​Small Grant Competition 2020: Understanding
In 2020 the VAMHN held its second annual funding call on the theme of understanding. We received 44 applications and were pleased to award funding of up to £25k to four projects. Projects will run for up to 12 months - we are excited to see the results of these projects and will be sharing with them network once they are completed

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Project 1: Rupture and Repair: Towards a survivor-centred understanding of how rape harms  

• Project Aims
• Team

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This project has two core aims:  

1. To develop a survivor generated understanding of how sexual violence harms, orienting around the concepts of rupture and repair across five interconnected dimensions: time, space, body, others, self.
   
2. ​To shift the academic, research, and practice landscape by providing a survivor-centred alternative to the discourse of trauma as a way of understanding harm.   

The project will provide answers to two key priority areas identified for this theme, namely: (1) What are the long term and wider impacts of violence and abuse on all aspects of a person’s life? (2) How can we understand and measure the damage caused by the various interconnected systems that survivors encounter? Further it will start to address a key question on the longer list identified by the VAMHN consultation document as to what the impact is of medicalising survivors’ responses to abuse and trauma. 

Fiona Vera-Gray, Assistant Professor at Durham University 

Project 2: Victimization and domestic violence experienced by mental health services users during the COVID-19 lockdown period: understanding outcomes and their correlates ​

• Project Aims
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This project has three key aims:

1. To investigate the prevalence of victimization and domestic violence recorded in Electronic Health Records during the COVID-19 lockdown period.
2. To establish acute relapse, self-harm and death associated with experiencing victimization and domestic violence during the COVID-19 lockdown period.
   
3. To investigate correlates of these outcomes amongst the population that has experienced victimization and domestic violence during the COVID-19 lockdown period.

Giouliana Kadra-Scalzo, Post-doctoral Researcher at King’s College London
Robert Stewart, Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Clinical Informatics at King’s College London
Louise Howard, Professor in Women’s Mental Health, King’s College London

Project 3: Understanding the impact of micro- and macro-level violence during adolescence on mental health at the transition to adulthood 

• Project Aims
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The aim of this project is to capitalise on a nationally-representative and socio-economically diverse longitudinal UK cohort to explore:

1. How personal experience of violence and contextual neighbourhood violence during adolescence combine to impact mental health at the transition to adulthood.
   
2. Factors that protect against the development of mental health problems following exposure to these violent experiences and contexts. This will provide crucial insights into how violence at the micro- and macro-level contribute to the development of mental health problems and will identify potential modifiable factors that could be targeted to promote better mental health at a key phase of development. 
   

Findings will be interpreted and disseminated in collaboration with young adults with lived experience of violence and mental health difficulties.

Rachel Latham, Post-doctoral Researcher at King's College London
Helen Fisher, Reader in Developmental Psychopathology, King's College London

Project 4: Understanding the interconnection between violence-abuse and mental ill-health in Black and Minoritised Women’s Journeys to Healing-Recovery 

• Overview
• Team

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This research aims to explore black and minoritised (B&M) women’s lived experience of violence-abuse and mental ill-health and how they make sense of this linkage, their journeys of help-seeking and responses received and their views about what supports or compromises their healing. The research will synthesise existing research and new insights to shed further light on the ways in which violence-abuse and mental ill-health are experienced, understood and responded to. This enhanced understanding will be used to contribute to research knowledge, to inform the policy work of Imkaan, feed into wider conversations (such as the Women’s Aid campaign on mental health and domestic violence) and to strengthen practice responses.  
Research questions 
The research will address the following key questions: 

• How do women experience and make sense of their mental ill-health in a context of violence-abuse and how does this impact their help seeking?  
• How do women experience silencing around mental ill-health and violence-abuse and how do they resist-challenge (or are supported to) such silencing?  
• What pathways are accessed for help, what interventions are offered-received and at what point? How are different parts (statutory and voluntary sector) of the mental health system experienced? 
• What do women consider to be helpful and protective for building resilience and healing and at what points?  
• What is considered to be further harming at different levels (interpersonal, community and structural) and within which systems of support? 
• How do women resist negative labels and challenge systems?  How, and if, do specialist support services help women to develop strategies of resistance?    

Ravi Thiara, Associate Professor at University of Warwick
Sumanta Roy, Head of Research and Development at Imkaan