Confronting IPV: Experts Discuss Next Steps During UMSSW Homecoming

By David Beaudouin 

What’s the most common form of violence in the world today? Tragically, it occurs between two individuals supposedly in a loving relationship. In the United States and around the world, intimate partner violence (IPV) is a critical issue affecting not only the long-term health of affected women, men, and their families, but the economy as well. 

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), more than 10 million adults in the U.S. experience domestic violence annually. If aggregated, this statistic means that there is an IPV incident every three seconds. Additionally, from 2016 through 2018, the number of IPV incidents in the U.S. increased by 42 percent. 

The result is a growing and urgent public health problem with no immediate solution in sight. As NCADV reports, about 75 percent of IPV female survivors and 48 percent of male IPV survivors experience some form of injury related to IPV. Even worse, statistics suggest that about one in five homicide victims in the U.S. is killed by an intimate partner. Overall, IPV survivors tend to struggle with chronic physical and mental health issues, the latter including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and higher-risk behaviors such as excessive smoking, drinking, and drug use. 

It’s no surprise then that the consequences of IPV have an economic impact, estimated to cost the US economy between $5.8 billion and $12.6 billion annually, up to 0.125 percent of the national gross domestic product. IPV victims lose a total of 8 million days of paid work each year, while 21 percent to 60 percent of victims lose their jobs due to reasons stemming from abuse. 

To address the current response to IPV in the field of professional social work, as well as the road ahead, the University of Maryland School of Social Work’s (UMSSW) homecoming on March 8, 2024, featured a roundtable of local experts. Moderating the panel was Laurie Graham, PhD, an assistant professor at UMSSW. Graham’s research interests include sexual and intimate partner violence and homicide prevention. She has a particular interest in the development, implementation, and evaluation of programs and policies that seek to prevent multiple forms of violence perpetration. 

Graham: What is one of the biggest challenges or needs that you and those who work with are facing? 

Goodmark: I have been writing since the early 2000s about the biggest challenge that I think my clients continue to face, regardless of how they encounter the legal system, and that’s the way that the legal system is significantly limited in how it addresses intimate partner violence. My work is a critique of the criminal legal system particularly and its failure to address IPV in a meaningful way. I have argued that the criminalization of IPV is not decreasing or deterring intimate partner violence, that it exacerbates the correlates of intimate partner violence, and that it has huge consequences for the people that it was meant to benefit. So, for my clients, the biggest challenge is the fact that the system that they were told was supposed to protect them has not done that, and, in fact, has done serious harm to them. 

Simmons: In my individual work with trauma survivors, the challenge involves the concept of safety, in helping individuals recover that and understand what that means, while on their path to authenticity. Because of the impact of intimate partner violence on mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual levels, survivors who come to me for therapy are completely confused about how to find that sense of personal safety. A second challenge involves my consultation and training with other mental health professionals. What I’ve noted is professionals being hesitant to meet themselves as deeply as they are asking IPV survivors to meet themselves. That creates a limitation if you are afraid to meet yourself and examine your own biases. 

Cardenas: One of the biggest challenges in working with the immigrant communities is the structural barriers they face. These barriers include language, but there are also other barriers in engaging with local institutions. Immigrant individuals may have experienced discrimination in their countries of origin, making it difficult for them to trust and engage with institutions here. In working with these communities, we need to develop and test interventions that will have a clear translation to that community and that recognize the challenges they face. We should ensure that our approach to supporting them makes people comfortable with the resources we provide. Also, these communities often have competing needs, with other pressing matters that may take priority over addressing mental health issues resulting from IPV. It is important for local institutions to learn how to harness the resilience of these communities to try to foster healthier behaviors. 

Graham: How can we practically address these challenges as practitioners, researchers, and scholars? 

Simmons: One of the greatest challenges within that research field is being able to find the research on joy. Most of the research around epigenetics is focused on intergenerational trauma, how it’s passed down through your DNA, but there’s no conversation regarding how intergenerational joy is passed down. I think one practical way that we can assist is to be willing to go beyond the books and incorporate other modalities as an ethical component to really help victims. 

Goodmark: From a research perspective, I think the research is clear in my area about the many failures of the legal system. The only tool that the government funds well in responding to intimate partner violence is the criminal legal system. Other options are woefully underfunded, even though they are much more likely to be helpful to our clients. So, having conversations across the silos that exist between law and social work is an essential way of starting to think through how we can better serve the folks who really need our help, those victims who come in and say, “I don’t really want what the legal system has to offer, but it’s the only thing that’s being offered to me.” 

Cardenas: Well, research indicates that about 12 percent of children in U.S.-born Latino families are directly exposed to intimate partner violence, whereas only 6 percent of children in immigrant Latino families are directly exposed to IPV. This suggests that there is a protective factor at play within this immigrant community. We know that as they acculturate, the risk factor for intimate partner violence tends to increase. So, we need to identify and understand those protective factors. Some of them, such as strong cultural connections or lower levels of stress, are already known to us. The question then becomes, how do we harness these protective elements to mitigate the negative impacts of acculturation on the risk for IPV? In our research, I think it is crucial that our research focuses more on this resiliency aspect. And regarding practice, the knowledge already exists within the community. We need to learn how to listen and to work with them, and then join forces. 

Graham: In closing, what is one thing you want this audience to take away from this conversation?  

Goodmark: We are selling victims a bill of goods when we tell them that the criminal legal system is the way to address the harm that has happened to them — that it’s going to decrease or deter the violence that’s happened to them or make any kind of real change. And we must stop doing that. 

Simmons: You are not your trauma. As much as we know about the impacts of trauma, we need to know more about resiliency and about post-traumatic growth. So please know that you can reverse these impacts and that there is a way forward. 

Cardenas: Immigrant communities are resilient and resourceful. They have power, and we have to be open to working with them.