Abha Rai

Family violence is a complex phenomenon and includes diverse ways in which one can experience it. These experiences could include physical and emotional sibling violence (PESV), some aspects of adv...

Peru has one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in Latin America. Here we describe our intervention, titled ‘Strengthening capacities of teachers for the prevention of gender-based violence in Tambogrande, Perú’. This intervention was developed with local partners and implemented in 2023 with preschool teachers in a Jesuit school on the northern coast of Peru. The programme aimed to strengthen the capacities of preschool teachers to promote gender equality in their classrooms. To evaluate the impacts of the programme, we administered pre- and post-intervention surveys (n = 31) and collected qualitative notes during the programming. Post-intervention surveys showed a significant increase in the teacher’s ability to describe how gender differs from biological sex (p = 0.025) and in awareness of school policies to promote gender equality (p = 0.002). Teachers requested additional support to engage parents in ways that are culturally appropriate. Thus, we propose incorporating Catholic Social Teaching into future programming to correspond with the community and school’s religious beliefs.

Newly arriving individuals who have relocated from another country, especially those escaping situations of stress and violence, trauma, and uncertainty, can experience challenges with integration in a new country. To respond to these needs among new arrivals, we utilized community-based participatory research (CBPR) to develop a novel and culturally responsive intervention. In this research note, we describe our partnership with a community agency, the agency’s vital role in the development of this intervention, the salience of community voice, and the agency’s unique needs. To conclude, we highlight best practices for implementing community-centered interventions and discuss implications for future research with new arrivals.

While social work remains deeply human-centered, there are questions about how artificial intelligence (AI) can support the advancement of social work research. AI can guide researchers in various spheres, including developing and refining research questions, producing literature reviews and conducting analyses. AI can boost social work research productivity and position the profession as forward-thinking. However, since the buzz around ChatGPT began in 2022 there have been serious apprehensions around its potential misuse and ethical concerns. Through this note, our goal is to review the use of AI in social work research, summarize the types of AI software that can be utilized and conclude with a discussion about the considerations that social work scholars need to keep in mind while utilizing AI.

Purpose: Although some evidence indicates that coping and resilience could mitigate the adverse impact of intimate partner violence on survivors’ mental health, there is limited research on how these factors manifest among immigrant survivors, who may also face in-law abuse and discrimination. This brief report explored the associations between coping, resilience, perceived discrimination, and mental health symptoms in immigrant domestic violence (DV) survivors who experienced partner and/or in-law abuse. Methods: A self-administered online questionnaire was utilized to collect data from a sample of first, 1.5, and second-generation immigrants (n = 165) who reported experiencing DV (i.e., partner and/or in-law abuse). Multivariate linear regression models and bivariate t-tests were employed to analyze the data. Results: Nearly half of the participants reported experiencing both partner and in-law abuse. Over one-third reported partner abuse alone, and about one-fifth reported in-law abuse alone. Perceived discrimination and avoidance coping were linked to increased mental health symptoms, while resilience was associated with fewer symptoms. Additionally, we found that perceived discrimination was associated with greater use of avoidance coping and lower resilience. Conclusions: The findings reveal the high prevalence of in-law abuse in both immigrant men and women DV survivors and indicate the importance of fostering resilience and addressing avoidance coping. Analysis results also highlight the role of perceived discrimination in shaping survivors’ emotional well-being, emphasizing the need for targeted interventions. This report contributes to the limited literature on the mental health of immigrant DV survivors.

In this article, we review existing interventions to prevent gender-based violence (GBV) in Latin American contexts to evaluate the extent to which this work incorporates cultural responsivity—meaning whether the interventions consider the unique norms, identities, and attributes of specific cultures. We follow Arksey and O’Malley’s steps for conducting systematic scoping reviews. We reviewed articles from 2003 to 2023 across 12 databases. Fifteen peer-reviewed articles met the criteria for inclusion, which included being published in English or Spanish, focused on proposed or implemented interventions to prevent GBV based in Latin America, and published in the last 20 years. The selected studies contained information about separate GBV interventions (proposed or implemented) in 10 different countries in Latin America, in both rural and urban contexts. We categorized five interventions as most culturally responsive, six studies as moderately culturally responsive, and four studies as showing minimal attention to cultural responsivity. We found that culturally responsive interventions tended to involve working closely with men and women in local communities as “peer facilitators” or “community-based researchers.” These interventions challenged socio-cultural norms related to gender, family, and parenting, including attention to machismo and other forms of hegemonic masculinity. The present study is the first one to examine cultural responsiveness within GBV interventions in Latin America, and it is relevant for researchers, service providers, and communities in Latin America who are concerned with preventing GBV.