Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a well-documented public health issue and human rights violation. Power asymmetries in social relationships place women and girls at higher risk of certain forms of violence, including intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and violence perpetrated by family members. It is now common to see scholarship and global development reports advocating for gender equality and equity to address VAWG in multiple contexts worldwide. All these calls to action underscore that to achieve appropriate and effective interventions to end VAWG, there is a need to understand and intervene in the underlying factors that have been consistently associated with its perpetration and normalization worldwide.

The study explored, through a youth-driven participatory action research (YPAR) analytical lens, the power relations of young mothers in Colombia with their parents, intimate partners, extended family members, and others, to conceptualize power within these relationships. Through theory building on power-centered needs and violence prevention program design, the two Colombian research collectives who implemented this YPAR initiative carried out the following activities: 1) characterized the context of oppression and domination for young mothers in Cartagena and Medell�n; 2) characterized six power-centered needs experienced by young mothers and their interrelation with violent experiences; and 3) designed two youth-driven violence prevention interventions that addressed the identified power-centered needs.

We strived to be particularly cognizant of the pattern (identified in our collected data) that, for young women in the global South, a renegotiation of power—while necessary to prevent violence in the long term—can result in an ipso facto incidence of violence or in heightening the risk of short-term violence and victimization of the individual that attempts the renegotiation. Thus, we ventured to design violence prevention programming that procures safe renegotiations of power.

The theoretical framework that drove this study was decolonial feminism (Lugones, 2010) and multidimensional empowerment (Drydyk, 2013). In the global social work scholarship realm, there is a growing recognition of the need to address colonialism in the field. This decolonial feminist YPAR initiative, which resulted in the conceptualization of power-centered needs as a key analytical lens to understand the role of power in violence prevention work, is a step toward the decolonization of social work scholarship.