NCJ Number
224750
Journal
Violence Against Women Volume: 14 Issue: 10 Dated: October 2008 Pages: 1199-1213
Date Published
October 2008
Length
15 pages
Annotation
Following a literature review, this study examined domestic violence training for all social services workers, specifically adult protective services workers in order to help determine training gaps and needs.
Abstract
The results suggest that adult protective services workers need to be prepared to deal with certain aspects of domestic violence more than others, according to the study group of adult protective service supervisors. Areas judged to be the most important in terms of knowledge needed included intervening with the perpetrator, dealing with the mental health complications associated with domestic violence, worker safety, communicating the signs of lethality, dealing with elder abuse victims’ special needs, and identifying domestic violence situations. The results show that workers preferred traditional training strategies, although more than a third indicated interest in Web-based asynchronous training. The results also showed that agencies that had a domestic violence training policy had more workers participate in domestic violence trainings. Compared to other social services programs, adult protective services programs were less likely to have training programs. Implications to these findings are presented and discussed. Many cases of elder abuse involve instances of partner abuse. In this study, attention is given to whether adult protective services supervisors think their workers know enough about specific aspects of domestic violence. Attention is also given to the strategies that the supervisors think would be most useful to teach about domestic violence. Figure, tables, and references