Building Healthy Relationships to End Violence: Advancing a Relational Health Framework across Violence Prevention Fields

Research on violence has traditionally developed within distinct domains, including child maltreatment, intimate partner violence, teen dating violence, gender-based violence, and family violence, often resulting in parallel but siloed bodies of scholarship. While this work has generated critical insights into risk factors and consequences of violence, less attention has been given to identifying and integrating the relational contexts that promote healthy relationships and prevent violence across contexts and developmental stages. Increasingly, scholars are calling for strength-based frameworks that emphasize protective and promotive factors capable of supporting relational well-being across the life course. However, opportunities for dialogue that centers on healthy relationships and strengths-based approaches across violence-focused research areas remain limited.

This roundtable brings together members of the Building Healthy Relationships to End Violence (BHREV) leadership team that represents one of the 14 Grand Challenges for Social Work networks. This roundtable aims to examine how a relational health framework can advance violence prevention scholarship across multiple domains of social work research. BHREV is a collaborative initiative focused on identifying and translating knowledge about relational strengths that foster safe, supportive, and equitable relationships within families, romantic partnerships, and communities. The roundtable will highlight how scholars studying different forms of violence conceptualize and operationalize healthy relationships, and explore how integrating these perspectives can advance a more cohesive research agenda for violence prevention.

Participants will discuss several interconnected topics. First, BHREV leadership team members will briefly reflect on how relational strengths and protective factors operate within their respective areas of work, including child maltreatment, teen dating violence, intimate partner violence, and gender-based violence. These perspectives will highlight both shared constructs (e.g., trust, communication, mutual respect, relational safety) and differences (e.g., formative years, theoretical frameworks) in how healthy relationships manifest across developmental stages and social contexts. Second, participants will examine the opportunities and challenges involved in bridging traditionally separate violence research domains through a relational health lens; that is, a comprehensive, strengths-based lens shifting the focus of health and development from individual, risk-focused medical models to the quality and stability of relationships as the primary driver of well-being across the lifespan. Third, the group will discuss how collaborative research networks can facilitate the development of shared conceptual frameworks, coordinated research agendas, and translational strategies that move evidence into prevention, policy, advocacy, and practice.

The roundtable will prioritize dialogue among presenters and attendees, inviting participants to reflect on how relational health can serve as a unifying construct for violence prevention research, policy, and practice. By fostering cross-field exchange, this session aims to contribute to the development of integrative, strength-based approaches that advance social work’s role in promoting healthy relationships and preventing violence across the life course.