DVOMB Fall Advanced Series Training
What: Understanding and Addressing Women’s Use of Force
When: September 19, 2019
Time: 8:30-4:30pm
Registration starts at 8am
Where:
Denver Police Protection Association (PPA) Event Center
Cost: $30
CEU: 7 hours
Trainer: Lisa Young Larance, MSW, LCSW, LMSW
Registration to open soon!
Training Overview:
Understanding and addressing women’s use of force in their intimate heterosexual relationships
is a controversial issue across the U.S. that affects the work of activists, advocates, criminal legal
system personnel, and service providers at the agency, county, and state-wide levels. Often the
inaccurate perception that women who have used force are “batterers” ¾ requiring a one-size fits
all approach to intervention ¾ misinforms arrest procedures, judicial actions, and chosen
antiviolence interventions. Through lack of attention to context, interventions may fail to meet
the needs of women who have used force and may also fail to meet the goals of the referring
agency ¾ to prevent future incidents.
Awareness of the complexity of women’s use of force ¾ both philosophically and as a service
provision area ¾ is critical to productive community-wide conversations among stakeholders. It
is also critical to shaping service providers’ potentially life-saving interventions for women and
their families. A one-day training offers participants opportunities to engage in a variety of
thought-provoking, issue-focused conversations as well as gain direct-practice skills in meeting
this population’s nuanced needs. Specific learning areas include gaining a deeper understanding
of the issue’s history, the language used, new research findings, assessment techniques, and a
framework for serving women during group intervention.
Bio:
Lisa Young Larance, MSW, LCSW, LMSW, is a practitioner-scholar whose practical work,
curricula, trainings, and peer-reviewed publications, focus on meeting the needs of marginalized
women and their families. She is the founder of two innovative community-based programs
providing intervention, advocacy, and support for women who have used force in their relationships: Jersey Battered Women’s Service, Inc.’s
Vista Program
and Catholic Social Services of Washtenaw County's
RENEW Program
. She also co-developed and implemented the prison-based Meridians for Incarcerated
Women program for the Michigan Department of
Corrections
. Lisa consults domestically and internationally for a range of organizations and agencies including the New Mexico Coalition Against Domestic Violence; Harmony House’s Nurturing Hearts Violence Prevention Program in Hong Kong,
China; the United States Air Force’s (USAF) Family Advocacy Program serving women on 70 USAF bases world-wide; and Baptcare and Berry Street’s +SHIFT Program in Melbourne, Australia. To encourage discussion and resource sharing among practitioners and scholars involved in the lives of women who have used force, in 2007 Lisa launched and moderates the international “W-Catch22” listserv. She is also an editorial review board member of the international, interdisciplinary journal Violence Against Women. As a joint University of Michigan doctoral candidate in Social Work and Sociology, Lisa’s dissertation research focuses on the complex experiences of women who have had antiviolence programming contact.
