As a sexual and domestic violence victim advocate, years ago, I supported women during invasive forensic exams, while they filed police reports, and when they dialed into our crisis hotline. I'll never forget a single one of them.
There were many who told me that no one had ever believed them. There were those who trusted me with deeply held secrets. And many who thanked me for getting them to safe housing. I ran into one woman years later and she hugged me and told her friend that I had steadied her through the worst chapter of her life.
I eventually became a researcher, working for decades to better understand the scope and impact of gender-based violence and to discover effective ways to prevent it from happening.
The drastic proposed changes to federal research funding, including cuts to indirect costs, put all of this work in jeopardy. It could roll back critical advances and leave women, in the United States and around the world, in danger.
Homicide is a leading cause of death for women—most often at the hands of their intimate partners. It happens frequently during and right after pregnancy. Almost half of women in the United States have experienced some form of intimate partner violence.
As a researcher, my team relies on funding from NIH and the National Institute of Justice to study how violence survivors can find help more quickly. We want to help figure out what works to help these women get their lives back on track.
Our study participants quite literally entrust us with their lives, working with us while they remain at significant risk for partner violence, and even lethal abuse. Protecting their personal safety and keeping their study data secure are of paramount importance to ensure that their information doesn't fall into the hands of anyone that can do further harm. Our "indirect costs" fuel critical behind-the-scenes systems required to implement this work safely to protect the identities of women at risk for violence. It covers everything from the ethics review to the data security features, and the technology that makes those systems safe, credible, and possible.
Right here in Baltimore, our federally funded research revealed how powerful it can be for women to have safe housing after partner violence. This study included women at extremely high levels of homicide risk. Without having to worry about a safe place to live, we found these women were able to stabilize, build their economic independence, and reduce financial reliance on harmful partners.
For too long, violence against women has been ignored and minimized. When we finally have promising interventions, we have a profound ethical obligation to use them and to study the outcomes so we can learn how to best support these women and their families. Women's safety and women's lives depend on our work.
Michele Decker is the Bloomberg Professor of American Health at JHU's Bloomberg School of Public Health and founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Women's Health and Gender Equity. She leads research at the cutting edge of gender equity and gender-based violence prevention and response. She is also among the inaugural cohort of the university's Provost's Fellows for Public Engagement, a group of scholars selected to take part in a yearlong program designed to build their public engagement skills across a range of platforms and audiences.
