Promoting Collaboration within State Government to Prevent Domestic and Sexual Violence

By Shailushi Baxi, Rachel Davis & Larry Cohen, Prevention Institute

Addressing the Reality of Interlocking Forms of Violence A growing body of clinical experience and research suggests that child abuse, domestic violence, and youth violence often occur in the same families. This exposure to multiple forms of violence can have devastating effects on children, families, and communities. Despite these connections, separate programs have typically offered interventions that address only one form of violence, fragmenting responses to families. In addition, service-based responses to families that compartmentalize problems and offer single-issue interventions generally fail to include measures to prevent future violence.

The last few years have seen the implementation of a number of comprehensive strategies to prevent youth violence, child abuse and domestic violence. The federally funded Green Book and Safe from the Start projects are both good examples of sophisticated, comprehensive approaches. Both of these national initiatives work to improve outcomes for children affected by domestic violence and child abuse. This case study chronicles a slightly different approach to ending violence. Instead of focusing on the work of a particular program in a specific location, it examines the work of Shifting the Focus (STF), a coalition to change how California state government addresses and prevents violence.

History and Overview
Throughout the 1990s, as public attention to violence in California increased, so did the state’s efforts to respond to and prevent it. Numerous agencies and departments were responsible for addressing different forms of violence and related issues. While state staff worked hard and achieved significant results, the system to address violence lacked cohesion, having evolved sector by sector. Each effort addressed a discrete form of violence by focusing separately on gangs, youth violence, domestic violence, sexual violence, and child abuse.

This approach led to a number of unintended consequences, including overlapping programmatic and administrative efforts, fragmentation of services to local constituencies, and lost opportunities to build synergy. Categorical funding often made it difficult for local organizations to partner with one another. The state had roughly a dozen departments and an equal number of advisory groups, each developing its own approach to dealing with violence against women.

While the challenge to correct these unintended consequences through effective collaboration was not unique to California, it was intensified by the sheer size of the state. California’s residents represent 10% of the U.S. population, and its economy is one of the largest in the world. Correspondingly, the government infrastructure is large and diverse. Advancing violence prevention in California required deliberate, ongoing attention to collaboration.

In 1997, aware of the need for collaboration to improve violence prevention efforts, a group of state staff formed an interagency violence prevention partnership, called STF. Its name was intended to highlight a shift from a primary focus on intervention to one on prevention, and from isolated efforts to collaborative work. STF members included representatives from local organizations and from over 20 state agencies, departments, and commissions. This partnership was facilitated by a national non-profit organization, Prevention Institute, which focused on 1) prioritizing the prevention of violence-related injury through state policy and practice, and 2) promoting collaboration on state violence prevention efforts.

To help STF expand prevention efforts beyond post-crisis or education models aimed at individual change, Prevention Institute utilized the Spectrum of Prevention, which includes six levels of strategy development for violence prevention. These levels, delineated in the table below, are complementary and, when used together, result in greater effectiveness than would be possible by implementing any single one.

Influencing Policy Legislation
Developing strategies to change laws and policies

Changing Organizational Practices
Adopting regulations and shaping norms

Fostering Coalitions and Networks
Convening groups and individuals for greater impact

Educating Providers Informing providers who influence others
Promoting Community Education Reaching groups with information and resources

Strengthening Individual Knowledge and Skills
Enhancing individual capacity

Changing the Way Government Does Business
Using tools like the Spectrum of Prevention, STF has helped increase government capacity for collaborative violence prevention efforts in several ways, including:

• Identification and response to community needs: STF convened statewide community forums to identify ways in which government agencies can better support local efforts. These findings contributed to a state violence prevention strategy and the development of several violence prevention tools, such as an inventory of state prevention programs, a database of state training and technical assistance resources, a set of community data indicators, and training materials on violence prevention and interdisciplinary collaboration.
• Development of a set of prevention principles: STF developed a set of prevention principles for improving government effectiveness. These principles have been adopted by the Departments of Justice and Education, whose staff have been trained on the principles and are using them in bill analysis, legislative analysis, and program development.

The prevention principles emphasize comprehensive strategies, strength-based approaches, appropriate evaluation, well-designed funding, community-based initiatives, and strategic state-level partnerships. Relationships have been developed or strengthened among staff from different state agencies, which has led to increased communication, coordination, and collaboration among state programs, and joint work on training and technical assistance, funding opportunities, program development, data collection and management, and constituent outreach.

Jointly Sponsored Initiatives
STF has supported the development of several violence prevention initiatives, such as Safe From The Start and Violence and Crime in California: From Evidence to Policy. Safe From The Start addresses the effects of violence on the healthy development of young children and provides strategies to local practitioners on how to protect children from the effects of violence. The From Evidence to Policy initiative is a series of symposia that first examine the causes for the decrease in youth violence and crime in the 1990s and then provide policy options to policymakers to promote a continued decline of crime and violence in the future.

The Impact of STF
Before STF, the state’s responses to violence against women were centered chiefly in the Office of Criminal Justice Planning, or were fragmented across a number of different departments. Many of these departments had developed their own strategic plans for ending violence against women and girls, but had not coordinated them to avoid duplication or to prevent working at cross purposes. The state recently launched an initiative that brings eight state departments and offices together with all 13 domestic violence coalitions and committees to draft a new plan to end violence against women and girls in California. This plan will include a significant focus on primary prevention, reorient state government to local needs, leverage existing community assets, and emphasize collaboration across a range of related fields. It will also, for the first time, include recommendations for improving government practice.

Next Steps
Leaders in the fields of child abuse, domestic violence, and youth violence understand the importance of prevention but have lacked adequate resources to conduct prevention activities. Research indicates that the public also supports prevention and early intervention programs that address these problems. The need is clear, the will is there, and all that remains is to harness the interest and creativity of communities and to obtain resources to develop comprehensive prevention efforts. The state has an obligation to all Californians to respond to this need. The history of Shifting the Focus initiative demonstrates that improvements in state practice will lead to improved local outcomes statewide—safe and thriving homes, schools, and communities for all Californians.