GRACE

Five project goals

1. Rehabilitation across the justice pathway — multi-tiered, trauma-informed training programmes for incarcerated, at-risk and post-release individuals, co-created with inmates and correctional staff and built around empathy, accountability and lasting behavioural change.
2. Restorative Ambassadorship — a peer-mentoring model that trains selected inmates and ex-detainees to support behavioural change and grow a culture of responsibility inside correctional facilities and beyond.
3. Professional capacity building — training for officers, psychologists, social workers, teachers, directors and probation staff on trauma-informed and gender-sensitive responses to GBV dynamics, aligned with national action plans and EU frameworks.
4. Early intervention & post-release support — workshops for young people at risk, plus peer mentoring, gender-awareness sessions and community-based accountability tools for former detainees.
5. Survivor-centred coordination — survivor liaison committees and structured engagement with NGOs, victim support services and public authorities through policy dialogues, training and dissemination.

Who GRACE works with

Six groups were selected for their proximity to GBV dynamics, their current exclusion from structured interventions, and their potential to drive systemic change:

1. Incarcerated GBV offenders — engaged as co-creators rather than beneficiaries, in trauma-informed and peer-mentored programmes centred on accountability and victim safety.
2. At-risk or quasi-offenders — young men in probation or alternative justice settings, reached through early-intervention workshops on toxic masculinity, non-violence and emotional literacy.
3. Post-release former offenders — supported through peer-led mentoring, restorative accountability circles and community reintegration pathways that reduce the risk of reoffending.
4. Correctional staff and frontline professionals — prison officers, probation staff, psychologists, teachers and social workers, trained in restorative and trauma-sensitive practice.
5. National and local stakeholders — NGOs, victim support services and public institutions joined up through common training, co-creation workshops and policy roundtables.
6. Victim-survivors of GBV — not directly targeted, but at the heart of the project’s purpose: survivor liaison committees in each country uphold the “do no harm” principle across every intervention.

What makes GRACE innovative?

1. Participatory and trauma-informed rehabilitation design — curricula are shaped with the people who live and work inside correctional environments, not delivered top-down, and cover the full continuum from pre-custody to custody and post-release.
2. Restorative Ambassadorship and peer-led change — detainees and former offenders trained as mentors bridge formal systems and lived experience, reinforcing new norms from within and building leadership among people usually left out of reform processes.
3. Integrated professional training and survivor safeguards — institutional capacity and survivor ethics are built as one system, with frontline training grounded in survivor-informed ethics and backed by survivor liaison committees in every participating country.