Early-Stage Program Evaluation of the Abbreviated Roots of Safety Program: A Brief Intervention for Immigrant/Refugee Survivors of Intimate Partner Abuse

The application of mainstream intimate partner abuse (IPA) services developed for locally born residents to immigrants and refugee survivors does not take their unique needs, risk factors, and protective factors into consideration and has been documented to cause harm. Given the high rate of immigration to Canada and that IPA is one of the most impactful social determinants of immigrant and refugee health, it is imperative to develop and validate culturally safe and effective programs for Canadian immigrant and refugee survivors. This project’s purpose was to provide an early-stage evaluation of the acceptability, feasibility, and potential effectiveness of a newly developed intervention called the abbreviated Roots of Safety (a-RoS) program using quantitative methods. a-RoS is a two session, culturally safe, survivor-centered, safety-focused, strengths-based, and solution-oriented IPA program for immigrant and refugee women survivors of IPA. Information was analyzed from 22 consecutively admitted survivors who participated in the program and 65 staff who were trained to deliver the program. The results indicated that the program was feasible to implement and very acceptable to staff and survivors. Additionally, there was a large statistically significant increase in immigrant/refugee survivors’ understanding of their internal tools (knowing how they wanted to increase safety and having the tools to achieve their goals). There were also increases across 10 domains in the survivors’ perceived risk and protective factor for IPA. The a-RoS program can be considered a promising practice in need of larger-scale and more rigorous evaluation and research.