University of St. Thomas, Minnesota St. Catherine University Social Work Master’s Clinical Research Papers School of Social Work 2015 Understanding College Staff 's Experiences in Responding to Student Domestic Violence Victims Leigh Hartenberg University of St. Thomas, Minnesota Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.edu/ssw_mstrp Part of the Clinical and Medical Social Work Commons, and the Social Work Commons Recommended Citation Hartenberg, Leigh, "Understanding College Staff 's Experiences in Responding to Student Domestic Violence Victims" (2015).
Social Work Master’s Clinical Research Papers.edu/ssw_mstrp/453 This Clinical research paper is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Social Work at UST Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in Social Work Master’s Clinical Research Papers by an authorized administrator of UST Research Online. For more information, please contact libroadmin@stthomas. Running head: COLLEGE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Understanding College Staff’s Experiences in Responding to Student Domestic Violence Victims Leigh Hartenberg, B.
MSW Clinical Research Paper Presented to the Faculty of the School of Social Work St. Catherine University and the University of St. Paul, MN in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Social Work Committee Members: Dr. Michael Chovanec, Ph.
Emily Velure, MSW, LICSW Laura Goodman The Clinical Research Project is a graduation requirement for MSW students at St. Catherine University/University of St. Thomas School of Social Work in St. Paul, Minnesota and is conducted within a nine-month time frame to demonstrate facility with basic social research methods.
Students must independently conceptualize a research problem, formulate a research design that is approved by a research committee and the university Institutional Review Board, implement the project, and publicly present the findings of the study. This project is neither a Master’s thesis nor a dissertation. COLLEGE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Abstract The purpose of this study was to explore campus violence from the perspective of the campus staff members who work with directly with domestic violence victims. Current research that focuses on the experiences that campus staff members have in working with student domestic violence victims is limited.
A qualitative approach using exploratory and inductive research was used to analyze seven interviews from campus staff who had personal experience working with student domestic violence victims. Participants were asked to describe their thoughts about campus violence and their thoughts on ways to improve existing campus policies, procedures, and programs to continue reducing violence on campus. Participants identified key themes and ideas that could improve campus safety, such as continuing using Green Dot and having a more collaborative campus message that does not tolerate violence towards women. Participants also mentioned services such as anonymous reporting or confidential reporting was important to help increase reporting of domestic violence.
These themes demonstrate an importance for understanding college staff perspectives as these staff have an intimate working knowledge of the campus and how to improve safety measures for all students. Keywords: Domestic violence, college campus, campus staff, campus violence, qualitative research, exploratory research. i COLLEGE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my committee chair, Dr. Michael Chovanec, and my committee members, Laura Goodman and Emily Velure.
Thank you for all of your work reviewing drafts of my paper and sending positive encouragement for this project. Thank you to Dr. Catherine Marrs Fuchsel for helping me discover a passion for domestic violence research and for listening to all of my ideas for my research project. Thank you to my husband who has been my editor, my sounding board, and the foundation for my MSW career.
Finally, a big thank you to my family, friends, professors, and colleagues for their emotional support and their sense of humor, all of which has been incredibly encouraging, enlightening, and empowering over the years. ii COLLEGE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Table of Contents Section Page Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….………………………………………………………………………………… 90 iii COLLEGE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 1 Understanding College Staff’s Experiences in Responding to Student Domestic Violence Victims Perry (2002) conducted a project that showcased how domestic and dating violence occurs on college campuses. The partial quote and story below has been taken from Raising Voices, the program brochure that describes Perry’s project at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “Claire, a UW–Madison graduate, was involved in an abusive relationship that began in high school and continued through her undergraduate years.
Claire first identified the abuse in her partner’s extreme jealousy. She noticed he always needed to know where she was and who she was with. Gradually, Claire’s partner became more physically abusive. “The emotional abuse started first, and I would have run for the hills if the physical abuse had started first,” she says.
Her partner consistently blamed her for his own abusive behaviors. “It was always manipulation that I was the one that was causing the physical or psychological abuse to occur. He wouldn’t take responsibility for anything.… He would turn it around. It was always something I did,” Claire says.
At the time, she had difficulty distinguishing the abusive behavior from her feelings for him. “Any other person I’d been with before hadn’t acted that way, but… I’ve never been in love like this before with someone either. So that was always hard for me to distinguish, thinking, well this was what true love was about—real intense emotion.” The abuse in the relationship caused Claire’s grades to plummet. Her partner expected her to spend a lot of time with him, and this took her away from her studies.
He would pick a fight the night before she had an exam to purposely sabotage her academics. Claire also felt that he tried to sabotage her social interactions. He constantly questioned her and was suspicious of her, so much so that she rarely went out with friends.” COLLEGE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 2 Domestic violence is a complex problem that occurs with some frequency on many college campuses. Several authors report that as many as one in four women experience violent relationships while attending college (Giordano, Soto, Manning, & Longmore, 2010; Miller, 2011; Whitaker, Haileyesus, Swahn, & Saltzman, 2007;).
Scherer, Snyder, & Fisher (2013) report that violent relationships are even more common and state that one in three women experience violent relationships while attending college. Even more startling, of the 508 students polled as part of the College Dating and Abuse Poll (2011), 43% stated that they had experienced domestic violence, 52% reported knowing a person who experienced violence, and 57% reported that the violence had occurred while attending college (Knowledge Works, 2011). The “traditional college student” faces many challenges associated with both violent relationships and ending violent relationships. The “traditional college student” is between 17 and 22 years old.
Given that age range, the research literature considers college students to be at the developmental level of “emerging adults” (Arnett, 2000; Kaura & Lohman, 2009). Emerging adults are considered developmentally in late adolescence, but not yet in early adulthood (Arnett, 2000). As such, college-aged women are not considered to have had enough experience with dating relationships to know when a relationship is unhealthy (Lindsay et al. In addition to the challenges faced during a violent relationship, a college-aged individual may encounter barriers such as fear when she decides to leave a relationship or decides to get help (Hamby & Jackson, 2010).
Similarly, women may not feel safe enough or confident enough to report issues to campus staff, as they may face barriers such as fear of a perpetrator (Bostock, Plumpton & Pratt, 2009; Leone, Lape & Xu, 2014; Murray & Kardatzke, 2007; Yescavage, 1999) or fear of the societal blame associated with being labeled a victim (Sabel, Danis, Mauzy, & Gallagher, 2006). COLLEGE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 3 While college-aged women face many obstacles when choosing to report domestic violence, they often turn to campus staff members for help when they do decide to report. As such, it is imperative for campus staff to be appropriately trained to handle reports of domestic violence. The training of campus staff and the comfort campus staff has with handling domestic violence has not been well studied.
Thus, it is highly important for the research literature to begin exploring campus staff’s experiences when working with college-aged female victims. This paper focuses on research conducted at a Midwestern university regarding campus staff members’ experiences when working with college-aged victims. College campus staff who feel adequately trained and supported in their roles may feel more empowered in their ability to work with victims. Conversely, those staff who feel ill-equipped or who feel they lack the internal or external resources to help victims may project those frustrations into their working relationships with the victims they are attempting to help.
Understanding the nature of campus staff’s experiences when working with victims of domestic violence has numerous implications for the field of social work. One implication for the field of social work is that, ethically, social work strives to address social problems like domestic violence on college campuses. Domestic violence is a major social problem because it creates a power inequity between male and female romantic partners. Power inequities can be seen in the social culture of the campus and the policies that govern how victims and perpetrators of violence are treated.
These inequities allow male students to exert violent power over female students, and it also causes concerns of continued safety for other women on campus. Another implication for the field of social work is the social injustice of domestic violence. Domestic violence creates injustice on campus because of the way that male students oppress female students through violence and intimidation. To combat this oppression, social COLLEGE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 4 workers need to research and understand how campus staff members perceive their ability to enforce safety and equality on campus.
One final implication for social work is that the building of stronger and more effective human relationships is imperative to prevent domestic violence on college campuses. The stronger the relationships are between students and campus staff, the more victims will feel empowered to report violence. This will allow colleges and universities to continue addressing and reducing domestic violence as a problem on campus. Completing research that explores human relationships like those between the campus college staff members and victims is necessary for future prevention efforts.
To begin to address the human relationships implication as a social work practice method, this study will use qualitative interviews of college staff members. There are two main goals driving the use of the qualitative interview method. The first goal of the qualitative interviews is to determine how college staff members interact with domestic violence victims. This is important to assess because how a college staff member works with a victim is incredibly important to empowering the victim.
If a victim feels supported by the staff person to whom she reports the domestic violence, she may feel less shame, guilt, and/or fear for reporting the violent relationship. The second goal of the qualitative interviews is to explore the staff members’ views on improving safety on campus. If a college staff member feels as if there are barriers to his or her ability to work with victims, those issues need to be addressed by the university system. College staff members will be the most knowledgeable about what supports and barriers exist both in policy and practice that may support or detract from their ability to work with victims.
The overall research question for this study is, what are the barriers and supports that college staff persons experience when working with college aged female domestic violence victims? Secondarily, what do college staff persons feel could be changed on college campuses COLLEGE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 5 to increase the safety of female student victims? COLLEGE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 6 Literature Review When researching the college student population, it is important to understand how factors such as age, gender, and the responses of campus staff can impact students’ reporting behaviors. Additionally, knowing how college students and female victims specifically perceive domestic violence can greatly influence how staff members engage with victims who report domestic violence incidents.