The Gender Violence Database (GVD) is designed to be tool for researchers, practitioners, and the general public searching for peer-reviewed research and writing about gender-based violence. Our paper traces the challenges of confronting the research-practice divide that characterizes the emergence of the multidisciplinary field of Gender Violence, highlights the ethical and practical challenges of providing a consistent schema to map the work of the field, and discusses the GVD as a model for feminist DH pedagogy.
The recent movement toward evidence-based practice (EBP) in social work and public health emerged from a similar shift in medicine in the 1990s in which “the process of systematically finding, appraising, and using contemporaneous research findings as the basis for clinical decisions” (Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group 1992: 2420) became a practice imperative. EBP’s prominence has significantly impacted service delivery as federal, state, local, and private funding has become increasingly tied to its successful implementation (Mosley et al. 2019). As NGOs are increasingly expected to use EBP in their efforts to provide a safety net for vulnerable populations, including survivors of violence, they need predictable access to the best available evidence with as few barriers as possible.
Initial Project Development Steps
The GVD research team sought to bridge the research-practice gap as much as possible by rendering the choices that practitioners make in selecting evidence much more precise and useful within the current publishing environment. Central to this goal was the development of a database that offered a consistent set of tags and categories useful for searches across the many disciplines comprising the field of gender violence and the facilitation of intersectional search strategies that would enable practitioners and researchers to refine searches to reflect their current evidentiary needs. In devising its schema and overall user interface, the GVD team imagined its primary user as a practitioner with time-sensitive, intersectional needs operating under fiscal and time constraints.
The first project step was the construction of a schema—a set of search terms applicable to both past and ongoing research in the field. In deciding on the parameters and terminology the project would employ, the GVD team first had to determine which topics to include under the “gender violence” umbrella. The team decided to take a comprehensive approach to the field, including sources that contributed not only to knowledge about discrete acts of violence but also to an emerging understanding of the contexts, structures, and precursors of gender violence. Ultimately, the GVD team developed an inclusive definition, described in the GVD site’s “About” section:
Our scope includes forms of harm committed on the basis of gender, that are gendered in action, or that reinforce forms of gender oppression already in place. We include research focused on forms of harm such as intimate partner violence, sexual violence, stalking, and trafficking as they affect adults or children in any place in the world. We also include research that addresses the consequences of gender-based violence and that proposes intervention and/or prevention strategies.
Following the socio-ecological model Bronfenbrenner (1977) first introduced, the GVD team organized the working schema to account for each of five levels: intrapersonal factors (knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and identity characteristics), interpersonal factors (friendships, social networks, and family supports), institutional and organizational factors, community factors, and policy factors (including local, state, federal, and transnational policies). Using the socio-ecological model meant that sources addressing issues of structural violence and collective oppression could be included in the database alongside more familiar forms of (interpersonal) gender-based violence.
A crucial challenge in identifying and synthesizing research across disciplines is the sheer variety of discipline-specific terms that describe nearly identical contexts, phenomena, or populations. For example, criminology research most often refers to individuals who have suffered from gender-based violence as “victims,” while research in social work refers to this same category of individuals as “survivors.” Within disciplines, too, terms have changed over time in ways that the GVD team aimed to render consistent for users; the term “intimate partner violence” currently describes the phenomenon known in early scholarship as “wife-beating” and later came to be called “domestic violence.” The GVD team grappled with using terms that best represented the current understanding and best practices in the field, at times choosing terms that specific disciplines did not choose for themselves. Developing this schema meant engaging in a deliberate and strategic re-mapping of the field of gender violence in the name of practitioner and researcher access.
In devising and curating the schema terms, the GVD team prioritized intersectional principles at every stage of decision-making. Intersectionality—the understanding that individuals possess interlocking identities (of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability status, etc.) that render individuals differently vulnerable to structures of oppression—shapes both the lived experiences of people impacted by violence and the interventions and practices designed to prevent violence, support survivors, and challenge the perpetration of violence. An intersectional approach also reveals how an individual’s identities work in concert to create barriers or opportunities for effective intervention; so, for example, a survivor of sexual violence who is an undocumented immigrant and a legal minor will likely require different forms of intervention than a white lesbian citizen survivor of sexual assault on a college campus. Refining a search for the best available evidence works best if the search terms themselves are flexible and responsive to the interlocking identities and contexts whenever possible. Rather than using tags that would combine multiple identities—“lesbian survivors of child abuse”—as many publications do, the GVD team assigns tags that break down identity markers into the smallest possible categories so that users can run searches that re combine categories in productive ways.
Intersectional approaches are crucial in a field where both research and practice have historically prioritized normative populations to the detriment of groups whose current and historical oppression and marginalization have made them vulnerable to multiple kinds of violence. Gender Violence as a scholarly field has only relatively recently begun to move beyond a disproportionate focus on white, cisgender heterosexual female survivors to investigate the compounding vulnerabilities survivors face. Providing tags that allow for nuanced, intersectional searches remains a priority for the team; in practice contexts, the need for new information, innovative interventions, or deeper understanding about underrepresented populations is a likely scenario that prompts time-sensitive literature searches.
hooks’ (1984) margin-to-center approach further informed the team’s intersectional principles of schema development. This approach begins scholarly and activist investigation with a focus on historically marginalized populations—on individuals and groups that possess the most interlocking oppressed identities; the margin, rather than the center, then, becomes the starting point for theoretical and practical interventions aimed at dismantling seemingly intractable problems like gender-based violence. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that interventions that are truly effective for marginalized populations will likely be effective for those in the center, who face far fewer challenges, while the converse approach—beginning with the normative center and working outward toward the margins—has historically been ineffective and exclusionary.
Although the organizational schema that the GVD team uses for tagging purposes remains a behind-the-scenes tool, a version of the schema operates as the primary search tool for database users. On the search page, users can choose from an expandable list of hierarchically ordered tags grouped into four categories: Population (demographic and identity-related factors), Issues (forms of gender-based violence, from the intrapersonal to the political level, in the research), Responses (interventions that address gender-based violence), and Source Type (status as peer-reviewed and methodological approach). Sub-categories nest within larger categories for users to refine their searches. The full list of tags offers users a sense of the multiplicity and complexity of categories available for searches, inviting an exploration of research beyond the initial searches and thus quietly teaching users about the scope and depth of gender violence as a field. The GVD, then, becomes an opportunity for ongoing education and exploration for practitioners and researchers participating in a rapidly changing and expanding field.
Just as important, the work practices of the GVD offer a model for feminist DH process and pedagogical work. Team members routinely report on innovations in the field and engage in conversations on the conventions of journal publishing, the tensions among disciplines that differently define problems, populations, and interventions, the role of users and usability studies in project design, and the challenges of ethically applying useful labels to people, phenomena, and scholarship genres. Following feminist principles, almost every decision about the database—the process for including new tags to the schema, logo and interface design, protocols for usability studies, etc.—proceeds by consensus. In addition, team members also write blog posts that document process and document reflections on the ethical and feminist challenges of their work.
The undergraduate students, graduate students, librarians, Humanities Digital Workshop staff, and faculty who have been part of the GVD team since 2012 have mapped the multidisciplinary landscape of gender violence as a field in an unprecedented way, facilitating the growth of the field for researchers and practitioners’ use of research.