Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Help Seeking of American Indian and Black Women Experiencing Intimate Partner Violence

ABSTRACT Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a complex and pervasive public health problem disproportionately affecting American Indian (AI) and Black women, who ordinarily do not seek help, but who experience the worst health outcomes including homicide. With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, help-seeking for AI and Black women has become even more complicated amidst a global concern among advocates that social distancing, quarantine, and isolation measures are inadvertently endangering women experiencing IPV. To our knowledge, while anecdotal evidence shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has complicated women’s experiences of violence with a possible rise in levels of violence resulting in lethal outcomes, no systematic studies exist that track women’s experiences of IPV during this pandemic. To address this urgent gap, we propose a community-based participatory research (CBPR) study informed by Indigenous and Black feminist thought, that will employ qualitative and quantitative methods, enabling us to systematically describe the unique and intersecting structural, economic, and interpersonal facilitators and barriers to help-seeking for IPV among AI and Black women in urban and rural areas of Wisconsin during theCOVID-19 pandemic. We will conduct surveys and individual and focus group interviews with 300 AI and Black women every year for three years to track women’s experiences, patterns of help-seeking, and barriers to help-seeking. Women will be recruited from community- based partner agencies across the state as well as at other sites where our partners ordinarily inform women about their services, in order to capture women seeking help as well as women who have not sought help. Our ultimate goal through this study is to create a platform where women’s voices can then inform health practice and health policy while also drawing from a community advisory board constituted of advocates and other key members of AI and Black communities in Wisconsin, to provide actionable recommendations for addressing the urgent problem of IPV in the lives of AI and Black women. Our proposed CBPR study is in line with the mission and goals of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities because it focuses on two populations that are disproportionately affected by the pandemic, while also ordinarily disproportionately impacted by IPV. Additionally, this CBPR study engages grassroots, community-based agencies with an academic partner (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) in scholarship that is grounded in women’s realities, is participatory in nature, and is built upon the capacities and the resilience of community members.