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VISION Adolescent Domestic Abuse conference

    This event is in the past.

    If registered, please enter through the main entrance in the University Building, across from Northampton Square, a green space with a gazebo. There is also a silver sculpture in front of University Building.

    Only those that registered will be able to enter the conference room.

    To register please see: VISION and VASC Adolescent Domestic Abuse conference

    The UK Prevention Research Partnership Violence, Health & Society (VISION) consortium and the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London, are pleased to announce the Adolescent Domestic Abuse conference.

    Thursday 18th April 2024, 10:00 – 17:00 followed by a reception 
    Oliver Thompson Lecture Theatre (Tait Bldg), City, University of London, EC1B 0HB 

    Adolescent domestic abuse, which includes physical, emotional, and/or sexual abuse that occurs between young people who are, or were, dating, is often overlooked in research, policy and practice. The current definition of domestic abuse leaves those aged under 16 in teenage relationships falling into the gap between child protection procedures and adult-focused domestic abuse policy. 

    The conference brings together academics, practitioners, and policy makers to share existing research, policy and practice.

    Registration is required and free. This is an in person conference only and catering will be provided. If you cannot attend but would like the slides, please contact the email listed below.

    The programme: 

    • 9:30 – 10:00 Registration & refreshments 
    • 10:00 – 10:20 Welcome & setting the scene, Dr Ruth Weir, Violence and Society Centre, City, University of London and Katy Barrow-Grint, Assistant Chief Constable, Thames Valley Police
    • 10:20 – 10:40 Introductory Speaker, Louisa Rolfe OBE, Metropolitan Police and National Police Chief Council lead for Domestic Abuse
    • 10:40 – 11:00 Rapid evidence review on domestic abuse in teenage relationships, Flavia Lamarre, and Dr Ruth Weir, City, University of London
    • 11:00 – 11:30 Learning from the lived experience, SafeLives Changemakers
    • 11:30 – 12:00 Researching abuse within teenage relationships: A critique of a decade’s work and what we could do better, Professor Christine Barter, Co-Director of the Connect Centre for International Research on Interpersonal Violence and Harm, University of Central Lancashire 
    • 12:00 – 13:00 Lunch
    • 13:00 – 14:20 Panel 1: Teenage relationships and abuse: What the research says, chaired by Professor Sally McManus, Director of the Violence and Society Centre and Deputy Director of the VISION research project
    • Panel 1: Step up, Speak Out: Amplifying young people’s voices in understanding and responding to adolescent domestic abuse, Janelle Rabe, Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse, Durham University
    • Panel 1: ‘In practice it can be so much harder’: Young people’s approaches and experiences of supporting friends experiencing domestic abuse, Jen Daw and Sally Steadman South, SafeLives
    • Panel 1: Healthy relationships: children and young people attitudes and influences, Hannah Williams and Sarah Davidge, Women’s Aid
    • Panel 1: Intimate partner femicide against young women, Dr Shilan Caman, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
    • 14:20 – 14:35 Break
    • 14:35 – 15:35 Panel 2: Sexual violence in teenage relationships, chaired by Katy Barrow-Grint, Thames Valley Police
    • Panel 2: “Always the rule that you can’t say no”: Adolescent women’s experiences of sexual violence in dating relationships – Dr Kirsty McGregor, Loughborough University 
    • Panel 2: Empowering Youth: Addressing Online Pornography and Adolescent Domestic Abuse – Insights from the CONSENT Project – Berta Vall, Elena Lloberas and Jaume Grané, Blanquerna, Barcelona, Spain and The European Network for Work with Perpetrators of Domestic Violence, Berlin, Germany
    • Panel 2: Image-Based Sexual Abuse as a Facet of Domestic Abuse in Young People’s Relationships – Dr Alishya Dhir, Durham University
    • 15:35 – 15:50 Break
    • 15:50 – 16:50 Panel 3: Specialist services and local government, chaired by Dr Olumide Adisa, University of Suffolk
    • Panel 3: The role and value of Early Intervention Workers in supporting children and young people aged 11–18 in a domestic abuse service context – Elaha Walizadeh and Leonor Capelier, Refuge 
    • Panel 3: Prevention, Identification, Intervention and Protection: Learning on teenage domestic abuse from a multi-agency model in the London Borough of Islington – Aisling Barker, Islington Borough Council
    • Panel 3: Tackling adolescent domestic abuse in Lambeth – Rose Parker, Erika Pavely, Ariana Markowitz, and Siofra Peeren, Lambeth Health Inequalities Research and Evaluation Network 
    • 16:50 – 17:00 Closing remarks and next steps
    • 17.00 – onwards Drinks reception, Conference attendees are invited to a drinks reception in the Oliver Thompson foyer

    The abstracts

    The abstracts and information on the poster presentations and stands are below for downloading.

    ADA-abstracts-allDownload

    For further information and any questions, please contact VISION at VISION_Management_Team@city.ac.uk

    Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

    Making change happen in primary care: the story of IRIS

      VISION Director and Professor of Primary Care at the University of Bristol Medical School, Gene Feder, was a keynote speaker at the webinar: Making change happen in primary care – The IRIS story, on 28 November 2023.

      With his co-presenter, Medina Johnson, CEO of IRIS, they shared the story of the concept and ambition that led to the beginning of the social enterprise established in 2017 to promote and improve the healthcare response to domestic violence and abuse (DVA).

      DVA is a violation of human rights that damages the health of women and families. The health care sector, including primary care, has been slow to respond to the needs of patients affected by DVA, not least because of uncertainty about the effectiveness of training clinicians in identification and engagement with survivors of abuse.

      To address that uncertainty, Gene and Medina conducted a cluster-randomised trial in Hackney and Bristol, finding that both identification and referral to specialist DVA services substantially increased in the intervention practices.

      In the webinar they mapped the (not always smooth) trajectory from trial results to a nationally available programme commissioned by Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and local authorities in over 50 areas to date, including getting into guidelines/policy, further implementation research, negotiating with commissioners, and setting up a social enterprise (IRISi) to drive the scaling up of the intervention.

      For further information please watch the webinar video below.

      For any questions or comments, please contact IRISi at info@irisi.org

      Causal discovery for studying sexual abuse and psychotic phenomena

         Dr Giusi Moffa

        Sexual abuse and bullying are associated with poor mental health in adulthood. Elucidating putative causal relationships between affective and psychotic symptoms may inform the development of therapies. Causal diagrams can help gain insights, but how?

        Given a causal diagram, usually represented as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), and observational data from the variables on the graphs, many analytical methods (especially adjustment techniques) allow us to estimate the effect that intervening on a variable is expected to have on another.

        In real-world problems, we rarely have a complete picture of an underlying structural mechanism regulating the relationship among different variables. Causal discovery is a technique leveraging statistics and machine learning tools to uncover plausible causal relationships from data, with little to no prior knowledge of them. While learning causal structures from purely observational data relies on unrealistic assumptions (especially causal sufficiency and faithfulness), a causal discovery exercise may help us identify the most promising scenarios to prioritise when designing interventional studies.

        In a recent article, now available open access in Psychological Medicine, Dr Giusi Moffa, Statistician affiliated with the University of Basel, Switzerland and colleagues used state-of-the-art sampling methods for inference of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) on data from the English Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Surveys, to investigate sexual abuse and psychotic phenomena.

        The analysis sought to model the interplay among 20 variables, including being a victim of bullying or sexual abuse and a range of psychotic (e.g. paranoia, hallucinations and depression) and affective symptoms (e.g. worry and mood instability) while accounting for the sex of the participant. To respect temporality, we imposed some prior constraints on the DAG structure: childhood sexual abuse and bullying referred to events that were temporally antecedent to the assessment of the psychological variables, and hence they only admit incoming edges from sex and each other.

        Contrary to expectations, the procedure favoured models placing paranoia early in the cascade of relationships, close to the abuse variables and generally upstream of affective symptoms. A possible implication is that paranoia follows from early abuse involving bullying or sexual exploitation as a direct consequence. Overall, the results were consistent with sexual abuse and bullying driving a range of affective symptoms via worry. As such, worry may be a salient target for intervention in psychosis.

        Check out the paper for a more thorough discussion of the findings (joint work with Jack Kuipers, Elizabeth Kuipers, Paul Bebbington and VISION member Sally McManus).

        This is a repost of a blog available on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/causal-discovery-studying-sexual-abuse-psychotic-phenomena-moffa

        Paper available open access: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/sexual-abuse-and-psychotic-phenomena-a-directed-acyclic-graph-analysis-of-affective-symptoms-using-english-national-psychiatric-survey-data-erratum/CF603075EBBD5D75E60F327CE01C4050

        For further information about the approach: giusi.moffa@unibas.ch