Addressing Intimate Partner Violence and Substance Use in Conjunction: Why It’s Needed, Why It’s Not Happening, and How to Do More

Substance Use (SU) and Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) are frequently intertwined in complex ways, so why aren’t systems set up to address them together? Both SU and IPV are stigmatized with costly societal, family, and personal consequences, and these vary by gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc. While they do not “cause” each other, impacts are more severe when both are present. They are rarely addressed in a coordinated way in communities, human services, or social policy, despite growing evidence that doing so reduces harm and barriers to change and improves outcomes. Practitioners report many barriers/problems in working across fields and creating "hybrid" approaches (addressing both SU and IPV together). This session will explore why there aren't more hybrid services when it’s clear, in both research and practice, that they are needed. Because these are field-level issues, developing new intervention skills is not enough to overcome them.

Throughout, we will work with you to identify ways you can begin implementing hybridity in your practice and/or organization. We will examine:
- how separate intervention fields for IPV and SU have evolved, with different origins, histories, paradigms, approaches and controversies within each field and for different populations - and how these are gendered, raced, classed, etc.;
- the consequences of not addressing both;
- challenges and barriers to hybrid IPV/SU work to understand why hybridity is so uncommon;
- frameworks to understand the complexity of the challenges;
- different approaches to hybridity, at different stages of innovation for varied levels of need.