Dialog and Prevention Are Key to Halting Domestic Violence
By Melanie Slone
“I would always see the cops come and go. I would see friends getting arrested. There would be shootings nearby,” Luis Canseco tells North County Informador. “I wanted to be a police officer. I want to help my community. I want to learn why this violence is happening.”
College courses would take Luis in another direction, one geared toward prevention and education.
Today, as Domestic Violence Education and Prevention Program Manager at Community Resource Center (CRC), Luis and his coworker Veronica Lopez talk to parents and teens about domestic violence, healthy relationships, and teen dating violence, offering resources to the community.
“We’ll teach about teen dating violence. We’ll teach about healthy relationships and leadership,” he says.
Awareness and Dialog
“Culture is huge in the way we learn about life and how we learn about who we are, how we identify and how we act, the gender roles,” says Luis. He sees that kids are influenced by social media, TV, and music, “lyrics for example that talk really bad about women.…Parents tell me all the time, how do we fight that?”
Luis believes the answer lies in dialog. “We can’t change the music, but we can have a conversation with the kids,” he says. “Use that song as a way to start a conversation. Maybe you can ask them, hey, what do you think about what that song is saying?”
Luis’ program at CRC brings awareness to some 350 people a month and sometimes organizes 30-day training for smaller groups of teens. He says he prefers to deal with both parents and their kids. “Let’s have a conversation with the parents about domestic violence,” he says. “Let’s get them informed what domestic violence is…teen dating violence. Teen dating violence is a real thing. Just because they’re kids, it doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
His program teaches parents how to model healthy relationships. “The kids learn more from behavior than from words.” He discusses intimate partner violence and dating abuse. “We teach them about healthy relationships, boundaries, respect. We do activities, workshops with them.”
Then, two groups are brought together. Luis asks teens if they’ve talked to their parents about healthy relationships. “And most kids have not,” he discovers, so he focuses on education for both. “We can build a bridge between them… give them strategies on how to talk to your teens, and we encourage the teens to talk to their parents and trust their parents.”
Even if the dialog is difficult to build, Luis pushes for it. “Your kid doesn’t want to listen? Keep asking them. The day that your kid is in trouble, is struggling in a relationship, who are they going to think of? You, because you’ve been asking this whole time about their relationships. …They’re going to go to you. And that’s what we want…the goal is to build that trust between the teen and the parents.”
Because social media is also so important in teens’ lives, Luis’ program has launched a new peer-to-peer TikTok account, Young Love for Good, where teens interview each other about healthy relationships.
The Roots of Domestic Violence
Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, Luis says he grew up surrounded by machismo. “I would cry…my dad would tell me, stop crying or I’m going to give you a real reason to cry. That was a threat. He was threatening me, and he was checking my manhood.”
Luis says boys in the Latino culture are taught not to express their emotions. “So, all of that affects people, affects men, especially in that way, where men grow up, okay, I can’t cry. I can’t ask for help. I’ve got to deal with it myself. I’ve got to man up.”
He says these ideas can lead to depression and stigma. “That also adds up to violence,” he adds, “because if men are not expressing their emotions, they bottle this up their whole lives.”
This unexpressed trauma needs an outlet, he explains. “In a good way, through exercise, through talking through therapy…But if it doesn’t, it’s going to come out it in a bad way, maybe being violent to your partner, being violent to a friend, getting mad at a bar and starting a fight.”
Luis experienced violence firsthand at 12, when he moved to the United States. “I got bullied a lot because I didn’t speak English…I was bullied because I was overweight.”
And the trouble didn’t stop there. He remembers that Vista High had a lot of issues. “Street trouble…Police involved and so many injustices, crimes happening.” In response, Luis wanted to help kids who were being bullied. “I have always had empathy for kids who are bullied because I was bullied myself…And I wanted to stop the crime in my community.” He decided to become a police officer.
That plan changed when he took a sociology class “that really started speaking to my life experiences. I started learning about why there was so much crime in my community…why my friends were being arrested,” he says.
That’s when his focus shifted to a social justice outlook. “It spoke to my experiences. I thought, this is what I’m the most interested in.”
Social Justice
From Palomar College, Luis transferred to Cal State San Marcos and finished his bachelor’s degree in criminology. He then went for a master’s in sociology, where he says he learned about social injustice. Right after graduating in 2019, he landed his job at CRC, where he puts into practice his social science and gender studies.
“I’ve learned so much working in the community with people,” he says. He realized quickly that many people were unaware of the resources available to them, especially Spanish speakers. One of his areas of focus is Spanish-speaking communities, where he employs his bilingual skills teaching courses.
He also began to translate CRC materials into Spanish. “We have a big Spanish population here in San Diego, especially in North County, so let’s go ahead and translate all these papers, all these flyers into Spanish as well,” he says. CRC supported him in his efforts. Today, he does workshops with parents in English and Spanish.
He also advocates for prevention funding. “I want society to move toward prevention and stop domestic violence before it happens,” he tells us. He is fully invested in education, resources, and awareness. “Many people don’t believe in prevention. Hopefully schools can do more,” he says.
For now, “Some schools do a very poor job in teaching emotions to kids,” says Luis, so parents have the responsibility to talk about them with their children. Luis and the CRC program are there to help.
Domestic Violence (DV) Resources at CRC
People of both genders face domestic violence. CRC has a support group for men who experience domestic or sexual violence, the 4th Wednesday of the month from 5–6 p.m.
Luis notes that most victims of DV have suffered through financial abuse, “meaning that they don’t know much about finances. They don’t have access to the bank accounts. They always gave the money to the abuser. The don’t have financial knowledge.” CRC case managers and transitional housing can help with that aspect.
Direct CRC Resources
- 24-hour emergency hotline
- Shelter for those who need to leave a hostile environment. Approximately 184 DV victims each month.
- Carlsbad Trauma Center
- Links with other San Diego DV agencies to find space in shelters or hotel vouchers.
- Transitional housing.
- Trained case managers help an average of 28 DV victims from North County each month get back on their feet and get connected with local resources and legal centers.
- Counseling for adults and children who have experienced DV.
- Child therapy center with a child therapist.
- Most people using CRC’s services are in the North County, from Solana Beach to Oceanside, Carlsbad to San Marcos and into Escondido.
