Health Care
Progress in Addressing Domestic Violence in Indian Country
At a July 13 briefing at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Family Violence Prevention Fund joined other leading health, Native and violence prevention experts to release a new report that documents dramatic improvements in the health system’s response to domestic violence at Indian, Tribal and Urban health care facilities across the United States. When the program began in 2002, just four percent of women at Indian Health Service facilities were screened by doctors and nurses for domestic violence. By 2009, when it ended, 48 percent of women who sought services at these facilities were being screened for abuse – and preliminary data shows that 62 percent of women at some sites are now being screened. [...]
Building Domestic Violence Health Care Responses in Indian Country: A Promising Practices Report
Intimate partner violence poses a significant health threat across Indian Country. Increasingly, health care professionals recognize that it is a major public health problem that causes grave and lasting harm to individuals, families and communities. In the largest-ever survey of its kind, a 2008 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on health and violence found that 39 percent of Native women reported that they were victims of intimate partner violence some time in their lives – a rate higher than any other race or ethnicity surveyed. [...]
How Health Reform May Affect Victims of Domestic, Sexual, and Dating Violence
By making health care affordable and easier to obtain, health reform allows victims of violence and abuse to have access to services that would treat their abuse and many of the resulting conditions of that abuse before they worsen. In the new health care reform law, victims of violence and abuse were specifically included in several new protections and programs, and the new law also opens the door to integrating violence and abuse prevention into public health programs, research priorities, and adolescent health initiatives. [...]
New Tool for Public Health Professionals
The Family Violence Prevention Fund announces a new and improved evidence-based tool, Making the Connection: Intimate Partner Violence and Public Health. Featuring revised data and new topics, this PowerPoint training and education tool distills the most recent data and promising practices on the health impact of violence on maternal child health, mental health, injury prevention, children and adolescents, and more. [...]
Project Connect
The Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF) has chosen ten sites in nine states for a groundbreaking two-year violence prevention initiative designed to improve the health and safety of women and children. Project Connect: A Coordinated Public Health Initiative to Prevent Violence against Women is funded by the Office on Women’s Health of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It will find new ways to identify, respond to and prevent domestic and sexual violence, and promote an improved public health response to abuse. Project Connect funding stems from the health provisions in the Violence against Women Reauthorization Act of 2005. [...]
Home Visitation Programs Can Help More Families if They Address Domestic Violence
With Congress considering a substantial investment in home visitation programs, they should be refined to more purposefully address the needs of mothers and children at risk for domestic violence, as well as the link between domestic violence and child abuse/neglect. That is the conclusion of Realizing the Promise of Home Visitation: Addressing Domestic Violence and Child Maltreatment, a new brief released at a Capitol Hill briefing in February. [...]
Health Resource Center on Domestic Violence
The National Health Resource Center on Domestic Violence is the nation’s clearinghouse for information on the health care response to domestic violence and provides free technical assistance and materials to thousands of people each year. The Center is one of five specialized domestic violence resource centers in the country funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. [...]
Reproductive Health Initiative
Pregnancy is an important experience in a woman’s life and violence should not be a part of it. With nearly one in three women at risk for abuse in her lifetime, domestic violence is more common than pre-eclamplsia and hypertension -- both commonly addressed during pregnancy. Yet women are rarely asked about abuse or given information about the links between violence and their health. [...]
Study: Many Victims of Partner Violence Experience Reproductive Coercion
A groundbreaking study released this week sheds light on a little-recognized form of abuse in which men use coercion and birth control sabotage to cause their partners to become pregnant against their wills. The study, published in the January issue of Contraception, finds this kind of reproductive control to be especially common in relationships in which women experience physical or sexual partner violence. [...]
