Good Treatment

Good treatment Power relations

Summary

In this activity participants understand through experience why it is important to treat others the way we would like to be treated and reflect on what makes them feel good.

Materials

Paper, pens/pencils, markers

Procedure

Part one

1. Divide participants in small groups and ask each group to come up with a task for another group – something they should perform or do – to make everyone laugh and help energise the group. Give them time to come up with a task. 2. Ask each group to present their task, but no one should start implementing the task at this point. Normally, the tasks would be somewhat humiliating or make participants feel somewhat uncomfortable. 3. Tell the participants that you have forgotten to mention one important condition of the activity: each group will have to perform the task they have come up with within their group. Invite them to do it. 4. After the tasks have been performed, you can invite participants to reflect or move on to the second part and make a combined reflection at the end.

Part two

1. Invite participants to make themselves comfortable, close their eyes and think of a recent moment when they felt happy: celebrating an achievement, doing something or being with someone that makes them happy, etc. Ask them to recreate this moment in their mind: where they were, with whom, what they did, what they felt, remembering smells, sounds around them, etc. 2. Having allowed enough time for remembering and reliving, ask participants to open their eyes and form pairs. Each participant of the pairs

can use the body of their peer as clay and build a statue that would represent the situation or feeling they thought about in the first step. 3. Make a round and ask each participant to show and explain their statue.

Debriefing questions

• How do you feel? • In the first part of the activity, how did you feel when another group was imposing a decision on what you need to do? How does this relate with the topic of power? • Can you think of real-life examples when humiliating decisions are imposed to certain people or groups of people? • How did you feel when the rules changed and you had to perform your own tasks? • Would you have come up with a different task if you had known that you yourself had to do it? If so, how different and why? • Why is it easier to humiliate others instead of us? • What is the general conclusion of the first part of the activity? • What is the difference in the feeling that the first part and the second part of the activity brought up in you? How do you explain it? • Which part of the activity represents ‘good treatment’? How do you understand ‘good treatment’? • Why is it important to know what makes us feel good? How does it relate to our relationships to others? • How can we use the concept of good treatment to fight racism and invisible racism?