Intimate Partner Violence

Elicka Peterson-Sparks, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology in the Department of Government and Justice Studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Dr. Peterson-Sparks' research focuses on victimology, the criminogenic impact of religion, domestic violence, and homicide. She has published scholarly articles on homicide, domestic violence, sex offending, jury decision-making, juvenile justice, actuarial justice, mentoring, police response to intimate partner violence, and criminological theory, and her research has appeared in criminological journals such as Theoretical Criminology, Homicide Studies, Punishment & Society, The Criminal Justice Law Review, and The Journal of Criminal Justice Education. Dr. Peterson-Sparks is the author of the book, The Devil You Know: The Surprising Link between Conservative Christianity and Crime. She is currently the co-principal investigator of a five-state ethnographic study of rural and interstate prostitution in the Southeast. Kit Gruelle is a survivor of domestic violence and has worked as an advocate for battered women and their children for nearly 30 years. She started her work as a crisis-line volunteer in Durham, North Carolina in the mid-1980s at the Orange-Durham Coalition for Battered Women. In 1995, she created and coordinated the Bridges Program, a coordinated community response program (CCR), at Family Violence and Rape Crisis Services in Chatham County, North Carolina. In 2012, she completed her sociology degree (with a concentration in violence against women) at Appalachian State University. In 2001, she created the documentary film project Private Violence: The Movement against Battering in America. The feature-length film, Private Violence, directed by Cynthia Hill, premiered in January, 2014 at the Sundance Film Festival and on HBO on October 20, 2014 (it is currently nominated for an Emmy). Kit's article, "Healing From Within: Physicians Responding to Battered Women" is the foreword to The Physicians Guide to Intimate Partner Abuse by Drs. Ellen Talliferro and Patricia Salber, and parts of her story were recently included in Marlo Thomas' book It Ain't Over.