Community Engagement Continuum to Address Domestic Violence: Outreach, Mobilization, Organizing and Community Accountability

Background and Purpose: Theoretical frameworks through which to understand community engagement addressing domestic violence remain underdeveloped. This study examines eight different innovative community engagement examples in Asian and Pacific Islander communities to better understand the goals, contexts and characteristics of community engagement addressing domestic violence. The community engagement continuum is a result of the comparison of these examples of initiatives aimed to increase the participation of social networks, community members and community leaders to prevent and intervene in domestic violence.

Methods: A comparative qualitative case study (Yin, 1984) of eight community engagement initiatives addressing domestic violence was used to build theory about community practice. Selection of case sites used a convenience sampling from a roster of member sites and program descriptions of community engagement strategies from a national Asian and Pacific Islander resource center on domestic violence. Data on each of the community engagement strategies was collected through semi-structured interviews of key staff members and field notes from visits to each of the eight sites. Using grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), the study revealed themes that built a theoretical understanding of the relationship between the type community engagement strategy, aims of these strategies and other factors tying together and distinguishing these forms of community practice.

Results: The primary result of this study was the construction of a conceptual framework for community engagement to address, prevent and intervene in domestic violence. Each category within the community engagement continuum differed based upon the aim of community engagement, the relationship between the community-based organization and the community constituents, the timeframe of the community engagement strategy and the expected role of the community constituents. The community engagement continuum consists of the strategies of community outreach and education; community mobilization; community organizing and community accountability.

Implications: Strategies to address domestic violence in the United States have tended towards individualized direct services and criminal justice remedies. Community engagement strategies have been largely limited to community education with the goal to raise awareness of community members but not necessarily to increase their role in domestic violence intervention. While prevention and bystander intervention strategies have increased since the mid-1990s, they have tended towards primary prevention strategies or intervention in cases of verbal violence or engagement of law enforcement in cases of physical violence. The community engagement continuum provides a broader framework that includes primary prevention or early intervention strategies but also imagine a more central intervention role for community-level “first responders.”