Southwest Rural Family Violence Project
Funder: US Dept of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women
Project Timeline: October 2007 to September 2011
Total Amount Funded: $850,000
Project Goals: Identify, address, and prevent violence in families in the rural areas of Dona Ana County. This project has two goals:
1) to identify and map the areas of Dona Ana County that have a high incidence of violence in families and domestic violence risk factors, and
2) to target the areas identified in goal 1 and implement a prevention curriculum and intervention services.
GOAL ONE
Goal One involves using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to compile information regarding incidents of family violence. We included census data on families (including demographic information related to specific family violence risk factors), county DWI data, police reports of domestic disturbances, and child abuse reports. We will be looking at the correlation between DWI reports and family violence incidents.
Through using GIS to spatially represent family violence incidences in Dona Ana County the project will be able to pin-point "hot spots," that is places in the county that have a greater than average number of incidents, and areas where people have a higher than average risk of victimization. Finding the "hot spots" will enable the project to target prevention and education services in rural areas of Dona Ana County.
GOAL TWO
Goal Two targets prevention and outreach services to the targeted communities and includes the development of a training curriculum for use in the communities. A team of county AmeriCorps/VISTA volunteers, three social work students from NMSU, a social worker hired by NMSU and placed at the county, and an Outreach Worker hired by La Casa, will go to the county community centers in the rural areas of the county and assess the need for services, meet with the communities to develop trust, and provide crisis intervention services and case management to high risk families.
The team will conduct focus groups in the targeted rural communities to gain information on needs for prevention and to minimize negative feelings of stigmatization. Using community input, a prevention curriculum will be adapted and used in the rural, mostly Spanish speaking of Dona Ana County.
