Addressing
CHALLENGES facing WOMEN and GIRLS through
ENGAGED RESEARCH
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n the workplace, in their homes, in schools, and in the larger community, women and girls face distinct challenges that reflect structural and systemic barriers of sexism, racism, classism, and other discrimination. Three UTCSW faculty scholars are working to understand those barriers and identify and test means to challenge, mediate, and mitigate their influence. UTCSW Assistant Professor Kristen Ravi has spent much of her career focused on issues of intimate partner violence (IPV) and its effects on women. Ravi notes, “I became interested in women’s issues such as IPV because I saw the oppression that women face, and how that oppression is compounded based on the intersecting identities that women hold, such as race, socioeconomic status, immigration status, and sexual orientation.” In the wake of the pandemic, Ravi shifted her focus to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on survivors of intimate partner violence in their homes as well as their experience in shelters. Ravi found that the stay-at-home orders that began in March 2020 inevitably forced survivors of Kristen Ravi, violence to reUTCSW Assistant main confined Professor
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with their abusive partners for extended periods. This prolonged time spent together was dangerous for current and potential victims of IPV. Being trapped with an abusive partner both intensifies the isolation of survivors from social supports outside of their home and limits access to possible avenues for support or safety. It also potentially re-traumatized survivors who experienced trauma related to IPV or led to increased instances of IPV in the absence of access to safe shelters or key informal supports like friends or family members. Ravi is now embarking on a follow-up study examining the experiences of IPV survivors as well as the shelter staff during the beginning of year three of the pandemic. The study is the result of feedback from a local shelter director. As Ravi explains, “I shared the findings with the shelter leadership involved in the study, and one of the directors asked us to replicate our study. The shelter director wanted to know ‘if [the shelter] was doing any better.’ Now that we are in a new phase of the pandemic,” Ravi continued, “it is critical that we examine how survivors’ experiences may have changed as well as the experiences of IPV shelter staff.” This new study also focuses on mother’s experiences parenting while living in an IPV shelter during COVID-19. Ravi and colleague UTCSW Associate Professor Courtney Cronley are conducting a mixed-methods exploratory study funded by the UT Professional and Scholarly Development Award in the Arts,
Humanities, and Social Sciences, looking at maternal-child bonding within the context of living in an IPV shelter. The study has mothers complete an online daily diary for 14 weeks, reporting on their daily activities, levels of stress, and bonding with their child. In addition to the daily diary data, Ravi and Cronley will also conduct qualitative interviews with mothers to explore potential causal relationships among the daily diary data. “This is the first study to use these online diaries to explore the maternal-child bond within an IPV shelter,” Ravi said. “We are excited about this study because we know that having a strong maternal-child bond is essential to positive outcomes among children exposed to IPV. This pilot study will help us to develop an intervention to strengthen the maternal-child bond among survivors and their children within the IPV shelter or transitional housing setting.” Cronley and Ravi have also turned their examination of life during the pandemic a little closer to home, looking at their own lives to identify strategies that can support women social scientists’ career success during COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic poses unforeseen risks to academic women’s career advancement. Women faculty are more likely to be grappling with new challenges related to caregiving and work-life balance, compared to their male colleagues, and may be facing more research obstacles due to the disruption of human-subjects data collection. “We described four strategies
