PFI-RP: Preventing Intimate Partner Violence Using Digital Technology: A Transdisciplinary Approach

This Partnerships for Innovation-Research Partnerships (PFI-RP) project focuses on addressing the phenomenon of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). IPV affects all strata of our society irrespective of adult age groups, education, employment, economic status, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual preferences. It is a multi-faceted- public health, criminal justice, and human rights issue costing billions of dollars of the government’s medical and criminal justice expenditures, especially in the investigation of IPV-related homicides. The project will focus on developing a one-stop awareness and empowerment digital technology platform that would help in breaking the victims' code of silence and help them seek and access appropriate help immediately. This would be instrumental in addressing at-home violence. The target customer segments include government (especially criminal justice agencies, and hospitals), non-government including all service providers (women’s organizations, social service agencies, medical clinics, faith-based organizations), educational institutions, and corporate organizations that are in dire need to prevent IPV. The primary focus will be on the domestic violence service-providing organizations to whom the victims and survivors report and resort to seeking assistance in dealing with the violence at home. The proposed project will use social science-driven action research methodology in designing a digital tool to address Intimate Partner Violence, an important societal challenge that is significantly exacerbated by the recent pandemic. Such a tool must ensure privacy, safety, and security to meet user needs and to help IPV victims or individuals at risk even in a modest way to reshape their lives in a positive direction. This is thus an effort to lend technology's power to human development. IPV is also a sensitive personal issue, and its varied ecosystems and archetypes pose unique technical challenges for this project such as digital privacy, safety, accessibility under low resources environments, and usability. The research objectives are to develop a victim-centered, culturally sensitive digital tool for IPV prevention that meets the above technical challenges. This is compounded by the social and behavioral science challenge of helping IPV victims to step forward to deal with the situation before it spirals out of control. This may involve IPV education, empowerment, and assessment of risks associated with self-advocacy goals. It is thus a multidisciplinary task. Breaking this so-called wall of silence with a science-integrated digital tool is the core innovation underpinning this project. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.