Community-based theater is a uniquely powerful way to challenge current beliefs and practices and develop new approaches to preventing intimate partner violence (IPV). Over the last 15 years, Professor Yoshihama has been conducting research using theater to develop, implement, and evaluate community-generated, socioculturally relevant approaches to preventing and ending IPV in Asian communities in Southeast Michigan.
Asians are one of the fastest growing minority population groups in the United States; however, IPV prevention programs that are socioculturally relevant to this rapidly growing population group remain limited. Studies of various Asian populations in the United States report the prevalence of physical and/or sexual IPV somewhere between 18-52% (Yoshihama, 2009) rates that are comparable to or somewhat higher than those found in studies of the general population of the United States. IPV-related homicides are disproportionately higher among Asian women across the United States (Yoshihama & Dabby, 2015) Furthermore, tolerance of IPV appears high among Asians in the United States. Given the high rates of IPV and greater degrees of tolerance of IPV among Asians in the United States, it is critically important to develop effective IPV prevention among this growing population group.
Concerned about the lack of socioculturally relevant IPV program for Asian communities in southeast Michigan, an area seeing steady growth of Asian residents, Professor Yoshihama and two graduate students at the time (Youn-Joon Choi, MSW, 2001 and Emilee Coulter-Thompson, MSW, 2001) created New Visions in 2001, a participatory action research (PAR) project involving ongoing collaboration of Asian community members and local and state organizations addressing IPV (e.g., shelter programs, state coalition).
Over the last 15 years, New Visions has used interactive theater to develop socioculturally-relevant IPV prevention approaches. Specifically, New Visions employs a form of interactive theater called Forum Theater, developed by Augusto Boal, the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed. Forum Theater involves creating a play, leaving a scene unsettled or inadequately resolved. After a performance of the scripted play, audience members are invited to replace a character on stage and to try out different approaches to resolve the problematic situation. New Visions prevention program is directly created by involving the members of the focal community. Trained Asian community members are engaged as Peer Educators, and they create skits that depict a situation where one character perpetrates abuse towards another, the skit typically ends with the bystanders depicted as avoiding or ignoring the situation and not taking any action directed towards preventing abuse. Community members in the audience are then invited to replace one of the bystander characters and to try to intervene in some way in the situation. All other actors remain in their characters and respond to a new situation unfolding in front of them, improvising as they go. Through multiple audience interventions and follow-up discussions, audience members and peer educators explores how to prevent IPV that are congruent with their sociocultural values and context.
New Visions has served as a valuable training ground for many students at UM and beyond; in addition to MSW students who chose to do their internship/practicum, undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students have involved in various aspects of the project as research assistants and volunteers. They gained direct experience working with diverse Asian communities, strengthened their skills and knowledge in community organizing, prevention, and community-based research.
According to drama and media theories, emotional involvement and identification with characters (e.g., feeling similar to a character) are conducive to attitudinal and behavioral changes in audience members. Thus, theater-based prevention programs developed and delivered by peer educators who are individuals similar to the audience would be conducive to identification, which would in turn lead to greater program effectiveness. Professor Tolman joined New Visions’ efforts around 2011. Together, Professors Yoshimana and Tolman have been examining the feasibility of the use of audience response system (e.g., clickers) to assess the audience members’ emotional involvement and identification and working to enhance audience input into the development of socioculturally relevant IPV prevention approaches.
The theater-based IPV prevention effort with community members has also allowed for an examination of the ways in which community members construct and challenge masculinities and femininities in their everyday sociocultural milieu. Professor Yoshihama and Fatmeh Baidoun (MSW 2016) presented their study findings at the American Men’s Studies Association Conference this year (another MSW 2016, Divya Chand also worked on this project).
While Professor Yoshihama’s research has been with specific communities and around a particular community issue, the process of using theater has many strengths, broader application among others. The flexibility of creating theater performances that are tailored to the communities they are intended for make the approach broadly applicable across other domains of community problems and in various different communities.