I'm here in Juneau for a steering committee meeting for DELTA, a Center for Disease Control (CDC) funded project to do an assessment of the needs and resources in Alaska for Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) prevention and to develop a state plan. I've posted on two previous meetings here and here. We've met a couple of times as a steering committee already. We now have an initial draft of the needs and resources assessment. There really is relatively little good data for evaluating much more than the actual incidence of intimate partner violence - and what we have there is a low count, data on people who report incidents.
A key problem is confidentiality. In small Alaskan villages just a couple of pieces of demographic data can identify someone, so attempts to get enough data to develop correlations between violence and other factors is very difficult.
Another issue we discussed and have discussed before is the dividing line between prevention and intervention. CDC money now is focused on prevention, but it seems there is a loosening of the resolve to create absolute separations. Intervention is seen is work done after there is a problem, prevention is work to prevent incidents in the first place. But if you work with children in a family where there was violence is that prevention (keeping the kids from repeating their parents' behaviors) or intervention (working the kids through the traumas they have experienced as witnesses)?
But I'm encouraged (again) by the wide experience, knowledge, and general reasonableness and understanding of the various group members, who represent different levels of prevention work - from the immediate village/urban prevention activities to policy makers and researchers.
Jocelyn was here from Atlanta to see what we were doing and to offer insights from the CDC perspective of what we're doing. According to her, we're well along on our project and that our initiative is impressive. We have to talk to people from the other DELTA project states and see if she tells them the same thing
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