Poised for Prevention: Advancing Promising Approaches to Primary Prevention of Intimate Partner Violence

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Primary prevention of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)* - that is, taking action to prevent IPV before the threat or onset of violence - holds promise for dramatically reshaping our community environments and norms and is an important component of social change. Greater attention to advancing promising primary prevention approaches is essential to furthering the field and achieving dramatic reductions in the rates of IPV.

Building on this momentum, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Prevention Institute called together a group of leaders for a national convening in September 2006: Poised for Prevention: Advancing Promising Approaches to Primary Prevention of Intimate Partner Violence. The diverse set of local and national IPV leaders, including representatives from community-based and national nonprofit organizations, government, foundations, academia, and the business sector, urged an immediate and more coherent approach to primary prevention of IPV that builds on successes to date.

This report, published in May 2007, was written by Prevention Institute as a summary of the preliminary conclusions from the national gathering. It integrates the convening outcomes, Prevention Institute and the RWJF perspectives on the issue, themes from interviews conducted prior to the event with convening participants and a number of additional IPV experts, and a limited scan of the literature. The report includes a discussion of primary prevention of IPV, promising approaches to environmental/norms change, an examination of IPV primary prevention within immigrant communities, recommended actions to building momentum for primary prevention of IPV, and immediate next steps. The conclusions presented in the report are preliminary. The report is designed as a catalyst and call to action, to give a sense of direction and raise some issues for consideration.

*In recent years, the term intimate partner violence (IPV) has been embraced as a term that  includes violence between people in an intimate relationship who don’t necessarily live in the same household, including ex-spouses, boyfriends/ girlfriends, ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, or date, including same-sex relationships.While the term domestic violence is more publicly recognized, for the purposes of this report and the national convening, the broader term, IPV, will be used.

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