by Amber Fredrick, TSS Group Member, 2nd Year Graduate Student
In my time as an advocate, I have spent many long nights in emergency rooms and early mornings in court rooms working with survivors to get the care they need. In navigating these complicated systems that often leave survivors feeling confused, overwhelmed, and frustrated, I have learned the importance of survivor-centered care.
Practitioners and researchers characterize survivor-centered care as being comprised of several core principles that center the survivor’s context and needs. These principles include: collaboration and partnership, emphasizing survivor’s choice and autonomy, understanding unique needs, awareness of context, and understanding coping strategies of the survivor. In a variety of systems, this can look like active listening, working alongside survivors to help them obtain the justice they seek, or even just offering information to help them make informed choices.
Despite being a central component of domestic violence (DV) agency approaches, practitioners and researchers have struggled to evaluate and quantify survivor-centered care principles as well as their outcomes, especially from survivor perspectives. This tension between the lack of survivor perspectives, advocate needs, and the implementation of survivor-centered care hints at a research gap: defining and measuring survivor-centered principles and survivor outcomes through survivor-centered methods. Responding to this gap, the Survivor Defined Practice Scale was created by Goodman and colleagues in collaboration with survivors of DV to measure their perceptions of the care they received.
Once this measure was created, it had been found that survivor-centered care is linked to increased survivor empowerment, lower PTSD endorsements, and expedites the healing process. Further, as a function of survivor centered care, safety-related survivor empowerment has also been found to lower PTSD and increase help seeking behaviors among survivors of domestic violence.
To date, research on survivor-centered care has been predominately focused on DV survivors and agencies. Consequently, the implications of survivor-centered care among sexual violence survivors and sexual violence agencies have been minimally explored. We know that sexual violence is disproportionately perpetrated against people with minoritized identities, and that this type of violence is uniquely rooted in colonialism and other systems of oppression. Although sexual violence often co-occurs with DV, it is a distinct form of violence that warrants research attention particularly regarding survivor-centered care.
Ultimately, we can make inferences from DV research; however, given the unique nature of sexual violence, I think sexual violence warrants its own breadth of research! In practice, we’ve seen this with the growth in sexual violence specific agencies and resources, and we are becoming more aware of the different needs survivors of sexual violence have. In research, we are lagging behind this shift.
My goal as a researcher is to contribute to filling this gap by focusing on the perspectives of survivors of sexual violence. Specifically, I’m working on a project that examines the perspectives of survivor centered care among survivors of sexual violence and how that impacts survivor outcomes like safety related survivor healing and help seeking intentions. Ideally, this study would be one of many that help inform best practice for working with survivors of sexual violence by centering their needs and perspectives on different sources of formal care they’ve received.
Stay tuned for findings from this upcoming work in 2025!
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Trauma Research Notes 