Educational Trainings

Program Description

People providing public health, social services and health care encounter victims of violence every day. To better equip them with knowledge, understanding and tools for intervention serves the PVP mission.

Goals for these programs include:
Health care providers will have an increased understanding and awareness of their role in aiding victims of family violence who present at their hospital/clinic setting and incorporate screening skills into daily practice.

Diverse communities within the metro area will have an increased understanding about the role health care providers can play in aiding victims of family violence.
Social service agencies and law enforcement will have a deeper understanding of how family violence affects children at various age levels and obtain skills that will enable them to better support children they serve.

Trainings

Understanding Domestic Violence and Its Impact on Children

PVP has provided this training to approximately 350 participants since 2005 including childcare providers, school teachers and social service agency staff.

Through this training participants receive:

• Increased understanding of the dynamics of domestic violence
  
• Increased knowledge about the social, emotional and cognitive effects exposure to violence has on children

Strategies to support and respond to children affected by domestic violence
Actions that help promote safety of children, non-offending parents and their colleagues

Domestic Violence 101

PVP provides culturally competent education about domestic violence to health and social service professionals to enable them to screen for violence and refer patients to services. To date over 2500 individuals have participated in this training.

This training enables participants to:

• Identify their role in violence screening
  
• Overcome internal barriers to violence screening and referral
  
• Learn an effective violence screening process
  
• Understand challenges to change for violence victim/survivors
  
• Ask sensitive screening questions and articulate supportive responses to victims/survivors
  
• List resources for violence victim/survivors in their patient/client population

Participant evaluations from trainings in 2005 demonstrated that 88% of participants were satisfied with the material presented in the course and 84% of participants reported that handouts on diverse populations were helpful.

Comments from participants include:
-“Excellent presentation, it would be valuable for other groups to see and hear this information.”
-“Thank you for reassurance that there is a continuation of resources for abused.”
-“We need to learn to model this behavior for families, patients, co-workers, neighbors…to help with the bigger issues in society.”

The LINK Project

The LINK Project was designed to provide training on the link between domestic violence, child abuse, and animal abuse to five distinct areas including law enforcement, animal welfare community, domestic violence advocates, medical community, and social work and family sciences.
Outcomes resulting from this project are:

• Cross training among disciplines.
  
• Generate potential funds from conference and speaker fees.
  
• Save Haven for animals with families in battered women’s shelters.
  
• Work with shelters to start documenting animal abuse information.

Other activities include:

• Research and recruitment of training sites and partners for culturally specific educators.
  
• Focus on opportunities to train law enforcement.
  
• Provide 10 trainings reaching 100 different people from 28 different agencies.