ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the implications that previous themes within the data have for how resilience is framed and understood in the context of trauma, harm, victimisation, and recovery. This underscores the real diversity of how people may respond to serious harm and bereavement, giving useful direction to researchers and practitioners alike. Participants’ understandings of overcoming or negotiating adversity are grouped into five main categories. These categories are not the specific sources of support described in previous chapters but rather predominant or overriding ways in which overcoming adversity was framed. These categories include resilience as: (1) A Reformulation of Self or Experience; (2) Group Solidarity; (3) Tacit Peer Support; (4) Transcending the Past; and (5) Resisting Injustice. The second half of the chapter considers the thorny question of victim-centred policymaking, including the potential policy-relevance of critical studies of political violence and terrorism and the perennial risk of political co-option this carries. It then highlights six key recommendations for policymakers and practitioners to focus on, directly based on the findings of the present and preceding chapters. These centre on: (1) A Duty of Care for the Media; (2) Information Sharing Among Emergency Services; (3) Languages of Recovery within Victim Support Policy; (4) Victim Compensation; (5) Fostering Survivor Solidarity and Peer Support Programmes; and (6) Coroners and Inquests.
