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Domestic Violence Targeted at Symposium

Approximately 110 students from Yale and other universities, along with members of the broader community, gathered at EPH on Saturday, March 27 for the 2004 Annual Yale Domestic Violence Symposium, which was sponsored by the Epidemiology and Public Health Student Organization (EPHSO), the Yale Chapter of the American Medical Student Association, the Yale Law Clinic TRO, the Office of Women and Medicine, the Yale Medical Student Council, Yale Women’s Health Action, and the Yale Graduate and Professional Student Senate.

Student symposium organizers from Yale's Public Health, Medical and Law Schools

This year’s symposium had two goals. The first was to increase awareness of domestic violence generally, emphasizing that it is a public health problem. The second was to present a multidisciplinary approach to the problem of domestic violence, which was done by involving students from Yale School of Law in the planning of the symposium, and by featuring speakers from a variety of fields, including the legal, counseling, and political fields.

Elizabeth King, an M.P.H. ’05 who helped plan the symposium, noted that domestic violence is an important public health problem that impacts people’s mental and physical health, puts people at risk for other health problems, and has certain risk factors (such as gender inequality and poverty) in common with other health problems.

“Hopefully,” said King, “the symposium provided students of public health with a context to think more about the association between family violence and health, and the multidisciplinary approach necessary for addressing the topic.”

The keynote speaker at this year’s symposium was Representative Patricia Dillon, Deputy Majority Whip of the Connecticut House of Representatives and M.P.H. ‘98, who has worked extensively in the areas of health care and domestic violence. She spoke about her involvement in opening a battered women’s shelter in New Haven. She stressed that anyone can experience domestic violence, and noted that the majority of those who do are women and that the majority of abusers are men.

The symposium also featured a panel of speakers including an attorney, a physician, and a hotline counselor. Other panelists included a domestic violence survivor who discussed emotional abuse and controlling behavior that it took her years to recognize as domestic violence, and a police officer who said that law enforcement personnel frequently have only their own personal experiences with family violence to rely on when handling domestic violence cases at work because their professional training in dealing with the issue is so limited.

Davekumar Chandrasekaran, left, a first year Yale medical student and symposium planner, and Ben Atherton-Zeman, right, author and performer of "Voices of Men," which was performed at symposium.

Afternoon workshops allowed participants to focus on specific aspects of domestic violence, ranging from children’s experience and witnessing of violence to culturally specific issues related to violence. Nora Groce, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Public Health in the Division of Global Health, was a presenter on a workshop panel on international issues.

In addition to King, Samantha Illangasekare, Enid Castro, Marie Harris, and Aruna Dhara, all M.P.H. students in the class of 2005, helped to plan the symposium. Students from the School of Law and the School of Medicine were also involved in the planning.

-Story by Christy Gordon based on interview with Elizabeth King on March 30, 2004.