DELTA Meeting - Working to Prevent Intimate Partner Violence

I spent the afternoon at a steering committee meeting for DELTA. Don't ask about the acronym, the group is working on developing a plan for prevention of intimate partner violence (IPV). The link takes you to a post on a previous meeting, and it has links to earlier ones even. The project is funded by the National Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Alaska is one of 14 states to have such a grant.

Coming up with a state plan on something like this feels a bit presumptuous, but actually, I'm the only member who isn't closely involved in the field of IPV. I'm supposed to be contributing with my public administration expertise. For the last two years we've been trying to inventory how the state tracks intimate partner violence and what ways people and agencies are trying to prevent it. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the CDC is strongly interested in prevention rather than intervention. (Intervention being defined as reaction by authorities AFTER IPV.)

We're also trying to document what programs exist, where, and how one determines whether they are effective. A current buzzword in the field is "evidence-based programs" meaning that there are studies to test whether things work not so that money is spent on the most effective programs. As a guiding principle, that's great, but there are many obstacles. What works in Philadelphia may not work in rural Alaska. If you strictly follow the idea of evidence-based programs, you could never have a new program because there'd be no evidence that it will work. And measuring what hasn't happened (we're about prevention) is also tricky. Statistics has lots of sophisticated techniques for doing all this, but collecting sensitive data about people in small communities can increase risks for people as well. It's all pretty tricky, but there is so much to do. So we have to do what we can. Like most things, the more you learn about things, the more complex it gets.


But what little data there are tend to focus on incidents of IPV and there is little funding for prevention and measuring it is also elusive. We've worked hard over the last two years to let others in the field know what we're doing, mostly by talking about it with people members meet professionally who are in the field one way or another and through putting on workshops at professional conferences of people who are in positions to do prevention work (community health people, social workers, teachers, law enforcement,etc.)

[While the chart might look messy, making it helped us communicate our different understandings of the root causes of the problems and to focus on the areas and levels that would be most fruitful. And someone has transcribed it all so we can see it neatly.]


I continue to be impressed with the professionalism, knowledge, enthusiasm, and dedication of the other steering committee members. We're hoping to have a draft plan ready in January 2009. The idea is to have done a significant amount of work, but not have it so far along that it is a done deal when people get to look at it. We know that, despite our efforts, there are people who should be involved but haven't been. We just don't know who they are.



We'll have plenty of time next year to move it along to something the state can adopt to minimize the incidence of IPV through prevention rather than deal with victims and perpetrators AFTER things have gone wrong. Some of the committee members are working with people dealing with prevention of other health and social problems (alcohol and drug abuse for example) since there is considerable overlap.

We'll meet again tomorrow morning.