Staff Profile: Diane Gout
"I want to contribute something positive to the research. We know the problems. Now, we need solutions."
Diane Gout began working in the field of violence against women as a rape crisis counselor and later as an undergraduate student in Fresno, CA. She once won "Intern of the Year" for dramatically increasing participation in support groups, counseling victims, facilitating a batterers' intervention group, and participating on a judges' roundtable.
In 1999, Diane moved to Maine, earned her master's in social work from the University of New England, and started working with the Muskie School's "Snapshot" project, now known as the Violence Against Women Act Measuring Effectiveness Initiative (VAWAMEI). "I really wanted to work on the issues facing victims and survivors of abuse and the policies that affect them," she said.
For over a decade, the VAWAMEI team has been conducting site visits, collecting data and providing technical assistance to discretionary and formula (STOP) grant programs managed and funded by the Office of the Violence Against Women (OVW) at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Since 1999, Diane and her co-workers have visited select OVW grantees in all 56 states and territories, including grantees in tribal jurisdictions. The data collected from grantees serves multiple purposes: monitoring individual grantees, providing information to grantees on their own grant-funded activities and accomplishments, conducting long-term trend analysis and planning, and reporting to Congress on the achievements of the grant programs funded by OVW.
For tribes, in particular, this is the first and, to date, only data collected that illustrates how tribes are individually and collectively addressing issues of violence against American Indian and Alaska Native victims and survivors in tribal communities. Over 200 tribes and tribal coalitions are included among the grantees.
For Diane, the discoveries weren't only professional. During one trip to a tribal reservation, she noted the similarities between some of the women and her own relatives. After calling a great aunt, she discovered that her maternal great grandparents were Native American. "It all began to make sense as to why I had such a pull to work with this population," she said, "I was drawn to their communication style—illustrating their lives and experiences through narratives or stories—and to their holistic, compassionate view of their community. In Native American cultures, when a person exhibits negative behavior, the priority is to restore that person back into a productive member of the community while holding them accountable, not to isolate them; the latter only happens as a last resort."
These experiences and the desire to further the field of knowledge motivated Diane to earn her Ph.D. in the Interdisciplinary Social Work and Sociology Program at Boston University. Focusing on intimate partner violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women, her dissertation was entitled "Cultural identity and familial relationships as protective factors against intimate partner violence among American Indian and Alaska Native mothers."
In 2010, she and colleagues negotiated a contract with Red Wind Consulting as the evaluators for a nationally coordinated domestic violence and sexual assault response initiative for Indian Health Services (IHS). The Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 provided $7.5M to support this national effort by IHS to address domestic violence and sexual assault within American Indian and Alaska Native communities. These efforts will include expanding outreach, increasing technical assistance, and providing training. Approximately 65 IHS facilities have received funding.
"This is a tremendous opportunity for me and Muskie," said Diane. "With the paucity of research relevant to these issues, this is a critical step in gaining a better understanding. I am very excited to be a part of a national project of this scope that will undoubtedly provide IHS, policy makers, and—most importantly—tribal communities with information to generate recommendations for strategies to build and strengthen effective responses to victims of domestic violence and sexual assault."