University

of Minnesota, Twin Cities School of Social Work SW 8361 Identification & Assessment of Family Violence Jane F. Gilgun, PhD, LICSW Fall 2012 Assignment for Tuesday, November 20, 2012 We are not meeting on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I would like you to take the time off to reflect upon some major points of the course. These points include those I have made and those that mean something to you. I list these points a little later. It will be helpful to your success as a practitioner to reflect upon the ideas with which you began this course and to reflect upon whether your studies of the course topics have changed your ideas. If you find that you ideas have changed little or not at all, I would like you to reflect upon whether you seek ideas that are contrary to your own and whether you are fair-minded in your appraisal of the ideas of others. A hallmark of excellence in the practice of social work is to take the perspectives of others in an effort to understand them. If you cannot do this, then I suggest that you start talking to others about how to do this. A clue that this could be an issue for you is if your ideas about family violence are pretty much what they were when you started this course. Understanding often requires digging deep into your own perspectives in order to make space for the perspectives of others. A reflective practitioner is a competent practitioner. Points to Reflect Upon Here are some points I would like you to reflect upon. These are the points I have been making with you during our class time together. the importance of understanding meanings that individuals attribute to their actions and experiences; belief systems that perpetrators call on when they act out in harmful ways; beliefs about gender are significant; the one factor that is present is all forms of perpetration is belief systems that give them permission to act in ways that satisfy themselves and harm others; many people have low self-esteem and have abuse and neglect in their backgrounds and most of them do not beat other people, abuse them emotionally, or sexually abuse them; the constant across various experiences that perpetrators have is their belief systems; stay tuned to what appears to be related to various types of proscocial, antisocial, inappropriate, and self-destructive belief systems: guess whatthe safety of secure relationships that comes in many forms over the life course but basically to have safe havens where we can process and learn to manage events in

Reflections Upon Whether Your Ideas Have Changed In this section, I would like you to reflect upon whether you ideas about family violence have changed as a result of this course. First list the ideas you had when you began the course. Next list some ideas you have encountered while doing the readings and attending class. Next, show whether any of your ideas have changed. Relevance of November 20 Readings In this section, I want you to reflect upon the points I have been making and the ideas that you have developed or not developed over the course of the semester and see if todays readings have any relevance. You may want to begin by listing the main points in todays readings.

our lives in prosocial ways. Are you surprised? belief systems that survivors may have internalized and that complicate their recovery; importance of assessing and understanding persons in their multiple interactive contexts; importance of assessing for risks, resources, and protective factors in each context in which persons live their lives; importance of understanding that, while there are negative effects of various forms of family violence, many individuals have the good fortune to have resources in their lives that help them to cope with, adapt to, and overcome the adversities in their lives; social service providers comprise potential resources if we are able to form relationships of trust with service users. critical thinking and how it enhances competence in practice, in writing papers, and in getting along with others; the importance of sensitive responsiveness and attunement in child and family relationships, in couple relationships, and in service provider relationships with service users; recovery from trauma happens in the safety of secure relationships; when individuals show capacities for coping with, adapting to, and overcoming risks, they can said to be resilient; individuals may be resilient in some situations and not in others; building trust with service users may require taking the time to get to know them and their life stories; trustworthy service providers are reflective service providers; we may have a lot of information in our heads, but we know nothing about individuals until we take the time to get to know them; the importance of reflective practice, often done in supervision and often in peer-to- peer conversations; and the centrality of looking for information that undermines what we think is going on.

Relevance of Ideas of Course to the Final Assignment The final assignment builds upon the ideas that I have been emphasizing and upon your own learnings. The final assignment is your opportunity to show that you remember, understand, and can apply course learnings. I dont expect you to parrot what I have said in class, but I do expect you to think about some of the points I have made in class, as listed earlier. Also, I expect you to show that you understand and can apply principles of critical thinking that I discuss in class and also for which I provide at least one reading. As a reminder, the final project has several parts that are Practice Wisdom/Clinical Expertise o a brief statement of what family violence means to you; o a brief statement of your experience in working with persons who have experience family violence; o a brief statement of what you know from experience about working with survivors of family violence; o a brief statement of your personal and professional values that are relevant to your interest in various types of violence that take place in families. o a brief report on interview(s) with persons who work in the area of family violence if you do not have interviews as a section of your literature review; A Presentation of a Case An Assessment of the Case Treatment Planning for this Case Readings for November 20 The following are the readings for November 20. The topic is resilience: coping with, adapting to, and overcoming adversities. Cicchetti, Dante, Fred A. Rogosch, Michael Lynch, & Kathleeen D. Holt (l993). Resilience in maltreated children: Processes leading to adaptive outcomes. Development and Psychopathology, 5, 629-647. Masten, Ann. S., & J. Douglas Coatsworth (1998). The development of competence in favorable and unfavorable environments: Lessons from research on successful children. American Psychologist, 53, 205-220. Assessment Gilgun, Jane F. (1998). CASPARS: Clinical assessment package for client risks and strengths. Scribd.com. http://www.scribd.com/doc/105431319/The-CASPARS-Manual- with-Instruments