Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.
Failure to Protect or A Failure to Be Protected? The Criminalization and/or Revictimization of Mothers Who Are Intimate Partner Violence Victim-Survivors
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a significant societal, legal, and public health concern. Yet, current Canadian policies/approaches for addressing IPV are doing a significant degree of harm to victim-survivors, who are disproportionately women. In particular, social services and institutions such as the healthcare system, child welfare system, and the criminal justice system are serving to revictimize and/or criminalize women who are IPV victim-survivors - with specific respect to women who are also mothers. Often, mothers who are IPV victim-survivors are blamed for ‘exposing’ their children to violence. In addition to the damage that this revictimization and/or criminalization is doing to women, it also draws attention away from those who perpetrate violence while obscuring women’s victim-survivor status. As a result, my research seeks to better understand how - based on the experiences of mothers who are IPV victim-survivors - we can create policies and practices that support them and their children.
Eden Hoffer
PhD, Health Information Science
Faculty of Information & Media Studies - Western University
Supervisor
C. Nadine Wathen (https://www.uwo.ca/fhs/nursing/about/faculty/research_supervisors/wathen_n.html)
Eden Hoffer is a Health Information Science PhD student in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS). With an interdisciplinary academic background in criminology, social justice, and psychology, her doctoral research focusses on how mothers who are intimate partner violence (IPV) victim-survivors are re-victimized and/or criminalized by social services and institutions, such as the healthcare system, child welfare system, and criminal justice system. Her research aims to shed light on the ways that current Canadian policies and practices not only fail to offer protection to IPV victim-survivors - who are disproportionately women - but actively harm them and ultimately make it nearly impossible for them to escape relationships in which violence is occurring. Eden is extremely passionate about engaging in research that effects social change - specifically surrounding gender-based violence - and seeks to assist with policy reform, creation, and implementation regarding how IPV is approached/addressed in Canada. Eden is particularly focused of the creation of IPV interventions which incorporate a trauma-and violence-informed approach and acknowledge the impact of trauma and violence - in addition structural and systemic violence - on individuals’ lives in order to create a more compassionate and effective environment of care. Eden is also passionate about knowledge mobilization and contributes to public forums such as Policy Options and WomanACT.
You can connect with Eden on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/eden-hoffer-623588186/; on X @ Eden_Hoffer (https://x.com/eden_hoffer); and via email at ehoffer3@uwo.ca.
View Eden's work as it appears in the Inspiring Minds Digital Collection: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/inspiringminds/653/.