NSCSW Workshop: Understanding Coercion & Embodying Non-Coercion

Understanding Coercion, Embodying Non-Coercion & Reimagining How We Practice

Coercion exists along a continuum of power and control that extends far beyond individual relationships. While coercive control is recognized within the context of intimate partner violence and gender-based violence, coercion is also embedded within the policies, practices, institutions, and social systems that shape our workplaces, communities, and everyday social work practice.

This workshop invites participants to critically examine how coercion operates not only in the lives of the people and communities we work alongside, but also within helping relationships, organizational policies, professional expectations, and the broader systems in which we practice. Together, we will explore coercive control in the context of intimate partner violence, including fear, intimidation, surveillance, manipulation, enforced compliance, and the erosion of autonomy, and consider how these dynamics may also be reinforced through systems and social work practice.

Central to this workshop are these questions:

• When does care begin to resemble coercion?
• How can social workers balance care, protection, accountability, and risk management within systems that prioritize compliance, liability, efficiency, and measurable outcomes?

Participants will critically examine how interventions, eligibility criteria, organizational policies, and professional expectations can limit choice, reduce self-determination, create barriers to accessing services and resources, and shift helping relationships away from collaboration and toward coercion, control and harm.

Grounded in trauma-sensitive, anti-oppressive, intersectional, and decolonizing perspectives, the workshop explores how broader systems of power, including colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, racism, ableism, misogyny, heteronormativity, and other intersecting forms of oppression continue to shape social work practice and disproportionately impact Indigenous peoples, Black communities, racialized communities, people living with disabilities, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, and others who have been historically marginalized. Participants will examine how governments, legislation, organizations, and professional systems can intentionally or unintentionally reinforce coercion by restricting choice, conditioning access to services on compliance, silencing lived experience, and privileging institutional authority over relational accountability.

Throughout the workshop, participants will explore non-coercion as an intentional ethical and relational practice grounded in decolonizing approaches and informed by trauma-informed, anti-oppressive, and survivor-centred values. Through embodied inquiry and critical reflection, participants will consider how coercion may become embedded in everyday practice through the use of authority, professional power, mandatory processes, policies, compliance-based approaches, organizational cultures rooted in liability and risk aversion, and even our language, assumptions, and decision-making.

Using a non-coercion lens, participants will explore practical approaches to expanding opportunities for choice, fostering collaboration, practicing transparency, supporting informed consent, engaging in shared power, and strengthening relational accountability. We will also critically examine benevolent coercion: how actions intended to protect, help, or keep people safe can unintentionally limit autonomy, reduce choice, or reinforce power imbalances.

The workshop invites participants to turn inward to examine the relationship between coercion, trauma, and social workers' well-being. If participants are curious, they will have the opportunity to reflect on how coercion can become internalized within helping professions. Together, we will examine the ways we may unintentionally coerce ourselves by pushing beyond our physical, emotional, and relational limits; sacrificing our own well-being in the name of care; overextending our capacity; neglecting boundaries; and internalizing expectations to continually do more with fewer resources. We will consider how professional cultures that normalize self-sacrifice, productivity, and overwork can disconnect us from our own needs, our bodies, and values, ultimately affecting our capacity to practice in ethical, relational, and trauma-informed ways.

The workshop will conclude by inviting participants to engage in practices for embodying non-coercion in our words, actions, and relationships, while collectively reimagining and shaping possibilities for change across systems, workplaces, and practice settings.

This 2-hour workshop will not be recorded.

Objectives

• Knowledge: Understand key terms, concepts, and language related to coercive control and GBV/IPV; understand embodied practice of co-creating trauma sensitive relationships with survivors of gender-based violence, and what it means to be a trauma informed through policies and practices in organizations that work with survivors, and introducing self-inquiry practice to critically analyze and understand forces of oppression, power dynamics and coercion used in practice with survivors of gender-based violence.
• Skills: Apply concepts and skills related to coercive control and GBV/IPV in critical social work practice; apply resources and approaches to embodied advocacy and becoming a trauma steward in GBV work.
• Values: Shifts in worldviews, values, assumptions, and beliefs related to the oppressive factors of GBV/IPV & coercive control in social work practice.

Foundations

Several sections of the NSCSW Code of Ethics & Standards of Practice are relevant to this workshop:

Value 1: Respecting the Dignity and Worth of All People

• Guiding Principle 1.1: Social workers respect the inherent dignity and worth of all people.

• Guiding Principle 1.2: Social workers promote the self-determination and autonomy of all people.

• Guiding Principle 1.3: Social workers uphold the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all people consistent with applicable rights and legislation.

• Guiding Principle 1.6: Social workers uphold the dignity of all people by recognizing the worth of individuals with disabilities by upholding their rights, fostering inclusion and ensuring equal opportunities in society.

• Guiding Principle 1.7: Social workers uphold the rights of all people to receive services in a manner that considers intersecting factors of exclusion and respects all manner of diversity.

• Guiding Principle 1.8: Social workers respect the rights of service users to make decisions based on voluntary consent when possible.

• Guiding Principle 1.9: Social workers uphold the rights of every person, group, and community to be free from violence or threat of violence.

Value 2: Promoting Social Justice

• Guiding Principle 2.1: Social workers uphold the principles of social justice related to the rights of individuals, families, groups, and communities to receive fair and equitable access to services, resources, and opportunities and to be free of oppression, racism, and discrimination.

• Guiding Principle 2.4: Social workers advocate for the rights of all individuals, families, groups, and communities to be free from oppression, exclusion, racism, and discrimination.

Value 7: Providing Culturally Responsive Competent Professional Services

• Guiding Principle 7.1: Social workers are committed to the ongoing development of their professional abilities and knowledge, aiming to ensure the delivery of culturally responsive professional services.

• Guiding Principle 7.2: Social workers practise within their level of competence and seek appropriate guidance when services required are beyond their competence.

• Guiding Principle 7.3: Social workers contribute to the ongoing development of the social work profession and current and future social workers.

Speaker

Kristina Fifield (she/her), MSW, RSW, CCTP, Certified EMDR Trauma Therapist, TCTSY-F

Kristina is an intersectional feminist social worker who walks alongside survivors and families impacted by gender-based and family violence. She embodies a deep commitment to equity, trauma-sensitive care, and social justice–driven community healing in every relationship she builds.

Her practice is grounded in the understanding that survivors are the experts of their own bodies, stories, and experiences. Kristina centers choice, consent, and collaboration, and is intentional about sharing power in ways that feel meaningful and respectful.

She works from anti-pathologizing, body-first approaches to healing trauma, and is committed to decolonizing her practice through non-coercion, transparency, and relational accountability. Kristina honours each person’s autonomy and supports them in moving at their own pace, in ways that feel safe enough and supportive.

At the heart of her work is a belief that healing happens in relationship, through being seen, heard, and met with care, compassion, dignity, and respect.

Kristina participated in the Mass Casualty Commission Public Inquiry and co-authored a report for the commission highlighting systemic issues related to GBV for marginalized survivors. In 2023, she was appointed to the Progress and Monitoring Committee to represent the gender-based violence and advocacy sector.

Her work on the advisory committee for the LEAF’s Accountability Project and co-leading the GBV Advocacy Coalition in Nova Scotia underscores her commitment to promoting accountability for GBV.

"Thank you to all the survivors who have invited me to be a part of your journey. I am so grateful for everything I continue to learn from each of you."

Eligibility

NSCSW Members

All active, associate, retired associate, and student members of the Nova Scotia College of Social Workers are welcome to attend; our professional development programming is part of our member services funded by annual registration fees.

Community Partners

All allied health practitioners in Nova Scotia/Mi'kma'ki interested in learning more about this topic are eligible to sign up for a $25 partner ticket; just let us know which profession you are a part of when you register.

Professional development tracking

For members of NSCSW, participating in this event is eligible to fulfill the annual requirement for professional development related to anti-racist and anti-discriminatory practice. Members who have already completed that requirement for the year may instead categorize this session as formal professional development.

Visit nscsw.org/pd for more information about the updated professional development requirements for Nova Scotia social workers.

Questions?

Please contact nscsw@nscsw.org with any questions or concerns.