The “Healthy Jewish Families Project:" Faith and culture as tools for abuse prevention, health promotion and healing

Saturday, March 31, 2012: 11:25 AM-12:45 PM
Pacific A (San Francisco Marriott Marquis)
Speaker:
Naomi S. Tucker, *, Shalom Bayit

PDF file PDF file

Presentation Format:
Innovative/Promising Practice Program Report

Learning Objectives:
  1. Identify cultural and faith tools to prevent abuse and shift communal norms. Two important elements for creating normative shifts in health behaviors are (a) leveraging cultural values to create change, and (b) building relationships with the key community leaders who can influence others to create change
  2. Recall cultural and faith-based approaches as a key enhancement to public health models of abuse prevention/response. A community’s concern for the well-being of its members can be leveraged to prioritize domestic violence as a health issue. Positive community response aids health practitioners and DV agencies in supporting victims towards safety
  3. Identify ways to transform cultural barriers into protective factors: Is one’s faith/culture a resource or roadblock to getting help? Faith and culture can serve as protective factors (increasing resilience, encouraging help-seeking, promoting healing, improving healthy behaviors) or as barriers. We’ll present ways to use faith-specific teachings as a positive resource
Description:
This session presents the “Healthy Jewish Families Project” as a model that can be adapted to any faith or cultural group to shift that population’s normative views of health (individual and community) to include domestic violence prevention. Using culturally-specific and faith-based abuse prevention/response frameworks, we will showcase sample programs for teens, parents, clergy, community leaders, and physicians and health care workers to expand the playing field of how and where we respond to domestic violence in our own communities.