A New Approach

Most of the VIP team has spent their career focused one way or another on addressing violence. As the team took shape and the VIP Center began to develop, we were compelled by the question, “Are we accomplishing what we set out to accomplish?” Our goals were twofold: (1) That those who had been directly impacted by violence would feel safe in reaching out for support and would be met by a system that was well informed, well trained and compassionate; and (2) That less women, men and children would become victims of violence as a result of our work. As we looked closely, we had little evidence that we were moving effectively toward those goals. Despite great job evaluations and almost daily praise regarding another program we had done or speech we had given – help-seeking and reporting was still staggeringly low and we weren’t preventing violence. Period. Furthermore, as we looked around, we saw our colleagues in the same boat. Conference after conference we sat and listened to each other present on yet another clever poster campaign, another creative one-time-only-mandatory program, and another date-rape skit. There seemed an unspoken agreement that we would resist the urge to cry out in the middle of the presentation “Are you frickin’ kidding me? Isn’t this the exact same thing I heard 10 years ago, just with a different slogan slapped on the front?” And instead we nodded and smiled – all the while letting our hope for real change slip away into tired resignation.

This culmination of personal and professional restlessness and frustration triggered a professional crisis of sorts. Each of us reached a decision point. Would we dive in, willing to risk all we thought we knew, pushing beyond our own comfort zones comprised of “the way we’ve always done it” – or would we just keep plodding along, going through motions that were beginning to haunt our collective souls? Given that there were no proven models demonstrating the creation of a dramatic increase in reporting or help-seeking by victims of violence; and given there were literally no points of success to build upon within our own “prevention” efforts – we gave ourselves permission (in fact, gave ourselves a forceful directive) to upend everything we thought we knew in our respective areas of expertise. Question everything. Assume nothing. There were no more “truths with a capital t” upon which to stand. Only assumptions that required close scrutiny and re-examination. Fortunately, our personal frustrations with our work seemed to mirror a broader frustration within the field. There seemed a growing consensus that there needed to be greater innovation, research and critique of what we were doing – with a renewed eye toward prevention.

Our quest took us straight to the research. With the human stakes so high, it was clear we could not afford to intuit our next steps or “wing it.” First we took a look at the literature focused on violence against women. As we knew going in, there was nothing there that provided a clear set of data supported strategies for increasing help-seeking or preventing violence. There was, however, plenty to learn about what not to do. Valuable in its own right, as even before we can start doing something that might work, we must first stop doing what doesn’t work. As we completed our review of the violence against women literature, it occurred to us that we were not the first people that ever wanted to increase participation in a program or the first that ever wanted to prevent something. This keen stroke of brilliance led us across multiple disciplines reading anything we could find that involved someone having some success in trying to increase participation or prevent anything! From Public Health to Social Psychology to Marketing, Communication and Persuasion – there was a goldmine of research that could provide well-informed guesses as to where we might go next as a field. The prevention successes out there are many and their potential applications to our work are invigorating and inspiring.

Equipped with the best research and theory we could find, we took our newly created strategies to the front lines of our work at University of Kentucky’s Violence Intervention and Prevention Center. There, the best our minds could conjure was subjected to the realities of the front lines: peer pressure, parties, disinterested students, bureaucracy, faculty and staff overwhelmed with work-loads and family, message overload, competing issues of equal urgency…we all know the list. We watched with humility (but resiliency) as our initial attempts tanked completely. Then, little by little, the real life experiences and reactions of students, faculty and staff of UK began to shape and mold this model into a comprehensive new approach to violence intervention and prevention. By necessity, these are strategies in process. Strategies that must be refined and course corrected with each evaluation, stream of data and piece of feedback. By definition, it will be strengthened by your application, your scrutiny and your adaptation. Our story is one thread of many burgeoning around the country, fueled by the same impatient insistence – “this violence has got to stop.”