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In recent months, we've seen an unprecedented wave of testimonials about the serious harms women all too frequently endure. The #MeToo moment, the #WhyIStayed campaign, and the Larry Nassar sentencing hearings have raised public awareness not only about workplace harassment, domestic violence, and sexual abuse, but also about how routinely women survivors face a Gaslight-style gauntlet of doubt, disbelief, and outright dismissal of their stories. This pattern is particularly disturbing in the justice system, where women face a legal twilight zone: laws meant to protect them and deter further abuse often fail to achieve their purpose, because women telling stories of abuse by their male partners are simply not believed. To fully grasp the nature of this new moment in gendered power relations—and to cement the significant gains won by these public campaigns—we need to take a full, considered look at when, how, and why the justice system and other key social institutions discount women's credibility. We use the lens of intimate partner violence to examine the ways in which women's credibility is discounted in a range of legal and social service system settings. First, judges and others improperly discount as implausible women's stories of abuse, based on a failure to understand both the symptoms arising from neurological and psychological trauma, and the practical constraints on survivors' lives. Second, gatekeepers unjustly discount women's personal trustworthiness, based on both inaccurate interpretations of survivors' courtroom demeanor and negative cultural stereotypes about women and their motivations for seeking assistance. Moreover, even when a woman manages to overcome all the initial modes of institutional skepticism that minimize her account of abuse, she often finds that the systems designed to furnish her with help and protection dismiss the importance of her experiences. Instead, all too often, the arbiters of justice and social welfare adopt and enforce legal and social policies and practices with little regard for how they perpetuate patterns of abuse. Two distinct harms arise from this pervasive pattern of credibility discounting and experiential dismissal. First, the discrediting of survivors constitutes its own psychic injury—an institutional betrayal that echoes the psychological abuse women suffer at the hands of individual perpetrators. Second, the pronounced, nearly instinctive penchant for devaluing women's testimony is so deeply embedded within survivors' experience that it becomes a potent, independent obstacle to their efforts to obtain safety and justice. The reflexive discounting of women's stories of domestic violence finds analogs among the kindred diminutions and dismissals that harm so many other women who resist the abusive exercise of male power, from survivors of workplace harassment to victims of sexual assault on and off campus. For these women, too, credibility discounts both deepen the harm they experience and create yet another impediment to healing and justice. Concrete, systematic reforms are needed to eradicate these unjust, gender-based credibility discounts and experiential dismissals, and to enable women subjected to male abuses of power at long last to trust the responsiveness of the justice system.

This qualitative descriptive study examines the perspectives of 19 mothers who survived intimate partner violence (IPV) and sought custody of one or more children through the family court system. We explored these mothers’ perceptions of the nature of court processes from start to finish, their understandings of the impact of court processes and outcomes on their well-being, and their recommendations for improvements to facilitate a process that is sensitive to survivors’ experiences with IPV. Mothers interviewed in this study described an experience that was largely invalidating and distressing, compounding the adverse effects of IPV on their well-being. Qualitative content analysis yielded six clusters: 1) survivors must enter into a court environment that implicitly presumes the absence of trauma, 2) survivors face obstacles to getting their stories of abuse across and heard, 3) survivors experience harmful and helpful interactions with court professionals, 4) survivors endure distress in the courtroom, 5) survivors suffer psychosocial consequences outside of the courtroom, and 6) survivors make recommendations for an improved custody process that is sensitive to experiences of IPV. Results paint a picture of a family court system that has the potential to cause grave, lasting harms to survivor-mothers who are separating from abusive partners.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically highlighted the isolation of domestic violence survivors, triggering media coverage and innovative efforts to reach out to those who are trapped in their homes, facing greater danger from their partners than from the virus. But another harmful aspect of this difficult time has received far less attention: survivors’ intensified loneliness. Although loneliness can be catalyzed by isolation, it is a distinct psychological phenomenon that is internal and subjective in nature. Loneliness is not only acutely painful in its own right; it also inflicts a range of long lasting, health-related harms, and heightens survivors’ vulnerability to violence, creating a vicious cycle that may continue long after strict stay-at-home and physical distancing policies end. This may be particularly true for marginalized survivors, for whom larger structural inequalities and institutional failures compound the negative impact of loneliness. This brief report describes what we know about the nature and costs of survivor loneliness and uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a lens through which to review the ways current DV interventions may help alleviate loneliness (as distinct from isolation), and how these might be expanded to enhance survivor wellbeing, immediately and even after a return to “normal.”

Intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors seeking safety and justice for themselves and their children through family court and other legal systems may instead encounter their partners’ misuse of court processes to further enact coercive control. To illuminate this harmful process, this study sought to create a measure of legal abuse. We developed a list of 27 potential items on the basis of consultation with 23 experts, qualitative interviews, and existing literature. After piloting these items, we administered them to a sample of 222 survivor-mothers who had been involved in family law proceedings. We then used both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and Rasch analysis (RA) to create a final measure. Analyses yielded the 14-item Legal Abuse Scale (LAS). Factor analysis supported two subscales: Harm to Self/Motherhood (i.e., using the court to harm the survivor as a person and a mother) and Harm to Finances (i.e., using the court to harm the survivor financially). The LAS is a tool that will enable systematic assessment of legal abuse in family court and other legal proceedings, an expansion of research on this form of coercive control, and further development of policy and practice that recognizes and responds to it.

PurposeDespite the costs of survivor isolation, most mainstream domestic violence programs have focused on meeting the needs of individual survivors and possibly their children, disregarding their attenuated social connections. Only in recent years have some advocates begun to address this gap through the development of practices that restore or create new ties between survivors and their informal networks. In order to grow and systematize these nascent network-oriented practices, we need a way to identify and measure them. This article describes the development of the Network-Oriented Practices Scale, designed to fill this gap.MethodWe developed a series of 35 draft items reflecting each dimension of the network-oriented approach, a model created in a prior community-based participatory research study. We administered them to 234 advocates in domestic violence programs across the country. Exploratory factor analysis identified underlying factors and reduced the number of items.ResultsThe resultant Network-Oriented Practices Scale (NOPS) comprised 14 items across three factors: Mapping Networks and Relationships (working directly with survivors); Engaging the Person who Harmed (working with harming partners); and Engaging Networks Directly (working with informal network members).ConclusionsThe time has come to develop a more systematic approach to supporting survivors’ renewed links to their communities. The NOPS, described in this brief report, sets the stage, highlighting a set of practices that domestic violence programs can implement, and providing a way to assess their successes and failures in promoting survivors’ connectedness, safety, and healing.

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is a methodological approach where community–academic teams build equitable relationships throughout the research process. In the domestic violence (DV) field, CBPR may be particularly important when conducting research with racial and ethnic minority DV survivors, as this group faces concurrent oppressions that inform their lived experiences. To our knowledge, no systematic review has synthesized articles using a CBPR approach to explore the needs and lived experiences of racial and ethnic minority DV survivors. Using PRISMA guidelines, we conducted a systematic review of the literature, retrieving articles that used a CBPR approach to understand the needs and/or lived experiences of female racial and ethnic minority DV survivors residing in the United States. Articles were identified from peer-reviewed databases, bibliographies, and experts. Thirteen of the 185 articles assessed for eligibility were included. Articles focused on a variety of racial and ethnic minority groups, the majority identifying as African American or Latina. Collaboration occurred in multiple ways, primarily through equitable decision-making and building team members’ strengths. Several needs and lived experiences emerged including gender identity and patriarchal attitudes, racism and discrimination, the immigrant experience informing DV, poverty, shame and stigma, and the need for social support. This is the first systematic review of articles using a CBPR approach to explore the needs and lived experiences of racial and ethnic minority survivors. Implications include promoting community-based dissemination, conducting quantitative studies with larger sample sizes of DV survivors, and encouraging culturally specific services that address DV survivors’ intersectional needs.

For survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), the act of seeking help from a domestic violence (DV) shelter can incur enormous costs. One cost is what we refer to as “parenting surveillance:” that is, DV advocates can monitor, evaluate, and sometimes control survivors’ parenting—activities given weight through their mandated reporter role. Although surveillance has long been a feature of state intervention into family life, particularly for low-income women of color, it is largely unexplored in the DV shelter system. This is a striking gap: Though most DV programs are committed to supporting survivors’ autonomy and empowerment, the surveillance of parenting may echo abusive dynamics from which survivors are attempting to escape. This qualitative-descriptive study aimed to explore survivor-mothers’ experiences of parenting surveillance among 12 residents of four shelters. Qualitative content analysis yielded five clusters: Survivor-mothers (1) experience and witness parenting surveillance in their programs even as they also find support, (2) describe negative psychological responses to surveillance, (3) report effects on parenting from surveillance, (4) cope with and resist surveillance, and (5) offer recommendations that minimize or diminish surveillance. Although surveillance is a structural phenomenon, baked into the policies and practices of DV shelters, participants’ experiences of it vary based on their personal identities and histories and their relationships with advocates. Despite these variations, however, the costs of surveillance for mothers is significant. For advocates, addressing this phenomenon requires pragmatic and relational shifts grounded in empathy for survivor-mothers’ subjective experience of parenting in challenging conditions.

Until recently, the connection between intimate partner violence (IPV) and persistent poverty had been largely ignored. Recent research indicates, however, that the two phenomena cooccur at high rates; produce parallel effects; and, in each other's presence, constrain coping options. Therefore, both external situational, and internal psychological difficulties are missed when women contending with both poverty and IPV are viewed through the lens of just one or just the other. This article describes mental health consequences for women who contend with both partner violence and poverty. It proposes that the stress, powerlessness, and social isolation at the heart of both phenomena combine to produce posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and other emotional difficulties. The article also introduces the term \"survival-focused coping\" to describe women's methods of coping with IPV in the context of poverty and highlights the role that domestic violence advocates, mental health providers, and researchers can play in addressing these tightly intertwined phenomena.

When intimate partner violence survivors seek help from public institutions, including domestic violence programs, they necessarily submit to the scrutiny of staff who are required to report suspicions of child abuse or neglect to the state child protective system. This prospect would frighten anyone but has particular weight for survivor-parents who – during a period of enormous stress, chaos, and trauma - are often held responsible for the conditions of abuse they are trying to end or escape. So, what happens when they enter such systems? How do survivors think about and manage the experience of being evaluated, and more acutely, the looming possibility of a mandated report? And how do advocates, trained to restore power to survivors navigate their roles as mandated reporters? Each of the articles in this special section describes a piece of this puzzle. But the profound implications of their findings cannot be understood clearly without an understanding of the historical and structural contexts of oppression in which they play out – contexts that many survivors know only too well. This article aims to review briefly the broader social, historical, and structural contexts of mandated reporting and the linked phenomena of parenting surveillance and the forced separation of families of color. Centering these broader legacies of violence and other harms expands our capacity to ask the right research questions and support survivors more effectively as they seek help from systems they need for safety and healing, but that they also rightly fear.

Domestic violence (DV) advocates aim to restore survivors’ choice and control, a process that involves sharing power with survivors, to the extent possible. At the same time, as mandated reporters, they are legally required to observe, evaluate, and potentially report survivors’ parenting to the Department of Children and Families (DCF), an activity that involves exerting enormous power over survivors. Although research has long documented the tension between systems that support DV survivor-mothers and systems that support children, almost no research has explored how advocates think about and manage on a daily basis these perhaps contradictory roles. This study aimed to fill this gap. Using a qualitative, focus-group methodology, we conducted six focus groups with advocates across four programs. Findings demonstrate that advocates perceive profound tension between their role as facilitators of empowerment and their obligations as mandated reporters, especially given their (advocates’) general distrust of DCF. They use myriad strategies to manage the resultant conflict, including inward facing strategies, designed to manage their own biases and see survivors in context; survivor-facing strategies, designed to name, share, and use their power in every way possible within the systemic constraints they face; and system-facing strategies that balance cooperation with DCF and continued advocacy for survivor-mothers. Despite their thoughtful and strategic efforts to minimize “power-over” dynamics, however, advocates report that navigating this tension often exacts an emotional toll on them, causes irreparable damage to their advocacy relationships, and harm survivors. A number of actionable recommendations follow, including the need to establish opportunities for survivors to talk with each other, outside the earshot of staff, about their parenting challenges.