April is National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month, and the College of Social Work would like to take this time to recognize one of its faculty members whose expertise lies in gender-based violence (GBV). Dr. Hu’s research explores and addresses intersecting socio-structural and epistemic inequities that contribute to violence against sex workers, human trafficking, and GBV.
Through her past direct work and current research, Hu has discovered that people impacted by GBV very often experience not one single type of violence, but multiple forms. For instance, women experiencing domestic violence could also encounter physical and sexual assaults. People in sex work, especially sex trading for survival, may also experience sexual assault, partner violence and at some point even trafficking.
“I always see systemic inequities as the root causes of these forms of violence and what makes it challenging for people to leave violent situations and seek support and services,” says Hu. “Systemic inequities may include a wide range of persistent social-structural conditions, such as poverty, multiple forms of stigma, housing insecurity and the criminalization of people navigating these very conditions.”
For example, in one recent publication, Hu and her co-authors looked at how intersecting structural factors tied to migration, including citizenship, language barriers and racialization, disproportionately affect women sex workers’ access to health and community services in Vancouver, Canada.
Early this year, through a scoping review of empirical literature globally, she and her co-authors also revealed how social-structural conditions and barriers, such as financial insecurity, precarious immigration status, linguistic marginalization, and limited digital literacy, intersectionally compromise migrants’ access to or use of digital tools to address intimate partner or domestic violence.
However, beyond these social and structural inequities, Hu also sees epistemic injustice against survivors of GBV as an important, but often under-addressed, form of systemic inequity. Examples of this includes misrepresenting their lived experiences and discrediting the importance of their expertise, experiential knowledge, and leadership in the critical work of social service development and policymaking.
“Ultimately, I remain committed to reimagining spaces for service development and policymaking where we not only draw on the experiential knowledge of people with lived experience, but actively center their leadership in these critical tasks addressing systemic root causes of GBV,” says Hu.
For example, Hu is currently leading a survivor-participatory project, (Re)imagining Survivor Engagement and Leadership in Clinical Storytelling and Decision-Making within Anti-Trafficking Social Service Provision. She is exploring how trafficking survivor stories are told, constructed and used to inform professional decision-making across anti-trafficking social services, as well as how survivors themselves perceive the storytelling experience when seeking and receiving social services. This project is supported by the College of Social Work Community-Engaged Research Pilot Grant.
In this work, Dr. Hu and her co-investigator, Dr. Jacquelyn Meshelemiah, onboarded a small group of survivors as our community co-researchers to develop and implement the project. Their ultimate hope is to not only reimagine survivor leadership in how client stories are engaged in social services, but also to see survivors given greater space to co-lead anti-trafficking research.
