| How can grassroots knowledge about violence prevention and response be
captured to guide local antiviolence organizing? How well do we understand
the root causes of violence or the complex factors maintaining it in
different contexts? Too often, decisions with life and death consequences
are made on the basis of assumptions rather than knowledge, and advocates
are left without the tools or insight research can provide for challenging
these assumptions.
Too often, research findings that might guide action
don’t “trickle down” in ways that are useful at the grassroots level—nor are
local providers, activists, and advocates always equipped to analyze and
critique controversial findings.
Advocates are readily invited to spend
time helping researchers but are rarely invited to help shape the research
agenda or interpret its results. Formal systems of support for researchers
seldom reward work in this arena and rarely is the sharing of ideas and
findings encouraged among researchers.
No common culture, institutional
framework, or network of informal connections exists today to assist in
bridging these gaps between the producers and potential users of domestic
violence knowledge. |