First published on October 20, 2014 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Like many entities directed at the greater public good, the USF College of Public Health’s Harrell Center was the product of a private philanthropist’s gift. James Harrell and his family wanted to do something to help eliminate family violence, and they acted on that desire. The result was a 1997 endowment that set the stage for what has become an international force.

“The intent of the Harrell family was to provide a center that would focus on family violence,” affirmed Dr. Martha Coulter, the center’s founding director, “but they were particularly interested in looking at the prevention of family violence, as well as research that would be directly applicable to prevention and intervention.

“So the mission of the Harrell Center, really, is to be an intermediary between research and practice, to do research that is focused on family violence intervention and prevention across the lifespan.

“The grant was an endowment, so the funding is very limited, because it’s just the interest on the endowment. Now, most of the income is from other grants and contracts,” Coulter said, “but what the Harrell endowment did was provide the base for doing that kind of research.”

Brick sponsored by the Harrell Center in remembrance of James Harrell after his death in 2007.

One of three faculty members at the center full-time, Coulter, whose doctorate is in maternal and child health, teaches three courses: Family and Community Violence, Child Maltreatment, and Child Health, in addition to coordinating the maternal and child health academic concentration at COPH.

“In the very beginning, there was only the grant and the establishment of the center conceptually,” she said. “Over the years, we’ve developed.”

That development recently necessitated alignment into three divisions.

“The specific divisions – the redesigning of the organizational chart – has really been something that I’ve done this year,” Coulter said. “Before that, over the years, we’ve just developed these different projects and all worked together, but it looked like now we were at a place where we really needed to have a little bit more separate organization and to develop some strategic goals and objectives in each of those content areas.”

The result is a children’s services division directed by Dr. Lianne Estefan, an intimate partner violence division directed by Coulter, and an elder mistreatment division directed by Dr. Carla Vandeweerd. Dr. Karen Liller recently joined the center as a regular collaborator focusing her attention on the overlap between child maltreatment and unintentional injury, Coulter said, and “usually about 10” graduate students round out her staff. A community advisory board is among the center’s numerous external extensions.

“The children’s section has been very involved in looking at issues regarding the prevention of violence in the community,” Coulter explained, “and the center has developed a virtual research institute with one of the community agencies, Champions for Children, which is a multi-program unit, so that we can do research that is truly collaborative. We’ve worked very consistently with them over the years.”

Graphic that Harrell Center graduate assistant Natasha Hojati created for the Center’s Facebook page.

Coulter said that much of what her intimate partner violence section does involves the courts, so much so that she has become a regular consultant for the courts and has undertaken the task of evaluating the effectiveness of their intervention programs for batterers. Developing and continually improving guidelines for batterer intervention and responses to the needs of victims have been major off-shoot projects.

Among the section’s more significant research findings is that female batterers are falling through the cracks. While the county’s intervention for male batterers has been “very effective,” Coulter said, it has largely failed to successfully intervene with female batterers, who comprise about 15 percent of all convicted batterers in Hillsborough County.

“The clinical providers of these programs,” she said, “have been saying for a long time that they didn’t think the state-mandated curriculum for men was really the right curriculum to use for women.”

Among many leaders and dignitaries who have visited the Harrell Center over the years was then-Attorney General Janet Reno, who attended an elder abuse conference sponsored by the Center in 2001. The attorney general is pictured above with students Seraphine Pitt (left) and Carol Williams, and below with Dr. Coulter.

The elder mistreatment division concentrates on elders with dementia and the kinds of violence against them, which is, Coulter said, “fairly common, unfortunately, from both spousal caretakers and children taking care of elderly parents. The dynamics of this are very different from other sorts of domestic violence and really have a lot to do with people not understanding how to help people who have dementia.”

Coulter said she considers a new project in the division to be particularly tantalizing and potentially groundbreaking.

Called the Senior Surfers Project, Coulter said it looks at the rapidly expanding but little-known phenomenon of women over 50 seeking relationships online and getting responses from people who wind up physically, emotionally or financially harming them.

All previous research on Internet connections leading to violent encounters has been on adolescents, she said, so Senior Surfers is another project aiming to keep potentially overlooked victims out of the cracks – in this case, the cracks that open at the nexus of society and technology.

Dr. Coulter chats with Judge Dennis Alvarez (left) and James Harrell at a 1997 function.

With so much involvement in the local community, including working closely with the Spring and, until its recent demise thanks to funding shortfalls, the Family Justice Center, the Harrell Center’s global impact might be surprising to some, but global involvement has proven beneficial on numerous fronts.

Dr. Pnina S. Klein, a clinical and developmental psychologist and professor of education at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, recently led a Mediational Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers workshop on campus to promote cognitive functioning and attachment by improving parent-caregiver interactions with infants and young children.

Attendees included community professionals, physicians and COPH students, faculty and staff.  Dr. Robert Nelson, a joint professor in COPH and the Morsani College of Medicine, sponsored attendance by a visiting group of physicians and clinicians from Ecuador.

“It’s been used all over the world,” Coulter said of MISC. “The outcomes internationally of this program have shown that it’s very effective in strengthening attachment and reducing child maltreatment, so we brought Dr. Klein here from Israel this year to do a training for community people and staff here, as well as faculty and students.”

Dr. Martha Coulter, Harrell Center founding director (right in both photos), in Ecuador in 2007.

Elsewhere on the international front, Coulter is working with the medical school in Panama to begin collecting information and developing guidelines for Panamanian health providers to improve their responses to intimate partner violence. She’s also working in Quito, Ecuador, to develop a program that will provide fundamental intervention services for indigenous populations.

Children in a remote Himalayan village in India read books sent to them by the Harrell Center.

Coulter went to India in 2012 with a group that collected data on maternal/child health and family violence among the 26 indigenous tribes in the Himalayas as a response to one tribal leader’s interest in addressing those issues. Progress has been slow, she said, because the tribes are not formally centralized in any way, and the terrain is difficult and isolating. The center recently collected books to send to children there. A librarian navigates dirt paths on a bicycle to deliver them.

Not surprisingly, Coulter’s five-year vision for the Harrell Center is about more expansion, mostly ideological, and lots of it.

“I would like to expand our depth in looking at female offenders and the way the courts respond to them,” she said.

“We’ve applied for some grants to look with a lot more depth at issues related to fathers. This is an area that has been somewhat neglected and needs a lot of attention. What are the ways that we can help fathers from the very beginning develop the kinds of skills that will be more nurturing and less likely to produce problems?

“As far as the center itself,” she said, “I think the area that we really need to expand the most is our capacity for doing community training and education and technical assistance.”

“I’d also like to see us focus on more primary intervention in a public health direction.   A lot of what we’ve done has been secondary response intervention, but I would like to see us working with primary situations – families, parent-child relationships.”

Coulter said an example of the center’s involvement in this area is its participation in the Hillsborough County Violence Prevention Collaborative, a plan for reducing violence throughout the county.

Community events also make Coulter’s expansion list. Recent ones have included fundraisers with artists and bands, and even a biker run.

“I would like to see us expand these community events, because they have been very helpful. The center doesn’t have much funding,” she said, “and the funding that we get is almost always research funding, so if we want to do things that are outside the research arena, we have to raise the money ourselves.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health. Photos courtesy of Dr. Martha Coulter, Eric Younghans, Dr. Robert Nelson, USF Health and the Harrell Center.

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October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month

Guatemala has the third-highest rate of femicide (the homicide of women based on gender) in the world. And according to UN Women, 21.2 percent of Guatemalan women have experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime.

USF College of Public Health (COPH) MPH student Caitlynn Carr, who is also a doctoral candidate in applied anthropology at the university, is studying intimate partner violence (IPV) among Guatemalan women.

As part of her doctoral research, funded by a Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, Carr is conducting field research in Guatemala examining the barriers that indigenous women face when it comes to seeking help for IPV. Carr, who’s concentrating in maternal and child health, said examples of those barriers include governmental corruption, lack (and cost) of transportation, inability to take a day off from work, childcare issues and the fact that women rarely travel alone in the country. Other factors include racism against indigenous people, a machismo ideology, lack of services provided in Indigenous languages (there are 21 in Guatemala), fear of leaving a partner, economic dependence on a partner and others.

Carr’s research will also focus on ways to curb IPV.

Carr said she got interested in IPV in Guatemala when she visited the country with a Habitat for Humanity project in 2011. In 2015, she conducted research focused on Indigenous women’s psychosomatic/distress symptoms resulting from IPV.

“After conducting semi-structured interviews with 40 women and receiving surveys from 80 women, I found that only one of the participants sought formal services for the abuse that she experienced, illuminating a disconnection between IPV services and Indigenous women in rural areas of Guatemala [services are more prevalent/common in more urbanized areas],” Carr said.

Carr is currently living in Guatemala, immersing herself in the culture and living in the communities where she’s conducting her research. She cooks with community members, goes to church with them and builds friendships. Establishing these kinds of relationships is an important step to curbing IPV, Carr noted, as community-based and community-led programs have had more success than governmental programs at reducing IPV in Guatemala.

“Governmental programs oftentimes lack funding and resources, as well as personal outreach, which leads to limited accessibility and success. Oftentimes, nonprofit organizations fill in the gaps where governmental organizations fall short,” Carr said.

Carr­, who plans on pursuing postdoctoral research on violence prevention and IPV after graduation, hopes the research will illuminate potential avenues for violence prevention among Indigenous communities when formal governmental efforts fail.

“The research situates violence against Guatemalan women from a life course perspective and examines social determinants of health from both a socioeconomic and sociohistorical lens,” Carr said. “I’ll share study results with all stakeholders in the form of a comprehensive report and/or professional presentation with the hope of informing federal policy surrounding these issues.”

For information about family violence prevention and resources, visit the COPH’s Harrell Center.

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

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USF College of Public Health’s Dr. Martha Coulter recently established a legacy gift with USF Health’s Office of Development and Alumni Relations to support the USF Harrell Center for the Study of Family Violence. These planned gifts are deferred commitments made through one’s estate to ensure that their philanthropic intentions carry on their legacy, long after their lifetime.

The Harrell Center was originally created through a private endowment by James and Jennifer Harrell. Its mission is to develop and integrate knowledge with best practices to strengthen community responses to family violence. It’s designed to conduct and translate research into usable information for practitioners, to provide education and training, and to serve as a resource and advocacy center for the public and professionals.

Coulter, Professor Emerita at the COPH and founding director of the Harrell Center, dedicated her career to improving the lives of families and children. With this gift, she hopes that the Harrell’s mission and research can continue to do more to help victims of family violence and the systemic problems associated with it.

“Next year will be 25 years since I was given the grant funding for the Harrell Center by the Harrell family” Coulter said, “I was the director for 22 of those years right up until I retired. It’s very close to my heart and I feel very strongly that family violence is an issue that is critical to understand and prevent.  It is an underlying problem to a great number of health and mental health issues, as well as a chronic community issue. The pandemic has brought family violence to the forefront of our attention as we recognize the increases in many forms of family violence due to isolation and stress.”

Some family violence issues that Coulter hopes gets more support are in preventive measures, therapeutic interventions and survivor resources once they are out of a violent situation. She also wants more multidisciplinary research that delves into understanding the root causes of family violence.

“There is so much more that the center could conduct if it had more money. In addition to research, they could do more training, consultation and support for community agencies and expand into other areas which is what I’m hoping to do with this gift. I want to help, but to also encourage others to donate as well. I think this is the way we’ll be able to move the center into accomplishing all of its goals,” Coulter said. “While the center has been successful in acquiring research grants and contracts over the years, these are for very specific research projects and there is much need for additional, more flexible funding. For example, helping community agencies to evaluate their programs is a frequent request.”

Coulter also commented on the great current leadership of the Harrell Center, the support of its advisory board members and the ongoing support from the USF COPH and its community which have all helped the center really blossom into what it is today.

“Dr. Coulter made a generous planned gift to support the Harrell Center for the Study of Family Violence, for both operating needs and endowment, so that the important work of the Center goes on in perpetuity,” said Kara Steiner, senior director of development and alumni engagement for USF Health Office of Development and Alumni Relations. “As the former director, and a current board member, she understands more than anyone how important funding is to maintain the programs and community partnerships that exist. 

To learn more about making an estate commitment to the College of Public Health, contact Kara Steiner at 813-458-9149 or karasteiner@usf.edu. 

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

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USF Health hosted its virtual 5K, “Run Family Violence Out of Tampa Bay,” from April 17-18. With 107 registrants, the effort raised more than $7,200 that will go to directly support the The USF College of Public Health (COPH) Harrell Center’s priorities.

The 5K was endorsed by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office and news of the event was distributed through multiple social media channels. Participating leaders included former USF President Betty Castor, former Florida House representative Samuel P. Bell, III, COPH board members, faculty and community organization leaders such as Mindy Murphy from the Spring of Tampa Bay. The Harrell Center also thanked Lennar Homes and many of their other donors for contributing to the event’s success.

The Harrell Center serves as an intermediary between academia and practice to address family violence across the life span. To address this mission, the center connects the technical assistance needs of community organizations with USF students and faculty who have the skills to manage these needs.

However, one challenge the center faces is trying to meet the needs of the community through academic solutions, such as research, evaluation, training and advocacy, without an allocated budget.

“We rely on student volunteers and the faculty’s orientation toward community engagement,” Dr. Abraham Salinas-Miranda, assistant professor and director of the Harrell Center, said. “All the funds raised from the 5K are being utilized for community-based projects that don’t have a funding stream through USF. Our students can learn while working with projects that advance evidence-based practices. The community can address challenges that they have not been able to address.” 

Salinas-Miranda said that one of the things he liked most about the event was the sense of connection with family, friends and the community who were all supporting their cause.

“I think it’s really amazing that despite this being our first 5K and the COVID-19 pandemic causing the race to be virtual, we had over 100 participants. The community response to the event was really inspiring,” Salinas-Miranda said. “We would like to thank everyone who participated and donated! We will make sure to put every penny to good use to address family violence in our community.”

Click here to see more photos from the event.

Related media:
LifeLine video playlist on YouTube

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

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The American Public Health Association (APHA) held its annual meeting and expo virtually this year from Oct. 24-28, and USF College of Public Health (COPH) students and faculty took part in the many offerings. 

According to the APHA website, “The APHA Annual Meeting and Expo is the largest and most influential yearly gathering of public health professionals, bringing the public health community together to experience robust scientific programming, networking, social events, poster sessions and more.” 

The theme of this year’s meeting was “Creating the Healthiest Nation: Preventing Violence” and featured a mix of live and on-demand sessions.

Throughout the course of the APHA meeting there were Zoom meet and greets, a film festival, live exhibitor presentations, pre-recorded poster presentations, a social media scavenger hunt, a virtual dance class and the opportunity to win prizes and more. Webinars focused on urgent topics like climate change, COVID-19, advancing racial equity and the Flint, Mich., water crisis. As it does every year, the COPH had a booth where attendees could learn more about the college’s many public health programs and degrees.

Thousands of new abstracts are presented each year, making the APHA Annual Meeting the most influential gathering in public health, and dozens of COPHers presented their research. 

Dr. Abraham Salinas-Miranda, a COPH assistant professor and director of the college’s Harrell Center for the Study of Family Violence, was a frequent presenter and moderator at this year’s meeting. 

“I have been an active member of the Family Violence Prevention Caucus at the APHA since 2015,” said Salinas. “As part of my involvement, I volunteer to provide support as a moderator, since family violence is my area of research. I get to learn a lot every year of the types of research and hot topics in family violence. It’s very interesting.”

One of the presentations/panels Salinas was involved in was Initiating a community-centered approach in addressing domestic violence: The Hillsborough County domestic violence coordinated community response project. 

“Established partnerships are the key ingredient for a successful coordinated community response (CCR) and tailoring the CCR Model (which is an international safety audit analysis model) to the community needs, with flexibility and a strengths-based focus, resulted in increased engagement and prompt decision-making,” said Salinas.

Other faculty and students from around the college displayed and discussed their research. 

Assistant Professor Dr. Miguel Reina Ortiz received an APHA Excellence in Abstract Submission on an International Topic Award for research on HIV testing among pregnant women that he conducted with the COPH’s Dr. Ricardo Izurieta and others.

“Economic incentives were effective in motivating pregnant women living in a high HIV urban setting in Ecuador to get tested for HIV, even after controlling for the fact that some pregnant women had been previously tested for HIV,” said Reina. “This is encouraging as it may help us understand ways to devise strategies to increase HIV testing among pregnant women, which, when coupled with timely treatment, can reduce the risk of mother-to-child HIV transmission,” said Reina. You can read more about the research here.

A sampling of other research presented by COPH faculty and students included:

• Trends in COVID-19 cases and deaths by gender among Florida residents of reproductive age
• Health and well-being outcomes of males raised in mother-absent homes: A scoping review
• The benefits of fatherhood involvement in Florida maternal, infant and early childhood home visiting programs

COPH students and faculty also took part in poster presentations. 

Three COPH students, Jan Dahrendorff, Kristi Miley and Emma Tumarkin, presented posters at the Annual Delta Omega Student Poster Session. 

According to its website, the Delta Omega Honorary Society promotes graduate study in public health and recognizes outstanding achievement in the field. Each year, 19 students who attend schools with active Delta Omega chapters are selected to present their research. 

“This is the second year in a row that all three COPH student nominees for the National Delta Omega Poster competition were selected as finalists,” said Ellen Kent, coordinator of USF Health Service Corps and Sunshine ERC.

You can read more about the college’s Delta Omega presenters and their research here.

One of the highlights of the APHA meeting was a review course of the Certified in Public Health (CPH) exam. The session was led by the COPH’s Dr. Jaime Corvin and included presentations by COPH Dean Dr. Donna Petersen and Drs. Karen Liller and Anna Torrens Armstrong. Getting a CPH distinguishes one as a public health professional with knowledge of key public health sciences.

For a snapshot of everything the APHA Annual Meeting and Expo had to offer, click here.

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

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Calling it “a dream come true,” Dr. Abraham Salinas-Miranda has been appointed director of the USF College of Public Health’s (COPH) Harrell Center, whose mission is to develop and integrate knowledge with best practices to strengthen community responses to family violence.

Salinas-Miranda, a medical doctor trained in Nicaragua who came to the COPH as Fulbright Scholar and earned both his MPH and PhD from the COPH, has been at the center since 2015, serving in a variety of capacities.

“I like that I can combine my research and clinical expertise with the work of local community agencies addressing multiple forms of family violence—for example, intimate partner violence, child neglect and abuse and elder mistreatment—with other, overlapping forms of violence, such as sexual and gun violence,” said Salinas-Miranda. “The unique way the Harrell Center does this is by actively participating, collaborating and co-learning with the community. I appreciate that it’s not just passive transmission of information about best practices. It’s a co-learning process.”

Salinas-Miranda says his interest in the study of family violence was inspired by community and academic mentors (in medicine and public health), and especially by the mentorship of the Harrell Center’s former director, Dr. Martha Coulter. 

“She guided me on the value of community partnerships for addressing domestic violence, the importance of being present for community organizations and survivors, and how university faculty (and students) can make a significant difference serving in their roles as educators and researchers,” said Salinas-Miranda.

Some of Salinas-Miranda’s immediate plans for the future of the Harrell Center include:

• adding to its senior faculty, drawing upon the many professors and researchers at the COPH, USF Health and other USF colleges studying violence-related topics
• pursuing cutting-edge research on the intersection of adverse childhood experiences with intimate partner violence perpetration and victimization
• obtaining collaborative grants
• developing fundraising strategies for community-engagement projects

According to Salinas-Miranda, violence is one of the greatest public health challenges of our time and to stir sociocultural change, policy makers have to work in tandem with communities.

“Violence is behind so many public health issues—obesity, depression, unwanted pregnancy, suicides, substance abuse and more—that we are trying to eliminate. We as humans are relational beings. We depend on our relationships to develop and adapt. Growing up in violent and abusive environments sets patterns of beliefs and behavior that are transmitted to future generations and increases our vulnerability to health issues.”

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

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