A Systematic Review of African American Women Intimate Partner Violence Victims' Help Seeking Pathways

Background and Purpose: Intimate partner violence (IPV) within heterosexual relationships is a critical public health problem that has pervasive deleterious effects and disproportionately impacts African American women. African American women experience the second highest prevalence rates for victimization. Yet, they reflect the highest rates of IPV homicide. Still, they are more likely to remain with their abusive partner than seek help. Fundamental to improving their outcomes is more fully understanding their help seeking experiences. This systematic review examines the current literature on African American women IPV victims’ help seeking. The primary goals were to summarize their experiences, identify barriers and underline areas of further study. This study makes a unique contribution by assessing available service provision for African American women and highlighting existing culturally congruent interventions.

Methods: Six electronic databases (Academic Search Complete, CINAHL complete, Criminal Justice Abstracts, Social Sciences Abstracts, Social Work Abstracts and Religion Philosophy) were searched utilizing the following search strings: (1) intimate partner violence; (2) help seeking; (3) disclosure; (4) African American or Black. A search for grey literature was also conducted via the Cochrane Collaboration’s online library of systematic reviews. A total of 80 empirical studies were identified. Limits were set for the publication year (2004-2016), document type (peer-reviewed, journal-article), language (English), and the author’s institutional affiliation (USA), resulting in 33 articles after de-duplication. Inclusion criteria were as follows: the study (1) includes African American women as part of the sample, and (2) who were help seeking for IPV victimization. A summary was compiled for each article, outlining research design, sample demographics, service provision type, key findings, and strengths and limitations.

Results: Service providers were organized into three main areas: formal providers, quasi-trained helpers and informal supports. Each area of service provision was evaluated for accessibility and barriers. Most of the available service provision was designed for women whose help seeking pathway was via formal providers (29 articles). There were a dearth of interventions designed for implementation among quasi-trained helpers and informal supports (4 articles). Women’s access to services is limited, specifically since there is a paucity of providers where African Americans largely reside. Barriers to African American women’s IPV help seeking largely resulted from racism, discrimination, racial loyalty, and limited knowledge of available resources. Of particular note is the paucity of culturally congruent service provision for African American women.

Conclusions and Implications: This review underlines the need for research on the accessibility of and barriers to service provision for African American women during IPV help seeking. Findings suggest that their decisions are largely shaped by the racism and discrimination that they experience when engaging with formal service providers. There is a need to develop more culturally congruent service provision; interventions that incorporate African American women’s cultural values are in particular need of additional research. The review highlighted a promising intervention delivered in the shelter system. This finding, coupled with other interventions, underscores the potential to develop a more comprehensive approach to supporting African American women IPV victims’ unique needs.