Annie Lyles’s research while affiliated with Cancer Prevention Institute of California and other places

It's not expected that children protect themselves from sexual abuse and the predators that perpetuate it; as a society there is a normative belief that safety is the responsibility of the adults and institutions that surround children. Yet, our most trusted institutions and systems have been colluding with perpetrators, supporting them and creating a norm that allows sexual assault and child rape to continue. Individuals must be held responsible but by blaming individuals alone, the opportunity to change systems and establish policies and norms that protect children is lost. Prevention Institute has identified the key norms that shape our environment and encourage acts of sexual violence. Using literature, key informant interviews and moderated discussions with practitioners Prevention Institute has delved deeper into the most pervasive of the five norms, that of privacy and silence. The current attention to systems that have perpetuated sexual abuse by staying silent echoes the norm that that sexual, family, and intimate violence is a private matter -- none of our business -- and so those who witness it tend to stand by rather than standing up. This session will discuss changes in policy and practice that counter the value of privacy and shift norms from blaming the individual to creating systems that support healthy children and prevent future abuse. Participants will have the ability to make the case for a prevention approach and be familiar with examples of communities and systems with policies and practices in place to prevent sexual abuse.

Violence leads to death, injuries and chronic disease, and it poses a serious health challenge for young people, especially children and adolescents in U.S. cities. When young people witness or suffer from violence, their brains develop differently as a result. The parts of the brain responsible for controlling impulses, regulating stress, solving problems, and empathizing are rewired, for example, and survival skills are developed at the expense of learning and social skills. These changes compromise children's health in the short and long term through various pathways. Violence also perpetuates the health, social and economic disparities in communities, and disproportionately affects young people of color. Safe communities enable children to play, learn and grow up healthy. This session will introduce the innovative public health approach of Urban Networks to Increase Thriving Youth (UNITY), a CDC funded initiative to prevent violence affecting youth. The presenters will highlight strategies in the UNITY Policy Platform that support stable and nurturing relationships, and that reduce young children's exposure to violence so that behavior is not learned in the first place. The UNITY Policy Platform was developed in collaboration with representatives from cities across the country via a peer-learning network. The UNITY Policy Platform describes what needs to be in place on the ground to prevent community violence, and it also delineates the supports that cities say they need for efforts to be successful and sustainable. Multi-sectoral collaboration yields valuable tools and resources for communities, and a public health approach to preventing violence works.

Healthy communities lead to healthy minds, but neither can be sustained without healthy, community-wide social norms. Prevention Institute has identified five key norms that limit community health by increasing the likelihood of sexual and domestic violence (SDV): a culture of violence, limited roles for women, narrow definitions of masculinity, an emphasis on power & control over others, and norms around secrecy. As approaches focused on changing these unhealthy norms gain momentum, practitioners and academics are seeking to better understand policy opportunities within a norms approach. Unfortunately, while policy change as tool is well established, evidence for the field of SDV remains sparse especially in underserved communities. As a way to expand the evidence base, the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Prevention Institute hosted a series of 10 webinars in 2010 focusing on a norms approach to violence prevention with special attention to underserved populations. For each of the five norms, policy implications at the organizational, local and national level were examined by over 1,000 national thinkers, local leaders and community practitioners via online dialogs. The resulting strategies, lessons learned from implementation, and measureable indicators for success, revealed the complexity of working with underserved populations and also the promising strategies, collaborative models and potential benchmarks for policy based efforts. This session will discuss the online, participatory learning process, equip participants with a solid understanding of the norms approach and reflect the field's best thinking about policy change as a tool to prevent SDV and improve community health.

In efforts to promote healthy eating and active living, many communities are finding that violence is increasingly impeding the effectiveness of their efforts. In the face of violence and safety concerns, residents in impacted communities often do not view healthy eating as a priority because protection from violence is a more intense and immediate need. Yet these communities are at higher risk for chronic diseases. Violence and the perception of violence negatively affects healthy eating and active living in many ways: 1) women avoid trips to grocery stores which impacts the family's health; 2) communities perceived as violent will not attract food retail stores and are not seen as a viable market for healthy foods; 3) overeating serves as a coping mechanism for victims and witnesses to violence; and 4) Perception of violence predicts physical activity more than the availability and accessibility to parks and open space. As the evidence grows about the links between violence, healthy eating and active living, communities are faced with the challenge of effectively addressing these complex issues. Based on findings from key informant interviews with experts in the field of healthy eating and active living and community leaders, this presentation will make the case for the link between violence, healthy eating and active living; provide examples of best and promising practices, and propose prevention strategies that are comprehensive, collaborative and innovative.

Violence against women (VAW) results in physical, emotional and fiscal harm to women, children, families and entire communities. While women, children and families who have been victimized need appropriate services and responses, equally important is ensuring that everything possible be done to prevent violence from occurring in the first place. Although services to respond to VAW have expanded and improved, policy and programmatic efforts to prevent VAW before it occurs are still in the early stages of development. As Service-Delivery Organizations (SDOs) continue to assist victims and their families and work to interrupt the cycle of violence, we also have to ask, What could be done to prevent VAW before it occurs? Primary prevention means taking action before the onset of symptoms, and to the extent that efforts can reduce the incidence of VAW, these must be promoted and expanded. As attention to primary prevention increases, associated funding requirements often dictate that SDOs incorporate primary prevention into their practices. Limited resources and an infrastructure geared towards screening for violence and treating the aftermath of violence, however, are not necessarily geared for prevention. Drawing upon input gathered in a national Web dialogue on this issue, this presentation will highlight emerging and promising models for successfully integrating primary prevention into SDO efforts. This presentation will also introduce tools that can be used to identify appropriate partnerships to advance environmental change efforts to prevent violence before it occurs.

As the intimate partner violence (IPV) movement shifts to an expanded focus on primary prevention, there is a growing need for concrete strategies and key venues in which to catalyze and sustain change. Synthesizing lessons learned from a national web-based dialogue of IPV prevention advocates and practitioners and a qualitative assessment involving consultations with states throughout the country, this presentation will review the Spectrum of Prevention as a conceptual framework for environmental and norms change with a focus on changing organizational practices to prevent IPV before it occurs. The organizational setting from workplaces and schools to faith institutions will be discussed as one of the most promising, and often overlooked, venues in which to shift harmful norms about violence, traditional masculinity, limiting roles for women, power, and privacy to healthier alternatives. Specifically, this presentation will examine why organizational practice change is critical for preventing IPV and detail common organizational functions to address for maximal impact. Emphasis will be placed on the role of the workplace in primary prevention of IPV, including the challenges and opportunities to creating workplaces that support respectful communication, gender equity, and nonviolence. Promising strategies and examples of successful organizational practice change initiatives will be discussed.

Increasingly, cities around the country are implementing innovative, comprehensive efforts to prevent violence. Many of these are in alignment with an emerging urban framework for violence prevention. Given the growing recognition that we cannot arrest our way out of this issue and the critical role of public health, this session will explore the implications for health administrators and leaders in transcending the traditional borders of a criminal justice approach. In particular, successful violence prevention efforts of various cities around the U.S. will be highlighted, including community engagement, federal partnerships, creative fundraising and resource allocation, and data-informed program and policy development. Examples will focus on implications for innovative leadership and management strategies within public health to strengthen violence prevention efforts. Examples will be shared and their strengths highlighted against an emerging model of violence prevention in cities, called the UNITY RoadMap. UNITY developed the RoadMap in response to a city assessment that evaluated a sampling of cities for comprehensive, data-driven efforts to prevent or reduce youth violence. It has since been refined by representatives from cities around the country. UNITY (Urban Networks to Increase Thriving Youth through Violence Prevention) is a national initiative sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and The California Wellness Foundation. UNITY was designed to support cities in their violence prevention efforts that expand the borders of a law enforcement approach to move toward an effective public health approach which spans multiple stakeholders and offers broader and sustainable solutions.