From #MeToo to #RealChange: Addressing Gender Violence at the Community Level

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

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This session will share innovative approaches, practices, and resources for law school clinics to engage in community-based collaborations to address gender violence at the local level. Participants will gain a deep understanding of how law school clinics can collaborate with community partners to develop effective responses to address gender violence at the local level, including model programs, protocols, trainings, and systems of supervision and accountability, including the use of relevant data analysis. Participants will learn concrete and culturally-specific tools for responding to gender violence and enhancing coordinated community responses. The session will start by providing an overview of the range of initiatives that our clinics are implementing, which include work with incarcerated women experiencing abuse, women survivors of violence affected by the COVID pandemic, low-wage workers experiencing workplace violence, and women affected by violence in conflict situations. The presentations will cover key points and provide information about effective tools and resources, emphasize the importance of trauma-informed, culturally-specific, and victim-centered approaches, and address how to establish more effective supervision and accountability mechanisms. Presenters will highlight the value of mobilizing community input through community assessment tools, with a special focus on marginalized and underserved communities. Data from projects’ community assessments and climate surveys will be used to identify priority issues for improving responding to gender violence at the community level. In the second part of the session, we will break out into groups and discuss specific questions that stem from challenges the clinics have faced throughout the course of their community-based collaborations. The groups will explore how trauma-informed, culturally specific, and victim-centered approaches can be replicated in other community-based collaborations. During the last part of the session, we will come back together to share the content of the group discussions in plenary.