Ohio State professor finds discrepancies between domestic abuse survivors’ experiences and the health services provided by domestic violence support facilities.
Julianna Nemeth, PhD, MA
Numbers become people with stories and faces, and statistics are memories and names. For assistant professor of health behavior and health promotion Julianna Nemeth, PhD, MA, her research with domestic violence survivors is more than “just a job.” Engaging with real women suffering from real-world problems brings her research to life.
“I have always been an advocate from a very young age,” Nemeth says. “As I started to do direct service work with survivors, I could see the overlap between unaddressed mental and physical health issues and the lack of services that survivors needed to address those issues. It was then I decided that it was important to develop the research skills necessary to give voice to this community.”
After serving as the manager of a rape crisis program following her undergraduate degree, Nemeth decided to go to graduate school at Ohio State as a result of seeing firsthand how “silos of treatment” for the survivors of violence prevent them from accessing the resources necessary to heal.
According to a 2011 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, one in three women in the United States experience intimate partner violence (IPV), which is defined as any “physical, sexual or psychological harm committed by a current or former partner or spouse.”
To further understanding on how to help agencies better serve domestic violence survivors, Nemeth was selected to evaluate the National Institute of Justice's Office of Victims of Crime community-based demonstration grant awarded to the Ohio Domestic Violence Network (ODVN) in 2016.
Nemeth, alongside five local community partners, explored the discrepancies between survivors’ experiences and the health services provided by domestic violence support facilities.
According to her research, over 81 percent of survivors reported having been hit in the head or made to have their head hit another object at least once, and over 83 percent of survivors reported ever having been strangled. Yet domestic violence service providers did not provide resources for brain injury, a common result of this action.
To combat this discrepancy, Nemeth and the ODVN are implementing the C.A.R.E model, a new approach to advocacy focused on health justice for survivors.
“If we find that this model does help survivors access the services they need, the next step is to implement the model in other domestic survivor programs across the state and country,” Nemeth says. “There is a real need to understand what’s happening in terms of the impact of this partner-inflicted brain injury on survivors’ brains, but also understanding what kind of interventions are best to support healing moving forward.”
Survivors guide both the execution and appraisal of the program, according to Nemeth.
“It’s critically important for both the ODVN and me as a researcher that survivors’ stories and experiences were leading the work that was being done,” Nemeth says. “It was their stories that allowed us to see the discrepancy between their lived experience and where domestic violence service providers were missing the mark in terms of addressing many of the health needs survivors were presenting. Fundamentally, they are driving the work that we do.”
Nemeth hopes to continue to use her research to defend those in need.
“I’ve always worked from a place of advocating for others whose voices are not being heard,” Nemeth says. “It’s part of me and I don't think you can take it away from the work that I do.”
