Tag: domestic violence

Awareness is Not Enough: An Update on the Forthcoming “Every 90 Seconds”

August 16, 2021

“Awareness, though, is not enough.”

That was my response to a recent question about whether awareness of the sexual harassment in the Governor’s office in New York state was going to change things.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of letting go of the promise that awareness will change violence against women while working on book that I just delivered to the Oxford University Press, Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence against Women.

I open the book by tracing a bit of the history of our field, and the promise of awareness, back to the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. With new awareness of the sheer frequency of violence against women and girls at the time, much started to change: The first rape crisis centers were founded, the number of domestic violence shelters expanded. Legislative change happened too, from new state laws about domestic violence and sexual assault to the passage of the Violence against Women Act. Medicine started paying attention also, adding posttraumatic stress disorder to the medical nomenclature as a nascent traumatic stress studies field began to grow rapidly.

Along the way, though, violence against women continued to be seen as a special interest issue — something that matters to women, or primarily to those who are abused and who abuse; but not necessarily to all of us.

Meanwhile, awareness of violence has never been greater, thanks to the #MeToo movement and near-daily headlines about sexual harassment and gender-based violence.

And yet, violence against women in its many forms has persisted, relatively unabated. Every 90 seconds a woman is raped. Another is assaulted by an intimate partner.

To be sure, we’ve watched declines of a few percentage points in some forms of violence. Yet, the same problem of women being victimized — along with girls and gender nonconforming groups — persists, just as it has for millennia.

So what to do, if awareness isn’t enough for change?

In the book, I argue that we need a new approach that helps people recognize their shared interest in ending violence against women, even if they didn’t think that violence against women has affected their lives directly.

We need an approach that helps people see that violence against women is tangled up with the most pressing public problems of our time — healthcare, immigration, education, and legal reform as well as gun violence and economic inequities. Issue by issue, then, I make the case that we share interests with people working on those issues, some of whom may never have considered the ways that violence against women mattered to them also.

By showing people how violence against women impacts the healthcare system and education access, criminal legal reform and economic opportunity, immigration and gun violence, I hope that we will be able to open doors to new kinds of collaborative action to end violence against women and make progress on those issues at the same time.

To make the case, I draw on concepts from community organizing that I’ve learned about through work at DU’s Center for Community Engagement to advance Scholarship and Learning. The book leads to a call to action to collaborate in new ways to restore and ensure dignity, fairness, opportunity, safety to women and our communities.

I hope you’ll see things you care about in the book along with work happening here in Colorado. The book is built on the foundation of what we’ve learned together over more than a decade of collaborating on research, while also pulling in national and international research findings.

The book is scheduled to be released in April 2022, just in time for Sexual Assault Awareness Month. I’ll keep you posted as it progresses and look forward to sharing it with you when it’s published. In the meantime, my sincerest gratitude to many people who have provided feedback and supported me throughout this project.

Traumatic Stress Studies Group Team Members standing on a bridge

Sharing Research in Socially-Distanced Times

November 10, 2020

The pandemic has only amplified the importance of doing research into the causes and consequences of violence as well as effective responses. However, sharing that research looks different these days.

In the Fall, our team typically heads off to the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) to share our work with other researchers and practitioners. Instead of logging miles this year, however, we’re logging on to a remote meeting.

The findings that we’re sharing at the remote ISTSS Annual Meeting reflect the breadth that is characteristic of our team’s work — as I hope you’ll see below across five poster presentations led by graduate student team members. From measuring service needs to developing a better understanding of revictimization risk, we hope there’s something for everyone in these posters. (Click on the picture of the poster to open a pdf version of the work.)

Needs and Concerns of Caregivers Involved in Child Abuse/Neglect Investigations

Two posters focused on understanding the needs and concerns of caregivers involved in child abuse and neglect investigations.

Adi Rosenthal led our team’s efforts to gather information about the service needs of families involved in child abuse and neglect investigations — and barriers to getting those needs met. She described that “We developed a measure for assessing the service needs and barriers across a wide range of services (i.e., physical health, mental health, school, and social, and basic needs) for families involved in child abuse or neglect investigations. The measure appears to be a promising assessment and captured high rates of unmet service needs: 94% of caregivers reported at least 1 unmet need and 39% reported at least 5. Caregivers reported an average of 7 barriers to getting their service needs met.”

Recognizing a research gap that has implications for practice, Maria-Ernestina Christl set out to develop a way to measure failure-to-protect fears. She summarized that, “Women involved in a child abuse investigation who had a history of intimate partner violence reported fears related to failure-to-protect laws. These fears were found to be related to economic dependence on the offender, racial identity, and their perceptions of the child abuse investigation.”

Revictimization

Three of the posters built on our team’s longstanding focus on revictimization.

Naomi Wright described findings from one of the studies that drew on interviews conducted over 9 months with women who had a recent unwanted sexual experience: “This study explored whether we could predict which women experienced another unwanted sexual experience. In particular, we wanted to understand whether social betrayal helped predict revictimization in addition to women’s other circumstances.”

Another study, led by Julie Olomi, tackled methodological limitations that have limited research on information processing and revictimization. Julie described, “Current methods seeking to interrupt the association between childhood interpersonal violence and revictimization by examining how women perceive and respond to risk using written, audio, or video vignettes have led to mixed results and not yet translated to effective, long-term interventions. This study sought to address this gap and introduces a novel risk recognition and response task asking participants to monitor and provide social skills feedback on a chat room conversation between a man and a woman to mask the focus on risk detection and response.”

Finally, Naomi Wright previewed findings from our team’s collaboration with Dr. Kim Bender (Graduate School of Social Work, DU). Naomi noted that “This study with young people experiencing houselessness found that young people who experienced violence or abuse before leaving home were more likely to also experience violence after leaving home. Psychological distress (i.e., depression and PTSD symptoms) were explored as a link between violence experiences before and after leaving home.”

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Check-in + Check Out: Traumatic Brain Injury and Intimate Partner Abuse

June 15, 2020

For many years, the term traumatic brain injury (or TBI) has evoked thoughts about the perils that faced combat troops or world-class athletes. Recently, victim advocates and researchers have pointed out the importance of recognizing that TBIs also affect victims and survivors of intimate partner abuse (IPA).

Here at the Traumatic Stress Studies (TSS) Group, we agree. In fact, we feel an ever-increasing urgency to bring attention to TBI and IPA, particularly as we check-in on one study’s progress.

Our research team has been asking women seeking services after IPA about head injuries as part of a larger research project. Here we check in on what the first 33 women told us.

Nearly all (94%) reported at least one head injury that involved an external blow to the head. On average, women reported three separate head injuries. Most women (64%) also described a period of time when they sustained multiple head injuries in a row, often due to abuse. The majority (82%) of women described alterations in consciousness for at least one of the injuries. Alteration in consciousness is a key criterion for diagnosing a TBI.

94% of women interviewed reported at least one injury from an external blow to the head. 

TBIs weren’t just a thing of the past for the women who spoke with our team. Instead, women told us that they were still contending with an average of five post-concussive symptoms currently. These included issues such as memory problems, concentration problems, and headaches.

In addition to external blows to the head, women commonly reported strangulation, which can injure the brain by disrupting the flow of oxygen. One quarter of women reported strangulation during the target incident and two-thirds in the past six months.

This check-in is based on reports from the 33 women in an ongoing study. The picture from these preliminary data may change as we interview more women, so we’ll be sure to bring you updates as we have them.

In the meantime, we’re trying to do our part to get the word out about the importance of paying attention to TBI when working with victims and survivors of IPA. For example, Dr. Gorgens and I wrote a piece published last month in the Clinician’s Corner, an online feature from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. Check out that piece for more about prevalence, screening, and treatment considerations when working with IPA victims and survivors.

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Acknowledgments:

This article describes a research project that is a collaboration between the TSS Group, the Rose Andom Center, Dr. Kim Gorgens (DU Graduate School of Social Work) and Dr. Julia Dmitrieva (DU Department of Psychology).

Funding for the project is provided by the MINDSOURCE Brain Injury Network, State of Colorado. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views or the official position of MINDSOURCE Brain Injury Network, State of Colorado.

 

Launching New Study: Intimate Partner Abuse (IPA) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

July 16, 2019

Blows to the head are common among women experiencing intimate partner abuse (IPA), as documented in recent research nationally (e.g., Corrigan, Wolfe, Mysiw, Jackson, & Bogner, 2003; Wilbur et al., 2001) and from the Traumatic Stress Studies Group (Gagnon & DePrince, 2017). Despite prevalence data, traumatic brain injury (TBI) and IPA have received scant policy and research attention. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2015 report to Congress, Traumatic Brain Injury in the United States: Epidemiology and Rehabilitation, failed to even mention IPA.

Victim service providers, recognizing the occurrence of TBIs among clients, have begun to integrate traumatic brain injury (TBI) screenings into practice. Unfortunately, the lack of research on TBI and IPA means that there is not yet an adequate empirical base to inform practices for the use of TBI screenings in decision-making and treatment-planning for women experiencing IPA.

We plan to address these gaps in a new study.

With funding from MINDSOURCE Brain Injury Network (Colorado Department of Human Services), the Traumatic Stress Studies Group will collaborate with Drs. Julia Dmitrieva (Department of Psychology, University of Denver), Kim Gorgens (Graduate School of Professional Psychology, University of Denver) and the Rose Andom Center to answer key questions about TBI and IPA.

In particular, we have designed a study that promises to result in an empirically-informed approach to screening for TBI among women experiencing IPA. By partnering with the Rose Andom Center — a multidisciplinary facility that serves women who have experienced IPA — we will ensure that the research conducted is relevant to providers and ready for their use. We also hope that this research will advance understanding and awareness of links between IPA and TBI in Colorado — and nationally.

Stay tuned for more on this new study as we begin data collection later this year.