PolicyLab

Today, in partnership with Maternity Care Coalition and Philadelphia’s Office of Domestic Violence Strategies, PolicyLab released an issue brief outlining an ideal systems-level response to preventing intimate partner violence (IPV) through partnerships between home visiting programs and IPV agencies.

IPV is a prevalent public health issue in the U.S., with significant physical and psychological impacts for survivors and their children and tremendous costs to all systems that support family success.

Effectively addressing a complex issue like IPV requires a comprehensive approach to prevent IPV before it occurs, identify and connect survivors to care and prevent repeated harmful behavior, and provide treatment to lessen the long-term consequences of IPV—all of which is often not realistic or logical for a single organization to manage.

With complementary approaches to delivering comprehensive, sustainable IPV prevention, community-based IPV-focused agencies and home visiting programs make an ideal partnership to support families with appropriate services in safe environments and reduce the toll of IPV on families and communities; however, challenges exist—such as privacy concerns around data sharing and lack of streamlined processes for referrals—that can prevent these successful partnerships. Our new brief—which is grounded in a project organized by a community-academic research team—discuss these barriers further and provides steps that can be taken to address them.