Helping the health care community lead in preventing abuse

There was a time when emergency department staff routinely treated domestic violence survivors and then sent them right back home to face further abuse, without the ability to offer referrals or other help.

When few OB/GYNs knew that pregnant women are at vastly elevated risk of homicide, often at the hands of a current or former partner.

When few physicians or nurses talked to young people about sexual coercion and rape.

For decades, Futures Without Violence has been working to change all that.

Our goal has been to ensure the health care community can become not just allies, but leaders, in the work to end abuse. And to support this change, we’ve created tools, trainings, and protocols that allow health care providers to support survivors of violence, promote prevention, and advance quality, equitable health care for all.

We’re very proud of how far we’ve come – and aware that there’s much more to do. With skilled partners, we’ve developed materials that tens of thousands of health care providers – and others – use each year. They include:

• A new toolkit, which is helping the nation’s 15,000 community health centers develop partnerships with local domestic violence and sexual assault prevention programs.
• More than two dozen powerful videos that help health care providers respond to domestic violence and reproductive coercion, and help advocates integrate health services into their work.
• Our You Matter safety card tool, which supports teens who had adverse childhood experiences – often witnessing domestic violence – developed with young people, adolescent health providers, and school-based staff.

We have a special focus on creating tools to help address the domestic and sexual violence that contribute to our country’s Black maternal health crisis, and on helping health care providers address the impact of violence on reproductive health at this time when it’s become much more difficult for survivors of rape, incest, and domestic violence to access the reproductive health care they need.

And because domestic violence and sexual assault happen to people of all ages, we’ve crafted our materials to help health care providers support survivors across the lifespan – including during childhood and adolescence, and when elder abuse and neglect affect too many of us.

These and many more resources are available at our online store where providers and advocates can download safety cards, posters, and more for free, and order hard copies for the cost of shipping.

We hope you will use and share these materials. To stay updated on our work with healthcare communities, please join our email list.