Session: Preventing Intimate Partner Violence Through Parenting Programs for Young Parents (Society for Prevention Research 21st Annual Meeting)

                A recent survey conducted by the CDC indicates that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men report experiencing physical intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetimes. Nearly a decade ago, the costs of IPV to society were estimated to be in excess of $5.8 billion per year (considering both direct and indirect health costs, lost productivity, and lost lifetime earnings). Despite the prevalence and cost to society, we know little about how to prevent IPV. A handful of programs are considered effective for preventing the perpetration of IPV, but most of these programs target adolescents, and therefore little is known about how to prevent the perpetration of IPV among adults.  Some suggest that prevention efforts targeting adults are “too late,” arguing that adults have already experienced and engaged in intimate relationships and have already formed their styles of interacting within these relationships.  However, others suggest that targeting adults and/or adult couples with primary prevention efforts may be an ideal time to intervene, given that skills, attitudes, and knowledge may be immediately applied and practiced within the current relationship. Existing programs that target parents, for the purposes of improving child and parental outcomes and reducing child maltreatment, provide a perfect opportunity to reach adults with IPV prevention efforts. In fact, the co-occurrence of IPV and parent-child aggression within families suggests that such programs might be an optimal way to target prevention of both types of violence. 

This symposium includes three papers describing programs for parents that contain a preventive intervention for intimate partner violence and presenting results from trials evaluating their effectiveness. In the first paper, the authors tested the effectiveness of the addition of an IPV preventive intervention to the Nurse Family Partnership home visiting program (NFP) in Portland, OR.  The second paper will describe the implementation and evaluation of the Family Foundations program, which targets young couples during pregnancy and after the child’s birth with programming aimed at reducing partner and parent-child aggression. The third paper will describe the implementation and testing of the Couple Care for Parents program, a preventive intervention that addresses interpersonal processes and promotes skills-based changes in couples with a newborn.  Implications regarding the utility and viability for using existing programs for parents as a vehicle for the prevention of intimate partner violence will be discussed.