Week 6: Intimate Partner Violence I

This week in class we are covering Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). A HUGE topic that’s going to take over my next few posts. But anyways, onto the info:

IPV used to be known as battering which was “the instilment of fear, oppression, control of a partner, and assault.  Today IPV includes all of the above plus stalking and economic exploitation, which is oftentimes not seen as violent.

IPV is also a more correct, umbrella term since it uses the terms “Intimate Partner”. It includes people that are sexually intimate, married or unmarried, cohabitating (living together), or formally cohabitating, dating or formally dating. The legal definition excludes those partners that are under 18 years of age where it delves into child abuse.

As a term IPV is gender neutral. This means that this term covers same-sex partners, transgender partners, etc. However, it can be problematic because these couples are not acknowledged as intimate partners in most states. That means they are often not protected by IPV laws that they need. This just one reason it is super important to have equal rights when it comes to marriage and domestic partnerships.

Also, to get protection under some IPV laws, one must have evidence. Usually this means physical evidence…so something bad must happen. This is, for very obvious and frustrating reasons, e x t r e m e l y  p r o b l e m a t I c.

However, one thing I am very interested in that this chapter really didn’t cover well (and that I could not find even on EBSCO) was interracial couples and DV. The book labels some statistics that black women are victims of IPV about 35% more than white females. The book also lists a study that shows that Native Americans and Alaskan Natives reported the most IPV and that Pacific Islanders reported the least. While I understand it is extremely hard to capture the true extent of IPV, we can assume it is much more in all of these populations. However, one question really keeps echoing in my mind. Are these IPV victims’ perpetrators the same race or of a different race.

My theory is that since racism can still exist in interracial relationships, that rates of IPV in interracial relationships would be higher than those of monoracial relationships. Of course there are other factors involved in IPV than racism, however I think this added factor could play a part in IPV in interracial couples. This, again, is an extremely understudied area and one that we don’t even really have small look. Maybe I’ll come across more information on this soon. If I do, I’ll post it. If any of you have links or books I can take a look at shoot me a comment or e-mail!

All in all this chapter was stocked full of information, however this was what was pressing on my mind at the time. Again, if you any of you have comments or questions I more than welcome them.

-Alex

Week 5: Child Protective Services and Risk Factors

This week we were to read about the field of work dealing with the issues of Child Maltreatment.
In this section I want to focus on what i learned about Child Protective Services (CPS) and also about risk factors and what they really mean.

So as I mentioned in my last post, I want to be a social worker. I've always thought of CPS as the area I wanted to go into. I want to be an advocate for children and teens that don't have the voice or power to help themselves or their situations. CPS helps children in 4 ways.

1)By investigating reports of maltreatment
2)By providing treatment services
3) By Coordinating services offered by other agencies in the community to child victims and their families,
4) By implementing preventive services.

These roles are broken into two different categories as well: Preventative and Post-investigation services.
Preventative services are supposed to increase parents knowledge of proper childhood development and give them them (and in my opinion children too) the tools they need to identify an abusive situation and how to prevent and stop theses situations. This is an area that I really feel is super important. Preventative actions for anything is not only cost-effective for those of you who are money oriented, but also help more people over a longer amount of time because you are stomping on a problem before it even gets started! If I had the choice to decide a budget for these services (like I did in a project for my Juvenile Delinquency class a few years ago) I would put most into preventive services. These services include day care, parent education, counseling and other many other volunteer programs. This is definitely the area of CPS I would like to work in.

The second role CPS has is Post-investigation services. These are where we help increase a child's safety through assessing family strengths, weaknesses, and needs. Post-investigation services include individual and family counseling as well as foster care and other legal services. However I don't think that these two forms of CPS are necessarily separate. If I were to advocate for a child who has been in an abuse environment, I would also be out there in the community providing information wherever I go about these issues to help prevent these kinds of abusive environments.

CPS is not however, without problems. Due to funding issues as well as the lack of properly trained social workers there are problems with investigating within' the proper about of time (anywhere from 24-48 hours). A worker can be given more caseloads that would stretch their ability to help individuals with the time and quality they need. While CPS still have these problems today, these services still do good in our society. Though I hope someday we can see it work to the capacity I know it can and should. Maybe I'll be working and making that difference while I'm in the field of Social Work.

Now for a little bit of a jump.

In discussions, Dr. B brought up the important topic of risk factors. Risk factors surrounding the different forms abuse increase the chances that abuse can happen. HOWEVER, just because a family has risk factors and other extra hurdles to jump does not mean that they are abusive. For example, it is more common for a family of young parents to become abusive as well as families in a low SES (socioeconomic status) bracket. That does not mean that young low SES parents are going to be abusive. Yes, it increases their risk, but these parents can often times be resilient in others ways. They might have help they are seeking, or have different cultural or community support to move past these obstacles. It's really hard to keep this in mind with the language we use when we talk about perpetrators and victims of abuse in the media and in everyday life. We definitely do need to be aware of risk factors, however, we must make sure we are not labeling or condemning families or individuals with these risk factors. Labeling can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, and then what? Instead we should be acknowledge these risk factors, and if we know someone with them, we should talk to them about it. Just keep this in mind when you're reading my posts and even when watching tv, the news, reading a paper, anything. You'll be doing our society a bit of good. :)

Anyways, I think that covers what I wanted to talk to y'all about today.

-Alex

CIB 1.5 - Feelings in a Nutshell

Since my CIB #1 blog was really long I decided to post my video/song feelings are going to be posted here in the CIB .5's. So here is how I felt and what came to mind in CIB #1:

This is what always comes to mind when I think about DV in general, and especially Abusive Mentality.

Hey, girl, you know you drive me crazy

one look puts the rhythm in my hand.

Still I'll never understand why you hang around

I see what's going down.

Cover up with makeup in the mirror

tell yourself, it's never gonna happen again

You cry alone and then he swears he loves you.

Do you feel like a man when you push her around?

Do you feel better now as she falls to the ground?

Well I'll tell you my friend, one day this world's going to end

as your lies crumble down, a new life she has found.

A pebble in the water makes a ripple effect

every action in this world will bear a consequence

If you wade around forever, you will surely drown

I see what's going down.

I see the way you go and say you're right again,

say you're right again

Heed my lecture.

Do you feel like a man when you push her around?

Do you feel better now as she falls to the ground?

Well I'll tell you my friend, one day this world's going to end

as your lies crumble down, a new life she has...

One day she will tell you that she has had enough

It's coming round again.

[x2] 

Do you feel like a man when you push her around?

Do you feel better now as she falls to the ground?

Well I'll tell you my friend, one day this world's going to end

as your lies crumble down, a new life she has...

Face down in the dirt, she said,

"This doesn't hurt", she said,

"I finally had enough."

[x2]

CIB 1: The Abusive Mentality

Hey all!

So besides journaling on my thoughts and what I learned every week I am also supposed to read “Why Does He Do That?” By Lundy Bancroft. In the three required posts I am supposed to analyze 3 separate chapters from Bancroft’s book and provide some reasons why I picked it, some song or quotes that come to mind when I think about what I learned in the chapter, some pics (the super easy part!! I’ve found lots of cool pics) and provide a video on concepts. So this is what makes these CIB posts a little different than my regular journaling. However! They will still contain lots of IPV info, so stay tuned and ask tons of questions!

So the chapter I chose to write about today was Abusive Mentality. What does something think or rationalize abuse? I’ve heard this question asked by my friends, family, my sister who is in a DV relationship, and I’ve wondered this myself for many years. How can some people hit another person, manipulate and control them, cut their partners out of society and abuse them and think it’s ok?

In his chapter, Bancroft writes about the types of ways people abuse and how they rationalize it, or do it, in each scenario. He talks about control,  the view of themselves in the family role, how they view their partner’s anger, how they confuse love and abuse, how they manipulate their partners to believing everything is their fault, and so on. These I felt were the most important so I wanted to tackle those in the video below, so click on it and I will explain all about these abusive mentalities!

So about this video. I looked up some videos on youtube that would talk about some of these points. However, those that were not focused on emotional abuse alone were all about “men being justified for abusing women who seek them” and how women “need to just get out, she’s stupid for staying” are such horrible messages, not to mention wrong in so many ways!! Hopefully I have conveyed to you all, and in this section of my blog, that leaving is never simple, or easy. So in response to all these jerks who are justifying abuse and victim blaming, I made this quick vid to go over the consistent research.

If any of you are interested in looking up some of the stuff that I talked about concerning red flags of domestic violence I found this great site http://www.acadv.org/abusers.html that lists everything in great detail.

Also there is this fantastic site called LOVE IS NOT ABUSE. It’s a site that provides some cool facts and resources (especially those of you going into the education field) on domestic violence not only in adults, but teens as well. There is also a really cool quiz on the homepage to test some of your DV knowledge! I dare you all to get 100%!

Last, but not least, I have to post a link from a peer-reviewed journal. I found this artcle about the help-seeking habits of male and female victims of DV. It shows that formal forms of help were sought by both males and females. These were police officers, doctors, nurses, etc. Informal forms of help (Friends, family, etc)  were commonly sought by both males and females as well. However, this study revealed that seeking formal forms of help increased the severity of the violence the victims were experiencing as well as increased the controlling behaviors of their abuser. This study brings up the important fact that just because a victim seeks help that the abuse stops. Often times, as I found with my research on the “Sin by Silence” Film, victims are at higher risk for violence up to an average of two years by their abusers. It’s a very dangerous time as well that I, as a future social worker, will definitely need to be aware of.

That study can be found here: http://ida.lib.uidaho.edu:6233/ehost/detail?sid=1a4d57ca-86aa-407b-a7bd-1473644ce315%40sessionmgr111&vid=1&hid=127&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=48472767

Anyways, hope you all got something out of this CIB as much as I did!

Till the next one!

-Alex

Week 4: The Different forms of Child Abuse

So this week in class our topics covered a wide range of child abuse. We covered Child Physical Abuse (CPA), Child Sexual Abuse (CSA), Child Neglect, and Psychological Maltreatment

As a future social worker, the age group I want to work with is adolescents. Though I will be willing to help anyone, adolescents is where I would like to focus for now. So while we covered these topics I noticed that in some cases, adolescents seemed to be a footnote. Adolescents are still children, and I feel that it's not only important for me to know about how to help and identify adolescents in these awful positions, but also to bring light on the issues that face adolescents in these violent situations.

Child Physical Abuse:

One thing that stood out in the chapter on CPA was that there are a lot of myths around Adolescents and CPA. Society often believes that adolescents who are victims of CPA are deserving of abuse. They often times see parents as having trouble controlling adolescent offspring and have to use other forces. They also feel that this is often because an adolescent are deserving as much of the fault as parents in an argument that results in CPA. What do you think of this?

In my opinion, these are very dangerous accusations. Adolescence is a often times a time of great change in an individual. While sometimes these changes are expressed in aggressive or hostile attitudes I think a greater parent and societal understanding of the difficulties of adolescence and greater support of the indivdual can really make a difference in an adolescents life. I wouldn't have made it very far if I didn't have the support that I did when I was an adolescent. If I had even more support and understanding I think I would have made it out of high school a much happier and healthier individual than I am today. However, I know I'm one of the lucky ones. Not everyone had the support I did. That's one of the reasons I'm going into the social work field to work with this group of people. I think a lot of times we forget what it's like to be an adolescent, and why it's easy for society to blame CPA on adolescents. We shouldn't forget that while adolescents are struggling in the  nether between childhood and adulthood that parents still are in power in the relationship. CPA, nor any abuse, should be blamed on the victims. 

Child Sexual Abuse:

As a quick note in CSA, adolescents can and are victims of CSA. However, adolescents (12-17) actually make up about 40% of child sexual abusers. This subject is pretty hard to talk about for anyone, but I think it definitely holds much more stereotypes than the other forms of abuse. This is really a hard topic and sometimes taboo subject. I know I am probably not doing this section much justice because I want to focus on adolescents, but I definitely urge anyone whose interested to go into that uncomfortable territory and learn some of the crazy and heartbreaking facts. 

Child Neglect:

(these include Health care neglect, personal hygiene neglect, nutritional neglect, neglect of household safety, neglect of household sanitation, inadequate shelter, abandonment, supervisory neglect, educational neglect, emotional neglect, and fostering delinquency)

I found that it was interesting that we have defined Educational/Developmental Neglect. This form of neglect is the failure to give a child the experiences that are necessary for growth and development, especially intellectual development. A form of this, and sometimes how this is caught, is by a child being extremely truant or not enrolled in school at all. I would think this probably one of the more frequent forms of neglect in Adolescence. This really sickens me, in fact this all really sickens me. However, I choose to focus on this one aspect because of my views on education. The perpetrators that educationally neglect children are robbing them of  their power. Knowledge and education are literally power! By not allowing a child to grow mentally and grow physically (through playing with other children in a safe environment as well as P.E) we are severely hurting these children, and our own future. I feel like this form of neglect (and many others such as) can be very easily overlooked. 

Psychological Maltreatment

The other form of Abuse, the most pervasive, is psychological maltreatment and emotional abuse. It is hard to have the other forms of abuse without emotional or psychological maltreatment. Since this is form of abuse is hard to define at times because of the broad definitions it has, it is very often never reported. Some studies in this chapter of “Family Violence Across the Lifespan” show that reports of psych maltreatment

Psych maltreatment actually increases with age and that older children are more likely to be psychologically abused. However, this could also be in part that those who can report it and recognize it for what it is are older. Also, it can be assumed that most parents have used some of the behaviors that fall under the spectrum of psych maltreatment sometime in their parenting. While some of these parents use these behaviors a few times, those that continue and repeat harmful psych abuse behaviors do even more harm to their children.

Overall there was so much information in these chapters I feel that I just cannot do it justice. If any of you have any questions pertaining to any of these forms of abuse I would LOVE to do the research to find your answer! Until then I guess it’s back to the grind of the depressing, but very, very important subject!