Prevention & Education

Preventing violence requires understanding how individual, interpersonal, community, and societal factors interact and overlap. The social-ecological model helps us better address harm occurring across multiple levels and factors. It provides a visualization of overlapping factors that shape people, relationships, communities, and cultures (CDC, 2022). This model can be a helpful tool in being more intentional when designing prevention programming and understanding how a program best suits the complex identities and experiences of our audience. 

A popular analogy in the public health field to conceptualize the levels of prevention is the River Story. This story situates the levels of prevention along a river where there is a broken bridge and people keep falling in. 

• Tertiary prevention assists people experiencing crisis, those who have been in the river the longest and need immediate support for recovery and healing. 
• Secondary prevention focuses on early response for folks who have fallen into the river to reduce the risk of further harm or crisis. 
• Primary prevention focuses on going upstream to the broken bridge, working together to repair the structures allowing folks to fall in the first place. 

• CARE Advocates practice secondary and tertiary prevention, which includes helping gain accommodations for academics, housing, work, or transportation as well as safety planning, emotional support, reporting support, warm handoffs to other resources, and facilitating spaces for survivors to be in community.
• CARE Prevention Education focuses on primary prevention, approaches implemented before interpersonal violence has occurred to prevent future harm. Strategies we utilize in prevention include promoting social norms that foster a culture of consent and protect against violence. These strategies include creating space for conversations on bystander intervention and allyship, as well as teaching skills to prevent violence, such as practicing healthy, sustainable relationships, and promoting healthy sexuality (CDC, 2016).

In 1989, feminist scholar, writer, and legal advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term Intersectionality. This framework allows us to understand how multiple power structures and social categorizations interact to shape individuals’ and communities’ experiences of power, privilege, and oppression.

Intersectionality is a guiding principle of CARE and an important facet of our prevention strategies. Understanding power, oppression, privilege, and identity is necessary to work toward social justice and make lasting, equitable changes for survivors and community members who exist at the intersection of multiple systems of oppression.