultation, feedback fatigue, limited resourcing, and unclear expectations, and how these can undermine trust and participation. Participants will also explore what safety means from a young person’s perspective, including emotional safety, agency, cultural responsiveness, and appropriate boundaries.
From Silence to Safety: Asian Immigrant Survivors on Their Journey to Wellbeing - Satya Bing and Sukriti Sabharwal
What does the journey to wellbeing look like for Asian immigrant survivors of sexual harm in Aotearoa? While every survivor's journey is unique, it is often shaped by the intersection of trauma, culture, migration, family expectations, and access to support.
Drawing on frontline experience in social work and crisis counselling, this interactive workshop explores how practitioners can support survivors as they move from crisis towards safety, empowerment, and recovery. Through a practice-based case example and facilitated reflection, participants will consider the impact of cultural and systemic barriers on disclosure, help-seeking, and healing, while exploring culturally responsive, trauma-informed approaches that promote wellbeing.
This session will offer practical insights into building trust, collaborative safety planning, psychoeducation, advocacy, and working alongside other services to provide holistic, survivor-centred support. Participants will leave with ideas they can apply in their own practice to strengthen culturally safe responses and support diverse communities on their journey to wellbeing.
The Cultural Skin: Navigating Proximity, Gender Dynamics, and Consent in the Latin American Diaspora - Araxi Mavridis
As the Latin American community in Aotearoa New Zealand continues to grow, frontline practitioners face a vital professional challenge: how do we reconcile a "high-contact" culture with "low-contact" Western safety frameworks?
Facilitated by Araxi, this engaging and eye-opening presentation explores the "perceptual gap" between Latin American and Kiwi social norms. Together, we will dive into how deeply ingrained cultural behaviors—such as personal space (proxemics), physical touch, communication styles, and traditional gender roles (Machismo and Marianismo)—can easily lead to significant cross-cultural misunderstandings in a post-#MeToo environment.
Grounded in TOAH-NNEST Prevention Principles, this session will help practitioners dismantle the "False Positive" trap—where genuine cultural warmth is mistakenly interpreted as predatory behavior or sexual invitation. Attendees will leave with practical, trauma-informed, and culturally sensitive tools to better support survivors, ensure accurate prevention education, and honor the multicultural realities of our work under Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Includes an optional, live interactive demonstration exploring cultural boundaries and personal space.
"Find a different job”, and other things sex workers don’t want to hear when they talk about sexual violence - Cherida Fraser
Stigma of sex work is a barrier to reporting harm and a common complaint is being told to get another job after experiencing sexual harm. This workshop will cover impacts of sex work stigma, unique barriers to reporting harm, and how sex workers negotiate consent. Overall we hope it will increase participants' confidence to meaningfully support sex workers who have experienced sexual harm.
Cherida Fraser has worked as a researcher, advocate, whanau ora kaimahi and community liaison in grassroots community-led spaces since she graduated with a Masters in Cross-cultural Psychology. Prior to graduating she worked as a sex worker and has been at NZPC: Aotearoa NZ Sex Workers' Collective for nine years supporting sex workers to work safely and advocating for their rights.
Sexual Violence Integrated Services - Tina Gulliver, Paul Mahu, Sandi Langford and Martin Hallen- Schmitz
Whiria Te Tangata WellStop
Looking at how we work with those that have been sexually harmed and those that have done the sexual harm in the same space.
How three services with different scope of practice, skills, and focus, work together to provide restorative practice and healing. Working alongside the whole system, where interfamilial sexual harm has occurred, to provide restoration and hope.
A holistic approach to whanau affected by sexual harm, achieved by working alongside whanau, creating an environment that supports an understanding restorative practice while meeting the needs of the whanau and contractual obligations.
The integrated services contribute to Shift 5 of the Te Aorerekura strategy:
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Safe, accessible integrated responses for people who have used violence includes wraparound services that model respectful, consensual, healthy relationships; enable accountability; and support behaviour change. Improved responses will provide services, support and programmes that are accessible early, particularly at the critical moment when people say they want to make change and are open to it. It is also about strengthening the informal supports for people using violence, for example, enabling those who have stopped using violence to support and inspire others to choose non-violence through peer-led initiatives.
Codes of Connection: Navigating Intimacy and Consent in Queer Spaces - Jono Selu, Moira Clunie and Jelly O’Shea
We need to talk about what happens after ‘Rainbow 101.’ This session moves past clinical checklists to look at the real, messy, beautiful, and complicated subcultures where queer people live and love. We explore how sexual violence practitioners can better understand these unique environments, work toward unlearning heteronormative biases, and build real, non-tokenistic pathways of trust that honour a survivor’s journey from Kahupō (distress) to Toiora (total wellbeing).
Too often, mainstream services stop at a baseline of "we aren't homophobic" or "we know what the acronym stands for." But a little bit of knowledge can actually close our minds to how much we don’t know. This workshop is an invitation to do better. Sexual violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it happens 1 within specific environments and subcultures that have their own codes of connection, expectations of consent, and experiences of shame.
Purposeful Peer Support Aotearoa - Tony Chamberlain
Purposeful Peer Support Aotearoa - a new wellbeing focused peer support framework – moving the focus of male victim-survivor support services from contracted outputs towards evidenced outcomes and alignment with social investment imperatives.
The pathway through the gateway - Caine Tawhai
“the pathway through the gateway”—is a reflective and meditative practice developed within a kaupapa Māori wānanga for tāne survivors of sexual abuse preparing for peer support roles. Drawing on the symbolism of the waharoa as a threshold into sacred communal space, it invites participants to move from the demands of everyday life into presence, stillness, and intentional reflection. Through this process, participants deepen self-awareness, emotional grounding, and relational capability, preparing them for the profound responsibility of holding space for others on their healing journeys.
Doing Prevention Differently: Community Development and Systems Change in Aotearoa - Sacha Harwood, Nikki Evans and Sophia Beaton
Community development and systems change in sexual violence primary prevention
What does sexual violence prevention look like when it is happening so far upstream that it may not always be recognisable as prevention? This panel brings together leaders from across the Hikitia initiative to explore primary prevention in Aotearoa New Zealand, grounded in community development and systems change.
Hearing all that is expressed: A feminist listening to the silencing of rape complainants while giving evidence -
Paulette Benton-Greig
This presentation brings a feminist ear to 30 Aotearoa/New Zealand rape trials to explore what they reveal about courtroom listening to adult female complainants. The research study involved listening for all complainant expression while they gave evidence (McDonald, 2020). In this analysis, I explore examples of those complainants being silenced and misheard, and their words refused, dismissed and reframed to identify three practices of silencing.
Sexual Violence Workforce Capability Frameworks - Susana Lepoamo and Heath Hutton
An exploration of the Sexual Violence Workforce Capability Frameworks and how these can be applied in the sexual violence specialist sector and beyond. The presentation will give an overview of the frameworks and some of the initial implementation tools that have been designed to support the implementation of these across the sexual violence workforces.
From Silence to Strength: Cultural Resilience and Healing Towards Toiora - Sylvia Yandall
This workshop explores the complex lasting impacts and effects of trauma on identity, relationships, vulnerability and emotional well being. Toiora offers an important framework or understanding restoration and wellbeing as a deeply personal and holistic journey. The body can “remember” trauma when the mind cannot - Personal boundaries can develop as a protective response - Grooming and coercive relationships – The tension between providing empathy and compassion to others while finding it difficult to extend the same care inward – Professional resilience can coexist with unresolved personal trauma, are some of the issues covered in this presentation.
Six things SV organisations can do to improve access and response for disabled people - Dr. Debbie Hager
Disabled adults have a higher lifetime prevalence rate of sexual assault and intimate partner violence than non-disabled adults (48% vs 30%). Many organisations assume that because they are non-judgemental and welcoming to all, they don’t need specific strategies, or to learn about disabled people and their needs, to be accessible. This is not correct. If you are not specifically planning for the inclusion of disabled people, your service is inaccessible to many.
In this workshop we will discuss six core strategies organisations can use to ensure their services are safer and more accessible for disabled people. These strategies will be presented and explained, then we will discuss what they mean and how these strategies can be implemented in your organisation.
Forty years of battles for sexual violence services – A personal journey – falling into gaps and building solutions – Dr. Kim McGregor QSO
This presentation provides a personal account of forty years working in the sexual violence intervention sector, highlighting both enduring challenges and important achievements driven by bicultural sector wide collaboration and persistence. It situates this journey within the broader historical foundations established in the creation of flaxroots, volunteer-based services such as Rape Crisis and Te Kākano o te Whānau.