Domestic/Intimate Partner Violence: Services for Victims and their Children

CPP is a treatment for young children aged 0-5 who have experienced a traumatic event and/or are experiencing mental health, attachment, and/or behavioral challenges. Typically, the child is seen with their primary caregiver in a dyadic format. CPP examines ways that the caregiver-child relationship and the child’s developmental trajectory may be affected by: 1) the child’s trauma history, 2) caregiver’s trauma history, 3) caregiver’s relational history, 4) contextual factors including culture, socioeconomic status, sociocultural trauma, and immigration experience. Targets of the intervention include caregivers’ and children’s maladaptive representations of themselves and each other along with interactions and behaviors that interfere with the child’s mental health and the emotion regulation capacities of both child and caregiver. For children exposed to trauma, caregiver and child are guided to create a joint narrative of the traumatic event and to identify and address traumatic triggers that generate dysregulated behaviors and affect.

The Community Advocacy Project involves providing home-based and community-based advocacy services for survivors of intimate partner abuse. Highly trained paraprofessionals, receiving intensive supervision, work with survivors of domestic abuse (and their children), helping them obtain the community resources and social support they desire. This is an empowerment-based, strengths-focused intervention designed to increase women's quality of life and decrease their risk of re-abuse.

CCPT is a developmentally responsive, play-based mental health intervention for young children ages 3 to 10 who are experiencing social, emotional, behavioral and relational disorders. CCPT utilizes play, the natural language of children, and therapeutic relationship to provide a safe, consistent therapeutic environment in which a child can experience full acceptance, empathy, and understanding from the counselor and process inner experiences and feelings through play and symbols. In CCPT, a child's experience within the counseling relationship is the factor that is most healing and meaningful in creating lasting, positive change. Based on person-centered principles, overarching goal of CCPT is to unleash the child's potential to move toward integration and self-enhancing ways of being. Child outcomes following CCPT include decreased symptomatic behaviors and improvement in overall functioning.

The DVHVI is a joint project of the Yale Child Study Center and the New Haven Police Department. The project provides enhanced law enforcement, community-based advocacy, and mental health services to families affected by domestic violence, in an effort to increase children’s safety and decrease negative psychological effects of exposure to domestic violence. The project conducts outreach home visits by teams of advocates and patrol officers. At the initial home visit, the team and non-offending parent identify issues affecting family safety. The team provides information related to judicial processes, available community resources, and children’s responses to violence and trauma. Ongoing intervention, including referrals for child-focused clinical treatment, is determined by the unique needs of each family.

The Kids' Club & Moms Empowerment are two programs designed to coincide with each other and are most effective when both the mother and child participate in the intervention. Kids Club is a preventive intervention program that targets children's knowledge about family violence; their attitudes and beliefs about families and family violence; their emotional adjustment; and their social behavior in the small group. The program is phase-based, such that early sessions are designed to enhance the child's sense of safety, to develop the therapeutic alliance, and to create a common vocabulary of emotions for making sense of violence experiences. Later sessions address responsibility for violence, managing emotions, family relationship paradigms, and conflict and its resolution. Activities rely on displacement and group lessons are reviewed and repeated, as needed, each week. Moms Empowerment is a parenting program that provides support to mothers by empowering them to discuss the impact of the violence on their child's development; to build parenting competence; to provide a safe place to discuss parenting fears and worries; and to build connections for the mother in the context of a supportive group. In essence, this ten-session intervention is aimed at improving mothers' repertoire of parenting and disciplinary skills, and enhancing social and emotional adjustment, thereby reducing the children's behavioral and adjustment difficulties.