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Intimate Partner Violence Risk among Undergraduate Women from an Urban Commuter College: the Role of Navigating Off- and On-Campus Social Environments

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Abstract

The current attention that is being paid to college sexual assault in policy circles and popular media overlooks a critical issue: the possible role played by the urban social environment in intimate partner violence (IPV) risk for the large number of urban commuter college students throughout the USA and beyond. This article helps to illuminate this dynamic using qualitative research collected at an urban commuter campus in New York City. Specifically, we conducted focus groups and in-depth interviews with 18 female undergraduate students, exploring the nature and consequences of IPV in students’ lives, perceived prevalence of IPV, and resources for addressing IPV. Our results indicate that college attendance may both elevate and protect against IPV risk for students moving between urban off- and on-campus social environments. Based on this, we present a preliminary model of IPV risk for undergraduate women attending urban commuter colleges. In particular, we find that enrolling in college can sometimes elevate risk of IPV when a partner seeks to limit and control their student partner’s experience of college and/or is threatened by what may be achieved by the partner through attending college. These findings suggest a role for urban commuter colleges in helping to mitigate IPV risk through policy formulation and comprehensive ongoing screening and prevention activities.

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Notes

  1. For instance, the City University of New York, the large institution studied in this paper, recently asked questions about physical and sexual assault in the last 12 months when conducting a survey of its students’ health experiences, but did not collect information about whether the perpetrator of the assault was an intimate partner. This is being remedied in an upcoming survey. The American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment (http://www.acha-ncha.org/sample_survey.html), which is used voluntarily by some institutions, does include questions about emotional, physical, and sexual abuse by an intimate partner.

  2. Currently, approximately 3,100 CUNY students live on campus out of a total student population of almost 270,000, which is just over 1 % of students.

  3. As noted previously, the American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment includes questions assessing the previous year incidence of three forms of IPV. However, the NCHA is a proprietary tool used voluntarily by select colleges, and resultant data is thus not representative of all college students (http://www.acha-ncha.org/partic_history.html). The National College Health Risk Behavior Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), appears to have gathered data from a representative sample of college students but, to our knowledge, has not been repeated since 1995 (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00049859.htm). In 2011, the CDC published data for the first time from its National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/nisvs/summary_reports.html), though to our knowledge, the survey has yet to collect enough data to meaningfully examine college students as a subpopulation.

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Acknowledgments

Financial support for this project was provided by the Healthy CUNY Initiative at the City University of New York. The authors would like to thank Nick Freudenberg, Patti Lamberson, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Health Sciences, Lehman College, City University of New York School of Public Health, 250 Bedford Park Boulevard West, Gillet Hall 431, Bronx, NY, 10468, USA

    Emma K. Tsui & E. Karina Santamaria

  2. HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies, New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    E. Karina Santamaria

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Correspondence to Emma K. Tsui.

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Tsui, E.K., Santamaria, E.K. Intimate Partner Violence Risk among Undergraduate Women from an Urban Commuter College: the Role of Navigating Off- and On-Campus Social Environments. J Urban Health 92, 513–526 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-014-9933-0

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