Understanding trauma
“Freedom is closer than you think” is scrawled in caps across a drawing depicting gray prison bars flecked with brown rust or rot. The drawing’s teenage creator told senior Abigail Smith it represents her feelings of imprisonment and her hope for release.
Smith, a leadership studies and psychology major, is making an anthology of artwork and poems created by youth in the Henrico County Juvenile Detention Home, located 15 minutes from the University of Richmond. She volunteers there to fulfill the community-based-learning component of Dr. Kristin Bezio’s Culture and Resistance class.
“The class examines the idea of artistic expression as a resistance tool,” she said. “We look at examples of resistance in plays, poems, books, and films, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Shakespeare’s As You Like It. I also see themes of resistance in the work created by the youth at the detention center.”
Volunteering at the center gives Smith a chance to better understand youth who may be perpetrators of, and in some cases, victims of trauma, the aspiring counselor said.
Similarly, her Jepson School of Leadership Studies internship with Virginia Victims Assistance Network (VVAN) last summer provided insight into how people experience and process trauma. The Jepson School awarded her a Burrus Fellowship to support her internship with the Richmond-based nonprofit, where she created marketing materials and a digital archive of over 1,000 records. But she said attending VVAN homicide support group meetings had the greatest impact on her.
“At one of those meetings, a woman recounted the pain of losing both her elderly parents in a home invasion,” Smith said. “After leaving that meeting, I sat in my car and took deep breaths. Dealing with the grief of losing loved ones to homicide feels very isolating. I can’t speak highly enough of the VVAN support groups that connect people experiencing similar pain.”
This year, she has continued her work to support people experiencing trauma by volunteering as a campus peer sexual misconduct advisor. Students selected for this role complete extensive training before they can staff a 24-7 confidential helpline.
“We provide information to enable callers to make educated choices,” Smith said. “We are not there to guide people toward making a specific decision, but to offer support and resources through the process.”
In addition to volunteering, she is researching intimate partner conflict and masculinity for her psychology senior honors thesis, with Dr. Adam Stanaland serving as her faculty mentor. She created and administered a survey that ranked 403 men — half of whom identified as heterosexual and half as gay — using the Conformity to Masculinity Norms Inventory to measure individuals’ adherence to traditional masculine norms. She then tracked the men’s endorsements of different resolutions to a couple’s argument as described in four vignettes.
“Both straight and gay men strongly endorsed compromise as a resolution,” Smith said. “But they diverged in their support of the other three conflict resolutions. For example, a few straight men who believed men should have power over women endorsed physical or psychological aggression in resolving partner conflicts.”
With the support of a School of Arts and Sciences travel grant, Smith presented her research at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Convention in Denver in February.
Recently named a Jepson Scholar, she received a full scholarship to pursue a Master of Science in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford following her Richmond graduation. Eventually, she also plans to get a master’s in counseling.
“The first degree will help me evaluate the effect of specific public policies on the community and national level,” she said. “The second degree will prepare me to counsel people who have experienced trauma. A well-informed counselor who genuinely wants to help can make all the difference!"