Psychology professor Tasha R. Howe has received a 2014-15 Fulbright scholarship to Croatia, where she will work in child abuse prevention.

Howe will use the award to teach a course on child maltreatment prevention and provide curriculum consulting to the Department of Psychology at the University of Zagreb.

Additionally, she will train psychologists and social workers on the latest neurodevelopmental approaches to assess and treat children at the Conference for the Croatian Psychological Association in Rovinj. Howe will also conduct a series of public lectures and workshops on violence prevention at the University of Zadar.

“Croatia’s transition to democracy and privatization has been accompanied by high rates of unemployment and family stress, leading to large increases in the incidence of child abuse,” says Howe. “Through this grant, I will be able to provide Croatian institutions with state-of-the-art violence prevention and program evaluation information, as well as learn from them how post-conflict societies develop policies and procedures for child protection.”

Howe will conduct several two-day intensives with child welfare staff using the American Psychological Association’s violence prevention curriculum, ACT Raising Safe Kids, for which she has been a facilitator since 2005. The program teaches professionals how to work with parents on positive discipline and nonviolent parenting skills. She has done similar work in Humboldt County, training child welfare staff, teaching parenting classes, and conducting program evaluations, several of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals with HSU students as co-authors.

In addition to her violence prevention work, Howe has over a decade of experience in curriculum development. She redesigned the university’s psychology major, which has several courses related to children, families, and violence, and she serves on the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee. She is also the author of the textbook, “Marriages and Families in the 21st Century: A Bioecological Approach,” (2011, published by Wiley-Blackwell).

This is Howe’s second Fulbright award. In 2008, she received a grant to work on domestic violence in Cyprus, another post-conflict country.

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