Narrator: The Center for Research on Violence Against Women at the University of Kentucky
is the nation’s only Center focused solely on research to address and prevent gender-based violence.
Diane Follingstad: We are the Center for Research on Violence Against Women. That distinguishes
us as a group of endowed faculty who are trying to do the best quality research that we can
to both ease the plight of victims of violence, but also we have is a very strong goal to
come up with the kinds of research studies that we hope will help us and help other people
aim toward preventing violence.
Claire Renzetti: The problem of gender-based violence or violence against women, is a global
social problem and a global public health problem. But it’s a problem that is surrounded
by lots of myths and stereotypes and misinformation. A research center and research in general,
is really important because it separates fact from fiction. It provides us with empirical
data on a problem, and you can’t solve a problem unless you have accurate information
about the causes of the problem, risk factors, unless you know about victims and perpetrators.
Heather Bush: The data that we’re collecting, it’s not just data. It’s people’s behaviors,
it’s their experiences, and those data points have a voice. And so, being able to provide
a story to that voice is a really important part of what we’re doing. The issue is that
the data is complicated and it’s complex, just as complex as the questions we’re trying
to answer, and to try to do that as a single person and to talk about that story, is really
difficult. It really requires a team with lots of different perspectives and research
backgrounds.
Diane Follingstad: When the center was established back in 2004, the early goal was to bring
together a variety of professionals who actually could bring different types of expertise,
different knowledge bases, who could all share their skills, and produce the best possible
research studies. In our Center, we have public health epidemiologists, we have a sociologist
who’s specialty is criminology, we have two psychologists. We also have a biostatistician.
Claire Renzetti: You can have a room full of geniuses and if they all look at the issue
through the same lens, you’re not going to be able to address the problem holistically,
but if you have a lot of people who have done research on a problem, but from multiple perspectives,
you’re likely to be able to develop a multi-dimensional solution to that problem, and that’s really
what we do in the Center for Research on Violence Against Women. And we also partner with people
in other departments who are not center faculty and with people outside the University of
Kentucky. So it’s really a Center that goes beyond the walls of Bowman Hall, and also
goes beyond the boundaries of the University.
Narrator: Ann Coker leads the research team evaluating the Green Dot Bystander Program.
A recent CDC-funded study in Kentucky high schools demonstrates the program reduces violence.
Ann Coker: We actually teach people how to identify situations where it might be risky
and figure out how to safely, but effectively, intervene to reduce the risk of violence.
If we can intervene to teach people how to take care of each other, that’s really what
we’re talking about when we talk about bystander behaviors. Then you have the potential to
see that carried out into adulthood. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention provided
us funding to evaluate the program as it was disseminated in 26 schools. So it’s a randomized
intervention design, which means that half the schools were randomized to get the intervention
and half were not. And then we surveyed people in all 26 schools over a five-year period.
Heather Bush: So as Dr. Coker and I were talking about the data, she said, “Why don’t you
just come and see what it’s like?” I so I went out to the high schools and collected
the data, and that’s really helpful because the study design informs analysis, but so
does how the data is collected.
Ann Coker: It really took about two to three years before we started to see a decline in
violence rates. In the schools that got the intervention, we found lower rates of sexual
violence perpetration in those schools relative to the schools that didn’t have the intervention,
and that was in the neighborhood of a 40 to 50 percent reduction. That’s a big impact.
Heather Bush: To be able to see the reaction when you can tell people that the data that
they’ve collected and the efforts that they’ve done that’s made a difference. It’s made
a difference in the research, and it has the potential to make a difference in student’s
lives. That’s why the green dot project is so exciting.
Narrator: The University of Kentucky is leading the nation with data on sexual violence and
campus safety, thanks to a groundbreaking survey that includes all UK students.
Diane Follingstad: President Capilouto, who really cares about the issue of violence and
safety on this campus, decided to sponsor an annual survey that he hoped would be able
to get feedback from all UK students. We’re talking about 27,000 students, and he came
to us and asked us to develop, implement, and then to analyze a survey that would be
done for the next five years. It’s been quite a gargantuan task, developing what of
the kinds of questions that would be best to ask to get the most relevant information
about student’s perceptions of safety, what is their knowledge of resources on campus,
as well as the negative experiences that may have happened to them. If you don’t know
what particular issues are for your campus, if you’re not able to come up with ideas
for ways to prevent it from happening, you’re pretty much working in the dark.
Heather Bush: Not only is it trying to assess the campus climate, it’s really changing
campus culture in having students from all levels take this assessment to tell us what’s
going on in their environment. What safety concerns do they have? What experiences do
they have? Now we’re at the point where we’re trying to analyze the data so that
we can create reports, and get that information back to the students, to administrators, policy
makers, as they make decisions to try to improve the safety of the campus. One of the really
exciting things about this project is that there are some pretty significant methodologies
that we had to consider in creating the survey and in disseminating the survey. And so, we’re
at the point now where we can share that information with other colleges and universities, so the
impact is significant. Not only can we change the safety in the environment of our own students,
but we have the potential to really change multiple campuses.
Narrator: Claire Renzetti and Diane Follingstad are collecting data to determine whether being
involved in a horticulture program at a battered women’s shelter has therapeutic effects
for women who have experienced abuse.
Claire Renzetti: GreenHouse17 is actually the name of our local battered women shelter.
The shelter is unique because it’s located on 40 acres of farm land and so like a lot
of non-profits, they were facing increasing food bills and other budget constraints and
so the associate director who is just a real idea person, she thought one of the ways that
maybe they could reduce their food bills would be to go back to having it be a farm. What
they did was they started a program where the women residents can volunteer to work
outside or they can sign up for a stipend program where they work for about ten hours
a week and get paid to do it, and they really work the farm. The staff at the shelter began
to notice changes in the women who worked the farm, over and above what they were seeing
with women just participating in regular shelter programing, and so they were saying you know,
“The women are having fewer drug and alcohol problems. They’re seeing increases in self
esteem.” So there were all these positive indicators, but there was no empirical evidence.
So Diane Follingstad and I are engaged in an evaluation of the farm program. We have
this study planned for a three-year period and we expect actually to have more than 300
women enrolled in the study over that period of time. So we’re comparing the outcomes
of the women who work the land with the outcomes of the women who do just the working with
the farm products with women who don’t do any of those things, and what we want to see
is if their outcomes are different. We’re measuring the outcomes during their stay in
the shelter, but then we’re doing a three-month follow up after they leave the shelter to
see if anything that happened effects them post-shelter stay. And we’re hoping that
the findings will produce data that the shelter could use to help them get additional funding.
Narrator: With virtual reality, Charley Carlson is evaluating whether training women in breathing
techniques helps them to manage high-risk confrontations.
Charley Carlson: My research focuses on developing self-regulation strategies for people to use
in high-risk situations. The example that we use in our virtual reality environment
is you meet a young man at a party and initially he seems like he’s very nice. The weather
changes and you need a ride home, so he offers to give you a ride home, the weather turns
very very bad, and so he has to stop and then he turns very very bad, and we want to evaluate
how women manage that difficult situation. Our primary focus is to introduce them to
a breathing strategy that they can learn, that we know from previous research, helps
keep them under physiologic control. So our goal in our initial study was to determine
whether we could introduce these women to a strategy for them to control their breathing
and that would influence the outcomes from the virtual experience. People find this experience
quite real and it alters how they think and how they feel, as well as how their bodies
are responding to this event. So we’ve found that this environment provides us with an
excellent opportunity to explore how we can teach women to make good decisions in a very
difficult situation.
Narrator: Center faculty want to create an online course to train nurses to accurately
identify domestic victims of sex trafficking.
Claire Renzetti: Based on what we know from federal data, most trafficking victims in
the United States are U.S. citizens and their traffickers are U.S. citizens. Now that’s
particularly true for sex trafficking victims and about 90% of them are women. And so, women
can be trafficked, young girls can be trafficked from their own neighborhoods from their own
homes. It’s really hard for people to identify victims if they don’t know what they’re
looking for, but what some of the research has shown is that many sex trafficking victims
feel that healthcare settings are fairly safe for them. In that they don’t get asked a
lot of questions. They have to go for healthcare, so they’ll go to an ER or they’ll go to
a public clinic and they don’t expect anyone to figure things out. And given that that
is a likely place for professionals to encounter sex trafficking victims, we thought it would
be good to train healthcare professionals in those settings and how to identify sex
trafficking victims. They often don’t go to these places alone. They’re accompanied
by someone who’s keeping an eye on them. So the only opportunity that professional
might have to talk with them is when they are actually in the examination room and they’re
alone. And so, Diane Follingstad and I have developed a curriculum that’s online to
train healthcare professionals particularly ER nurses and public clinic nurses, in how
to identify potential trafficking victims and then how to provide the victim with perhaps
a palm card that tells them how they can get help.
Narrator: With NIH funding, Ann Coker is looking for ways to identify cancer patients with
histories of abuse to see whether partner violence negatively impacts
their cancer treatment and recovery.
Ann Coker: There are psychological abusive behaviors that can occur in people in vulnerable
situations, here defined as people who may have cancer, and so what we wanted to do was
to look at the effect of psychological abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, that may occur
either in the past or currently that may influence how well women do with cancer, and of course
the longer term would be to look at, “How do you screen for that? How can physicians
screen for that or nurses screen for that?” and then reduce the risk of that negative
partner behavior effecting how women do. This state has one of the few statewide well-funded
cancer registries. We use the cancer registry as a source of our patients and that’s not
a common way to recruit individuals, so it was a great resource for us. We started looking
at the screenable cancers, so that there were breast cancer, cervical cancer, and colorectal cancer.
We then expanded it to a range of different cancers, so we included lung cancer as well,
and found very similar patterns in those cancers so that the type of cancer mattered less.
Charley Carlson: What science-based approaches enable us to do is to test and refine our
theories and our practices in a systematic way. The ultimate goal is to provide women
with the best of what we know that can serve to protect them from violence in their environments.
Ann Coker: We look at the data and we look at it again and again, and when we do that
we can identify potential solutions. We say, “Oh this might work.” Then we’re going
back to say, “Did it actually work?” But is that searching and researching that gives
us the real value of the Center.
Diane Follingstad: The hope is that by conducting research studies where you can compare different
kinds of interventions or you can evaluate how effective some type of program is, you
can put your resources into the most effective programs possible, and hopefully to even be
able to come up with ideas for the best ways to prevent violence.
Heather Bush: Giving us all a home where we can come together and work as a partner on
these problems, makes a significant difference in the contributions we are able to make.