i mean
my name is character model and i ministers your professor and the department of prevention
incubating help at the george washington university school of public health
my work in gender based violence spans over twenty years
and i would characterise the as action based research
in that i use the tools and the skills the public health and taking multiple
perspectives and different discipline in looking at the issue of gender based violence
and make no mistake gender based violence is a public health issue
it is not localised it is an epidemic
actually it's a pandemic
it affects many people
men women rolls royce communities worldwide
and it
is well documented the health the fax
that gender based violence can have
and our current thinking
all gender based violence
needs work
we tend to take an individual perspective
and to make people shameful and it being their responsibility to make change and that's
this has to change
so looking at putting the world the public health and gender based violence together reasoning
to the project i want to share with you today
and that is project of this project voices
which is a community academic partner show that looks at gender based violence among immigrant
latinos in washington d c
immigrant like to you know is make up the fastest growing segment of our population
yet have not been given the public health attention that pages are
so putting together this clearly academic partnership right from the start
we put in a grammar that make sure that each partner had half of the
funds
and that we train commuting members in research how to conduct interviews had to recruit
ask questions that a gender based violence so they also had the capacity to do
more projects after this one was done
so in our first phase of our project we talked one and one with members
of the community
men women boys and girls
that gender based violence what is it the their perspectives we looked at it from
home country experiences immigration experiences
but family
personal
be they social norms and experiences we also a about forty different types of gender
based violence
and the effect that those forms of violence had on health and wellbeing
from interviews we created a survey that we then want to gain a more broader
clearly perception of gender based violence and the actions that we could take to prevent
so we developed a survey that we gave to six hundred community members
but this was a little different and how we implemented that we actually did a
computer based survey where
people look to the screen and only they could see what was on that screen
the interview was also they could hear the questions through their headphones either english or
in spanish by the speaker and the screen was a touchscreen
and that way people didn't know what questions will be announced and we didn't necessarily
need to have highly rates of literacy to complete the interview
and what we found from all of these stories that we collected is that there
is a lot of stress in this community there's a gender based violence that is
occurring among men and women voicing cross people just don't talk about
but for this project what we're noticing is that there is a dialogue people are
talking about it then we are currently analysing all of these stories in working with
really members the meters
she this dialogue going so that we can talk with people talk with numbers of
the could really talk with q t champions so that we can create
so through these people's voices working together and only by working together can we hope
to foster the development of innovative programs and strategies that we can one day ultimately
prevent gender baseline
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