Cultivating Communities for Change: Promoting Collective Action to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse

Efforts to address child sexual abuse (CSA) in the United States focus largely on individuals and families, with non-profit organizations dedicating resources to providing support and advocacy after abuse happens. Intervention at the individual level is only one piece of the puzzle relative to ending CSA; the other is empowering communities to act in consort in the best interest of their children through collective action to prevent CSA before it happens.

This interactive workshop will allow participants to explore the history of CSA prevention and how we may shift our focus to the outer layers of the social ecology. The workshop will be hosted by SPARK Research for Social Change, an interdisciplinary team of scholars working to end violence through community-partnered research, training, and practice. SPARK was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to explore how to unite entire communities around shared values – in this case, promoting the rights and safety of children.

The workshop will begin with a presentation about the history of CSA prevention, which has largely focused at the individual level, and explain how Cultivating Communities for Change (C3) encourages us to shift our gaze outward. Specifically, C3 is guided by three aims: 1) Community Build (i.e., to foster connection and trust among communities so that they may have difficult conversations about CSA); 2) Community Voice (i.e., to create spaces for difficult conversations among community members and identify community assets to inspire collective action); 3) Community Action (i.e., to leverage resources to support community-driven prevention and intervention strategies). After laying this groundwork, presenters will share findings from a qualitative, in-depth interview study with changemakers in West Michigan about their understanding of what community is, what their communities need, and how CSA prevention efforts can be tailored to reach communities where they are.

Finally, participants will engage in an interactive activity to build their skills relative to a facilitation process, Open Space Technology (OST), that can be used as an innovative community-engaged research method. OST was developed as an organizational tool inspired by the notion that the most important practice-changing conversations occur in informal spaces driven by a context specific shared vision uniquely informed by multiple perspectives. The presenters have used OST to achieve the aforementioned aims of the Cultivating Communities for Change movement.

To learn how to use OST in their own work, participants will go through the OST steps themselves, which include:

• Engaging in a brainstorming session about their own priorities
• Creating clusters across participants’ priorities to identify the overarching themes therein
• Participating in brief focus group sessions around the overarching themes, with the opportunity to move around the room from focus group to focus group
• Debriefing together to identify action steps

The workshop will close with a conversation about challenges and opportunities relative to the community-level prevention of child sexual abuse, with emphasis on how social work research and practice can be central to these critical efforts promoting the rights and safety of children.