A Canadian Institutes of Health Research grant valued at $1,371,511 over five years has been awarded to Nursing professor Helene Berman and her team.
The project, titled Promoting Health Through Collaborative Engagement with Youth in Canada: Overcoming, Resisting, and Preventing Structural Violence, hopes to examine how structural violence is experienced by youth in Canada, how it influences their health and identify strategies that can be used to address and prevent violence.
Project objectives include:
- Examine how structural forms of violence are defined, understood and experienced by youth;
- Examine, from the perspectives of youth, how structural violence shapes their health and well-being;
- Undertake a critical and historical analysis of relevant policies to identify how institutions wittingly or unwittingly contribute to the victimization or vulnerability of youth and the differential impacts of policies on diverse groups of youth;
- Examine how structural violence is minimized, reinforced, or enacted through interactions with various systems/institutions (eg. child welfare, justice, health, Indian affairs, citizenship and immigration), and how these interactions influence health; and
- Evaluate the use of youth-centered Participatory Action Research approaches as a strategy to promote health by empowering youth to overcome, resist, and prevent structural forms of violence in their lives.
Berman’s team includes Lorie Donelle, Cheryl Forchuk and Abe Oudshoorn, all faculty members in the Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing who will serve as co-investigators on the project.
