Social work
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The social work grand challenge to ensure healthy youth development necessarily involves a focus on violence prevention, including the prevention of sexual and dating violence during adolescence. The experience of sexual and dating violence is associated with numerous and often long-lasting detrimental mental, physical, and social outcomes, many of which this grand challenge seeks to prevent. Although evidence shows that gender is a critical axis of identity to consider in violence prevention research and practice efforts, gender is not a central lens applied in the field's approach to such issues within this grand challenge. ⋯ Second, authors describe gender-transformative (GT) approaches to sexual and dating violence prevention, a promising practice for both ensuring the healthy development of youths and reducing violence perpetration by focusing on engaging boys and young men. Third, authors discuss the potential for GT strategies to be used in prevention efforts targeting adolescent social issues more broadly. Last, authors call for practitioners and researchers focused on healthy youth development to apply a gender analysis in their efforts and articulate concrete ways to do so.
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Reproductive justice is an intersectional social movement, theory, and praxis well aligned with social work's mission and values. Yet, advancing reproductive justice-the right to have children, to not have children, to parent with safety and dignity, and to sexual and bodily autonomy-has not been a signature area of scholarship and practice for the field. ⋯ The authors then highlight some of the ways by which social workers have been disruptors of and complicit in the oppression of individuals, families, and communities with regard to their reproductive rights and outcomes. The article concludes with a call to action and recommendations for social work to foreground reproductive justice in research, practice, and education efforts by centering marginalized voices while reimagining the field's pursuit of health equity.