I’m in Milan! On holiday with my family… but visiting the many wonderful museums here I can’t help but reflect on what a trauma-informed museum would look, feel, behave like.
On a visit to one museum I was told I had to follow a particular route around the spaces. When I tried to go a slightly different way, I was sternly told ‘No’ by staff who looked more like a police officer than a visitor team member.
🖐️It wasn’t even a busy museum, I still don’t know why I had to walk this route. So what? you might be thinking. Well, what struck me was I had no CHOICE in this matter. Along with a few other matters I discovered in the course of my visit. It was clear who was ‘in charge’ in the dynamic and who wasn’t. Hmmm…
Choice – is a key principle of trauma-informed practice. It’s important to integrate choice in a museum experience in any way we can.
Choice supports traumatised people to have a sense of agency and feel in control in a situation – these are often the things that were taken away from them in their trauma.
🏛️ I’m not saying that being told what way to walk around a museum will necessarily cause an extreme emotional response in a person, I’m simply saying… it’s not ideal. These rules and the manner in which we enforce them matter.
🤔 And as museums the very least we can ask ourselves is ‘Are they really necessary?’.
Louise Thompson 