Building community partnerships to end interpersonal violence: a collaboration of the schools of social work, law, and nursing.

The article discusses the University of Texas at Austin's (UT Austin) Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (IDVSA), an institution that was established in 2001. IDVSA is a collaboration of the Schools of Social Work, Law, and Nursing, and 150 community affiliates. Recognizing that interpersonal violence does not occur in a vacuum, the IDVSA operates within an ecological framework in which explanations for interpersonal violence acknowledge that individuals and families are nested in larger mezzo and macro systems, and factors such as gender, poverty, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, and immigration status play influential roles in our understanding of these issues.