Intersection between Intimate Partner Violence and Gang Violence

ALSO (Alliance of Local Service Organizations) has been implementing initiatives to reduce violence on Chicago's Northwest Side since 1998. A longtime partner of the CeaseFire Campaign, ALSO's implementation of violence prevention work resulted in decreased shootings and homicides in the target communities dramatically. However, ALSO wanted to reduce violence even further and through review of shootings and homicides realized that we were missing a major cause of street violence – intimate partner conflicts that play out by and among gang members. In 2009, a series of apparent gang-related shootings/homicides came to our attention. ALSO community violence outreach workers collaborated with ALSO domestic violence staff to uncover that the homicides were connected to each other, fueled by an ongoing domestic violence case but looked like gang related violence. We compiled the facts into a single narrative and attached supporting documentation from news articles to further explain this case. However, this case was not an anomaly. Interestingly, the more we analyzed cases of what appeared to be gang violence, the more we begun to uncover connections to unreported cases of domestic violence. ALSO uses cases like these as training tools to educate and mobilize professional groups and community members (law enforcement, outreach workers, domestic violence victim advocates, and other professionals) to expand the range of violence prevention/intervention options currently available in Chicago. ALSO uses a holistic approach to prepare current and new outreach workers to work with gang related conflicts and those that originate from intimate partner violence proactively.