Crosscutting Opportunities to Reduce Family Violence

The panel will address directions for the field to pursue that would better integrate the social work response to child abuse prevention and gender-based violence and ways that partnerships between these threads of social work—especially child abuse, gender-based violence, and elder abuse—can be better integrated. Also discussed will be a range of other partners we can work with to help to end family violence and how these topics can be formulated into a stronger research and educational focus.

Safe Children: Ending Severe and Fatal Maltreatment of Children

Ending fatal violence against children in the United States will not only reduce child mortality, but is likely to reduce other forms of serious maltreatment.  The beneficial effects of such an approach would also be shown in the reduction of permanent neurological impairment, other cognitive and emotional morbidities, and the arrest and incarceration of adults who would not have committed such violence if they had access to other options. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2012) has recently estimated the lifetime cost of child abuse to be more than $210,000 per victim, with most of these costs resulting from the lost potential of child abuse victims rather than the services they receive. We now also understand that violent parenting—even when it is not fatal—creates toxic stress that may result in a large array of untoward outcomes including changes to brain architecture, abnormal cortisol levels, and a range of health and behavioral health vulnerabilities (Shonkoff  et al., 2012).

Ending Gender Based Violence

Gender-based discrimination and violence continues as a major challenge for our society and others around the globe. Gender-based violence is not an epidemic, but rather endemic – at a high and continuing level – in American society.  The scientific evidence indicates there are tested, multi-pronged strategies able to end or greatly reduce gender-based violence over the next decade if there is the community and political will and support to do so.  Social work practitioners and scholars stand at the forefront of these initiatives and have made a significant impact in efforts to expand social responses aimed at ending GBV.  Promoting an end to GBV and encouraging violence-free intimate relationships requires not only “downstream” crisis responses involving criminal justice and social services but also “upstream” universal and selective prevention efforts.