Primary Violence Prevention: Taking a Deeper Look
Commentary about Interventions that Help Victims of Domestic Violence and Application of the Woman Abuse Screening Tool (WAST) and WAST-Short in the Family Practice Setting
Conclusions
Interventions for such a broad problem must take place at the level of community, school, family, and individual patient. Although we are busy incorporating screening strategies into our practices to detect battered women, it is also necessary for us to look upstream. We need long-term studies of the impact of violence prevention activities in the clinical setting. But as individual physicians we cannot wait for those results; if we are serious about primary prevention we must begin now by raising the hard questions about control and violence with boys and men. Otherwise, we will get very good at fishing the bodies out downstream but will never have any reprieve from that work.
