Summer 2006
Volume IV, Issue II

Special Issue: Nursing Research With an Impact

Cover photo by
Chris Hartlove

Feature: Wounded Hearts, Broken Lives | Next Section >

Prevalence Research 

At one area shelter, The House of Ruth Maryland, Hopkins nursing researchers conduct a clinic and gather information about the prevalence of the problem of domestic violence. Social workers, counselors, and nurses say the demand for services far exceeds the emergency help available. This shelter, for example, operates a 68-bed emergency shelter that houses women and children for an average of 45 days. The shelter turns away at least two times as many women and children as they take in. Counselors are so hard-pressed for space they can only take people under immediate threat of death or serious bodily harm.

Janice Miller, residential clinical director at the shelter, has found that women form a unique bond with their medical providers. "They will tell them things that they won't tell their pastors, teachers, or neighbors," she says.

Campbell says it is this special role of nurses that has allowed them to see and document the pervasiveness of the problem.

Domestic violence has a long history, but only recently have experts put names to conditions. In 1962, researchers coined the phrase "battered child syndrome." It wasn't until the 1970s that they began to identify "battered women." The understanding of elder abuse is still in its infancy.

Today, says Campbell, scientists look at the range of abuse over a lifetime—child abuse and neglect; intimate partner abuse, involving a spouse or close partner; and elder abuse. Still, it's difficult to understand the magnitude of the problem. Federal studies estimate family violence touches 25 percent of Americans as victims, witnesses, or perpetrators. Some statistics are staggering: Intimate partner violence, for example, accounts for about 22 percent of all violent crimes against women and 30 percent of female murders.

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Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing