NMHU Native American Social Work Studies Institute Partners with UNM School of Medicine - New Mexico Highlands University

Highlands University societal enactment students make lawsuit reappraisal skills successful intimate spouse violence 

January 9, 2023

The Native American Social Work Studies Institute (NASWSI) is moving successful concern with the University of New Mexico School of Medicine to supply societal enactment students with an accidental to make lawsuit reappraisal skills successful addressing intimate spouse unit homicides.

The concern with UNM is focused on Native American communities successful New Mexico who person been impacted by intimate spouse homicide. While there are university programs dedicated to humanities and anthropological perspectives of Native cultures, determination are precise fewer programs dedicated to the existent needs of tribal communities. Programs similar this 1 are 1 mode to bolster the skills tribes request to exert sovereignty and to code ongoing concerns specified arsenic Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

According to Dr. Melissa Riley, Director of NASWSI, “We don’t have many social workers in our tribal communities, truthful determination are gaps in the tract erstwhile it comes to tribal communities.”

The NASWSI is supported through tribal resolution by the All Pueblo of Council of Governors and the Navajo Nation and receives backing from the New Mexico State Legislature. The partnership between the NASWSI and UNM School of Medicine is the effect of authorities and tribal enactment enactment to provide social work students with education and training needed that volition heighten their work in tribal communities.

“Our absorption astatine NASWSI was to beryllium capable to make probe to inform social enactment practices, to enactment connected authorities that benefits autochthonal children and families, and to beryllium capable to supply coursework and learning opportunities for societal workers, societal enactment students, and tribal communities,” Riley said.

Riley has been a subordinate of the New Mexico Intimate Partner Death Review Team for implicit ten years and brings her expertise of the homicide lawsuit reappraisal process to the concern with UNM.

“There’s a continuous connection from those meetings that we don’t person capable grooming and knowing with helping professionals specified arsenic societal workers to understand how to navigate through a case, however to inquire captious questions, and how to guarantee that they enactment successful their ain lane, particularly successful the lawsuit of an investigation,” Riley said. “Some cases person fallen done the cracks because they have been jeopardized by somebody who didn’t travel process.”

The partnership provides social enactment students with real-life skills aimed astatine expanding prevention and involution services successful the field of intimate spouse violence. While students participating successful lawsuit reappraisal sessions are not seeing existent lawsuit reviews, the mock lawsuit files are existent to the details of existent lawsuit files she has reviewed in the past. The elaborate lawsuit files supply skills-based activities for students that assistance them use immoderate captious reasoning astir what a multidisciplinary attack to these cases mightiness look like.

“This is thing that volition payment students and the assemblage for years to come. I could not person done this connected my own; I really needed the assistance and enactment of the UNM School of Medicine and they were precise gracious in agreeing to bash it,” Riley said.