Murvartian seeks to expand her research on intimate partner violence through time at ECU
Lara Murvartian has wanted to help people since she was a child. Now a current predoctoral fellow at the University of Seville in Spain, an email exchange with Dr. Allison Crowe at East Carolina University brought her to Pirate Nation as a visiting scholar in counselor education.
Murvartian’s path of helping people began through volunteering with vulnerable populations, such as hospitalized children, geriatric patients, children with autism, and the homeless. While she is now a general health psychologist with training in psychotherapy and gender equality, her educational journey started in a different direction.
“My research career began when I decided to quit undergraduate studies in biomedicine and start a degree in psychology. My passion began when I started collaborating in an international research project on the use of creative practice as ‘mutual recovery’ with people with severe mental illness,” she said. “This innovative idea that sharing creative practice and resources could promote resilience in mental health and well-being among professionals, informal carers and service users was the starting point of my passion towards research. Since then, I have focused on the stigma associated with certain vulnerable social groups, starting with that towards people suffering from severe mental illness, and leading to my current doctoral thesis, almost completed, on the public stigma exerted by professional helpers towards women survivors of intimate partner violence.”
She found her specialty on violence against women while studying to do her residency to become a clinical psychologist. After starting a job as a research assistant to collaborate on a European project on violence against migrant women, Murvartian discovered that she was to be the fundamental support in helping a female professor who had been sexually harassed by a male professor resume her research career.
“We became close friends and still are,” Murvartian said. “This woman is very smart, kind and brave. She was doing a brilliant Ph.D. on violence against women, and she was the first professor who decided to fill in a complaint, on her own, against the aggressor.”
Murvartian noted that even though the male professor was found guilty years later, her friend still had to leave her job, move to another city and never published her Ph.D.
“Mostly because of her, I am doing this Ph.D.,” she said. “I could no longer close my eyes to this reality. There were many other women like her, and the general public, policies and institutions stigmatize and do not give the appropriate response.”
Throughout her educational journey, Murvartian has participated in several projects based in Spain as well as some across Europe. Currently, she is working on a national project in Spain focusing on hate speeches about migrants in high school populations in multicultural classrooms. She has also taught bachelor’s courses in psychology at the University of Seville.
“I have always loved teaching since I was little,” she said. “I used to teach English lessons to people from all ages since I was fourteen.”
Murvartian was drawn to the applied nature of Dr. Allison Crowe’s research and the progress she is making in combating public stigma around intimate partner violence.
“At the moment, I have been able to verify through the two systematic reviews carried out during my thesis that there is a clear Anglo-Saxon bias in the analysis of this stigma, with most of the research on the subject coming from the U.S.,” she said. “The collaboration between these groups, whose penal and welfare system is so different and comparable, added to the absence of studies in Spain, make collaboration between them highly fruitful. The collaboration had already started two and a half years before coming here, and will continue after the end of my stay here.”
While at ECU, Murvartian is working on research with Dr. Crowe related to her primary research interests of social stigma experienced and internalized by women who suffer intimate partner violence. She is also interested in pursuing any other research related to gender equality or women’s studies.
“I would like to be able to give sensitizing seminars or workshops, as I am passionate about doing so,” she said. “I also plan, if I have time, to do a workshop that we are designing in Spain on the use of educational drama in university students to promote the willingness to intervene in cases of intimate partner violence.”
Murvartian is making sure to maintain a balance in her work and personal life while in Greenville. She goes to the Eakin Student Recreation Center daily and hopes to meet other Ph.D. students and international visiting scholars. She also video calls her family, friends and boyfriend whenever she can.
ECU isn’t the first international experience that Murvartian has participated in during her studies. She received a scholarship to participate in a Peruvian project focused on the improvement of educational attention to children with disabilities in the Amazonas region. She also spent three months in Norway in the Department of Public Health and Nursing at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
“Maybe it would be interesting to get to know how different professionals (law enforcement, healthcare and social service providers) work with victims of intimate partner violence here in Greenville,” she said. “During my stay in Norway, I visited a sexual abuse center, and a restorative justice center. I was able to explain what I had done so far with professionals during my Ph.D., and they explained to me how they worked. The discussions and sharing of knowledge were very rewarding for both parties.”