Avital Kaye Tzadok (MSW, PhD)

Avital Kaye-Tzadok is currently a Haruv USA Director and a visiting scholar at OU. She is a social worker (BSW, MSW, PhD) with sixteen years of direct practice experience with marginalized populations, mainly at-risk adolescent girls and young women in Israel. She is also a social work lecturer, a certified supervisor and group facilitator. For her years in direct practice, she mostly worked at training at-risk adolescent girls and young women to become mentors for at-risk youth. The idea behind this program is transforming painful and traumatic pasts into knowledge and skills that can help others. Her PhD thesis focused on resilience and posttraumatic growth of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. During her post-doc at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, she was a part of an international research group, studying subjective well-being of children in over sixteen countries. During the past six years she has headed the field instruction unit at the Social Work Department of Ruppin Academic Center, in Israel, in charge if the practicum of 180 social work undergraduate students. She has been teaching social work courses for over ten years, mainly social work methods and interventions skills, group social work, resilience after trauma, working with people in poverty and working with adolescents. She has published book chapters and articles on: Resilience and posttraumatic growth after childhood sexual abuse, child neglect, promoting healthy sexuality and preventing sexual assault, feminist intervention with adolescents, and more.