Jennifer Freyd, UO Department of Psychology

Psychology professor Jennifer Freyd’s paper “Exposure to Betrayal Trauma and Risks to the Well-Being of Girls and Women” is now available online in the Fall 2009 issue of CSWS Research Matters.

“Women are diagnosed with a host of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) more often than men,” Freyd writes. Her article explores the “whys.” Click here to access a PDF of Freyd’s article.

Freyd is the breakthrough researcher who developed Betrayal Trauma Theory. She is the author of the award-winning book Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse (1996) and numerous other publications. See her website for more information. CSWS has supported Freyd’s work through faculty research grants.

2009 Annual Review

It’s been more than 15 years since CSWS published a yearly review. Our 2009 version, available October 1, had a limited printrun but is also available as a PDF.

Highlights of this issue include interviews with Joan Acker, professor emerita, Department of Sociology, and Scott Coltrane, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and a look at the scholarship of CSWS director Carol Stabile; CLLAS director Lynn Stephen; Physiology Department head Christopher Minson; and many others.

From “Being a Part of Radical Change: An Interview with Joan Acker”

Q: You got your Ph.D. at the UO?

Yes. I came here partly to get my Ph.D. I had decided that I was going to leave social work and go into sociology when we were living down in California. Actually, we were living in Silicon Valley, and it was a wasteland of housing tracts at the time and I couldn’t stand it. So I inquired at Stanford about applying to go into the sociology department as a graduate student. The head of the department told me there was no point in me even filling out an application because I was too old and I was a woman. This was in the 1950s.

For more of this interview, see the 2009 CSWS Annual Review.

A new online resource lists social service providers who have the capacity to communicate with Spanish-speaking clients with limited command of English. The “Directory of Bilingual Social Services” for the Eugene-Springfield community is located here on the website of the University of Oregon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS).

The directory is primarily intended for providers—although sections of the directory have been translated to Spanish, the listings themselves have not. By phoning local providers, members of the CSWS Research Interest Group “Becoming Bicultural: Latino Immigrant Mothers Raising American Children” found that currently 123 agencies and organizations have bilingual capacity to communicate with Spanish-speaking clients with social service needs.

“This shows a substantive improvement during the decade,” co-coordinator Marcela Mendoza said. “However, Centro Latino Americano in Eugene is still the only organization with culturally competent, fully bilingual staff. On a different note, all the social service agencies that we called in Springfield are bilingual, but not all the agencies that we called in Eugene have the same capacity.”

This directory is an outcome of a series of three workshops for Latino parents that the research group organized and presented at Springfield High School in February 2009.  At the end of the third workshop, they distributed a list of bilingual social services in our community. The parents in attendance expressed the need to (a) get a more comprehensive listing, and (b) make local service providers aware of the bilingual services that are “out there” to help Spanish-speaking clients with limited command of English.