Peer support workers, individuals with lived experience, are widely recognised as an evidence-based approach to engaging highly marginalised populations.
24 JUNE 2026. When women come to ROCC for Women, they often arrive carrying more than one kind of hardship — a history of trauma, contact with the criminal justice system, the weight of addiction, and isolation.
ROCC's answer has always been a trauma-informed, wraparound approach: personalised, flexible, long-term support built around each woman's circumstances rather than a one-size-fits-all program. Their new peer-led workshop program builds on this approach while also drawing on research supporting the role of peer support in recovery.
What is peer support, and how does it work?
“Peer support is an approach for supporting recovery, in which individuals with lived experience provide practical and emotional support to others who are navigating similar challenges.”
At its core, peer support is help offered by people who've lived through something similar. It's a recovery-oriented relationship built on shared experience and reciprocity, where both the person giving and the person receiving support benefit (Hobbs, Wanjiru & David, 2025). Research has found that peer support providers typically play two connected roles:
an engagement role — building trust, reducing isolation, helping people connect with services — and
an emotional role — offering hope, comfort, and validation grounded in lived experience.
ROCC for Women's new peer support worker role is built around continuity of care — relationship-building, ongoing advocacy, and staying connected with women between sessions — to boost workshop attendance, deepen engagement, and strengthen women's connections to each other and their community.
The benefits of peer support
The evidence is genuinely encouraging. For people receiving peer support, the review found consistent gains across three areas psychologists describe as basic to wellbeing:
autonomy (a stronger sense of self-efficacy and boundaries),
relatedness (reduced isolation, rebuilt trust in relationships) and
competence (better access to information and services).
Emotionally, this often translates into less anxiety and loneliness and more hope and self-esteem — with hope singled out as a particularly powerful outcome, because a peer supporter is living proof that recovery is possible.
It's a simple idea backed by strong evidence: recovery happens faster, and more sustainably, in connection with others who understand. ROCC's new peer support workshop program puts that principle into practice.
We're grateful to our board member Fiona David and her team at Fair Futures for generously sharing their recent research report into Peer Support on which we were able to draw for this article. ‘The Potential of Peer Support in Recovery from Modern Slavery: A Rapid Review’. Fair Futures Pty Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-7640305-0-2.
Reference: Hobbs, S., Wanjiru, S. & David, F. (2025).
