According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, in the United States alone, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by their partner. This comes out to more than ten million people each year. One in three women and one in four men have been victims of physical abuse by an intimate partner at some point in their lives.
Given the frequency of incidents, then, how can health-care professionals, advocates, and attorneys best work with domestic violence survivors? Some professors say that understanding neurobiology—how the nervous system processes and mediates behavior—can help them do so by connecting the dots between trauma, mental health, and domestic violence.
“It doesn’t take much digging to see what’s there is trauma, layers and layers of trauma,” said Dr. Elizabeth Fitelson during the morning panel of Arresting Survival, a recent New York City conference focusing on domestic violence survivors whose abuse led to their own arrest, prosecution, and punishment. “This is something that anyone working in the field of mental health should be aware of.”
Trauma is exposure to a distressing event, such as death or threatened death, actual or threatened injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence—all of which can be part and parcel of domestic abuse. According to the American Psychiatric Association, the exposure need not be experienced firsthand; trauma can also occur when a person witnesses a traumatic event, or learns that a traumatic event happened to a loved one or close friend.
[For more of this story, written by Victoria Law, go to https://rewire.news/article/20...ing-abuse-survivors/]
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