Browsing by Author "Goodman, Lisa"

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    Coercive Control Measure for Intimate Partner Violence
    (COSMOS Corporation, 2005) Dutton, Mary Ann; Goodman, Lisa; Schmidt, R. James
    This instrument was created to measure the previously neglected area of nonviolent coercive control in intimate partner violence. This was used to gain a theoretical understanding of coercive control. This instrument measures intimate partner violence victimization and offending, as well as the overlap and can be used with both male and female participants. Respondents answered questions about their own behavior and that of their partners in the past month and past 12 months. Between February and September 2004, 302 male and 448 female participants who had been in a relationship within the past 12 months were surveyed. Participants were asked about physical and emotional abuse and controlling behaviors they or their partners used. A Spanish Language version is also included. [CVRL Abstract]
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    Discounting Credibility: Doubting the Testimony and Dismissing the Experiences of Domestic Violence Survivors and Other Women (Author Manuscript)
    (Georgetown University Law Center, 2018) Epstein, Deborah; Goodman, Lisa
    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.
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    Discounting Women: Doubting Domestic Violence Survivors' Credibility and Dismissing Their Experiences
    (University of Pennsylvania, 2019) Epstein, Deborah; Goodman, Lisa
    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. (Author Text)
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    "No Sacred Cows or Bulls": The Story of the Domestic Violence ProgramEvaluation and Research Collaborative (DVPERC)
    (Springer Open, 2018) Thomas, Kristie; Goodman, Lisa; Schön Vainer, Elizabeth; Heimel, Deborah; Barkai, Ronit; Collins-Gousby, Deborah
    The Domestic Violence Program Evaluation and Research Collaborative (DVPERC) was formed in Massachusetts in 2011 as an effort to connect research and practice. Initially, we consisted of a few programs and researchers, but we quickly evolved into a regional collaboration spanning several states. From the outset, we have followed community-based participatory research values, including co-learning, power sharing, and relationship-building. Several aspects of DVPERC make it unique. Our collaboration is informal, ongoing, and comprised of an array of programs, practitioners, and researchers. Although we are abundant in number, we are regional in scope, which allows for regular, in-person meetings. In this article, we describe the history of DVPERC, the five elements of the DVPERC model, and the model’s inherent benefits and limitations. Throughout, we infuse our practitioner and researcher perspectives on DVPERC involvement. We hope our honest description of DVPERC assists others interested in launching their own CBPR practitioner-researcher partnerships. (Author Abstract)