Domestic violence, especially intimate partner violence (IPV) which is its most common form, is not a “private problem”. It’s a serious public health issue that threatens the safety, equality, and dignity of millions of women worldwide. In India, very few women reach out for help. Research shows that only about 13% seek any kind of support, and less than 1% approach formal services like healthcare, police, or legal aid. Most confide instead in friends, family, or neighbours, often only when the violence becomes unbearable.
First Step is a qualitative research and storytelling project by Faith Gonsalves supported by the Jeffrey Richardson Fellowship at Harvard Medical School (2024-2025). Co-designed with survivors, feminist organisations, and service providers in New Delhi, it explores how women disclose violence and seek help. The project aims to make it safer and easier for survivors to speak up and find support through this bilingual digital platform featuring illustrated videos, safety guides, and interactive tools.
To learn more, write to faithgonsalves.firststep@gmail.com.
Intimate partner violence refers to behaviours within a current or former intimate relationship that cause physical, sexual, or psychological harm. The World Health Organization (WHO) notes that this includes physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse, and controlling behaviours such as isolation or restricting access to money. Globally, nearly 1 in 3 women experience physical or sexual violence by a partner in their lifetime. IPV undermines health, safety, dignity, and freedom, with long-lasting consequences for both mental and physical well-being.
Globally, more than 640 million, 26% of those aged 15 and older, have experienced intimate partner violence (IPV). In India, IPV is the most common form of violence against women with more than 1 in 3 women reporting experiences of domestic violence during their lifetime. Beyond immediate harms such as injury or death, it is also a risk factor for several other serious health problems. These include increased risk of mental health problems such as depression and suicidality; poor birth outcomes and gynecological morbidities ; and increased risk of diseases like asthma or HIV . Over the last 30 years, research increasingly shows that IPV disproportionately affects women with lower social and economic status, immigrants, and ethnic minorities.
First Step is a qualitative research study and storytelling-based project developed Faith Gonsalves, supported by the 2024–2025 Jeffrey Richardson Fellowship at Harvard Medical School . It explores how survivors of IPV in New Delhi disclose violence and seek help.
It was co-designed with survivors, feminist organisations, and service providers to:
While community participation in research is increasing, survivors, especially women from lower socio-economic groups, immigrants, and minorities, are rarely seen as co-creators. First Step challenged this by using co-design methodologies to ensure survivor voices shaped outcomes.
This website presents a bilingual digital intervention (English and Hindi) with illustrated videos, safety planning guides, and interactive tools grounded in survivors’ lived realities.
First Step is designed for anyone impacted by intimate partner violence (IPV), and for those who may be the first people a survivor turns to for help. This includes women experiencing violence in relationships or marriage, but also friends, family members, neighbours, colleagues, or community members who want to understand how to respond with care and support.
The resource is also intended for educators, journalists, researchers, health professionals, and service providers who want accessible tools, survivor-informed insights, and real stories to guide conversations about IPV.
By offering bilingual content (English and Hindi), practical guides, and co-designed stories, First Step aims to reach a wide audience including women navigating difficult decisions about safety, to informal supporters trying to help, to professionals seeking to amplify survivor voices in their work.
First Step is not an emergency service and cannot provide direct crisis intervention. If you are in immediate danger, you should contact police, emergency helplines, or local crisis services listed in the resources page. What First Step does offer are survivor-informed stories, safety planning tools, and guidance on rights and options, so that women and their supporters can better understand IPV and prepare for next steps. It is a complementary resource, meant to build knowledge and support networks, not replace urgent care.
First Step is designed to be used at your own pace. Survivors of intimate partner violence may turn to it when they are unsure about what they are experiencing, need clarity on their rights, or want to explore safe options for support. You do not have to make any decisions right away, even simply learning more about IPV and available protections can be a powerful first step.
For friends, family members, or community members, the resource can help you recognise early signs of abuse and understand how to respond with empathy and care if someone discloses violence to you.
This site does not replace emergency services, but it provides stories, tools, and guides that are survivor-informed and bilingual (English and Hindi), to help people reflect, plan, and connect with support when and how it feels safe.
Most women in India experiencing intimate partner violence do not approach formal services like the police, healthcare, or legal aid. Instead, they turn first to friends, family members, or neighbours, and often only seek formal help when the violence becomes unbearable or life-threatening. By that time, the risks to their safety, health, and wellbeing are often far greater.
Focusing on early help-seeking means encouraging women to recognise harmful behaviours sooner, explore options before a crisis, and reach out to trusted people in their networks. Early support can reduce isolation, improve safety planning, and prevent violence from escalating.
It also means preparing communities, including the friends, relatives, colleagues, and neighbours who are most likely to receive a disclosure, to respond with empathy, care, and accurate information. Strengthening these informal networks is essential in contexts where formal systems can feel slow, unsafe, or out of reach.
Unlike many IPV resources that focus only on laws or formal services, First Step was co-designed with survivors and developed through qualitative research in New Delhi. It reflects the lived realities of women who often turn first to friends, family, or neighbours rather than formal systems. The resource is bilingual (English and Hindi), combines storytelling with practical guides, and is designed to support both survivors and the informal supporters they confide in. This makes it not just a legal or service directory, but a tool for awareness, empathy, and safer decision-making.
First Step / पहला कदम is built on evidence that when someone responds with care and support to a woman sharing her experience of intimate partner violence (IPV), it can help reduce harmful health effects such as depression, suicidal thoughts, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Positive, empathetic responses can also play a protective role against future abuse. On the other hand, negative or dismissive reactions have been shown to worsen survivors’ mental health outcomes. This underscores how crucial social support is in improving the wellbeing of women experiencing IPV.
This qualitative study aimed to understand women’s early experiences of seeking help including how they came to recognize and define their experiences of IPV, and how they connected with support systems and shared their stories with others, whether informally with friends or family, or formally with professionals and services. The insights gathered from this process directly informed the development of this resource.
The study was led by Faith Dharma Gonsalves as part of the Jeffrey Richardson Fellowship at Harvard Medical School, and implemented in collaboration with Shakti Shalini, Ideal Youth for Revolutionary Change (IYRC), and The YP Foundation, in New Delhi, India.
In addition to being reviewed and approved by the collaborating non-profits Shakti Shalini and IYRC, this study received ethical approval from the independent Institutional Review Board of Monk Prayogshala (Federalwide Assurance compliant under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, No. FWA00029694; IRB No. IRB00012595; provisionally recognised by the Department of Health Research, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, Registration No. EC/NEW/INST/2024/4473).
First Step was built using a co-design approach. This means creating solutions with communities rather than for them. Women with lived experience of intimate partner violence were involved as collaborators, helping ensure the resource is relevant, grounded, and impactful.
The project drew on trauma-informed design, service mapping, and feminist facilitation methods to prioritise accessibility, dignity, and survivor agency. These insights directly shaped the mixed-media website, which features illustrated videos, legal and safety planning guides, and interactive tools to support safer decision-making and connections to care.
In India, despite these serious risks, very few women reach out for help. Only about 13% of women seek any kind of help or support for IPV, and less than 1% seek help from formal services such as healthcare, law enforcement, or legal aid. Most women prefer to confide in informal supporters such as a friend, family member, or neighbour. It is only when the violence is perceived as intolerable and very severe, or in cases of emergency and suicide, that formal support from law enforcement, healthcare, or the criminal justice system is sought.
While factors like economic empowerment, laws that criminalise IPV, and access to legal mechanisms are important, they are not enough on their own to increase help-seeking. Deeply rooted patriarchal norms and ideas of male entitlement remain among the strongest predictors of people’s attitudes and behaviours. These norms shape whether IPV is seen as acceptable, if or how survivors can disclose it, and how communities respond. Here, education can play a vital role in influencing family, friends or wider community members’ willingness to recognize IPV and offer support.
Insights from the research highlight the need to prioritise violence prevention strategies that reflect the lived realities of women, while offering direction for designing interventions that support early help-seeking.
Insights on violence prevention
First, violence prevention is more than education about the types of violence. It must recognize the complex cultural contexts in which harmful or violent behaviours are considered normal. These everyday ways of showing “love” or “care” are in fact power and control tactics and mechanisms. This makes it harder to recognise these harmful behaviours early on or seek help.
Second, for most young people, marriage is seen as a new beginning, but rarely are its effects on women’s independence, choices, and daily lives discussed. Women often become extremely vulnerable to financial, physical and sexual violence after marriage. Encouraging couples to negotiate expectations before marriage on issues such as continuing education or work, staying connected to family, deciding when to have children, and pursuing personal goals, may help build more equal partnerships. At the very least, it may prevent women from being isolated and make it easier for them to seek help if needed.
Third, prevention cannot rest only on survivors. Patriarchal norms often suggest violence is acceptable and intervention is not. Effective prevention must empower communities not to look away. Supporting survivors can be simple in some cases, such as providing short-term comfort or practical help, but it is often a long-term process of navigating police or legal systems, arranging childcare, housing, employment, and access to healthcare. What feels safe and possible for a survivor may not always be easy for others to understand. Education that builds empathy, recognises trauma, and fosters a culture of collective care is therefore essential.
Insights for interventions that support early help-seeking behaviours
First, a major but addressable gap is the lack of awareness of available services. Crisis helplines, suicide prevention lines, and shelters exist but are poorly publicised, especially in regional languages.
Second, a trauma-informed approach requires reframing “leaving” as the only solution. Many survivors describe that “leaving is just the beginning.” For women, attempting to leave or file a police complaint can be the most dangerous moment. Safe exit takes planning, time, and often multiple attempts. Interventions must support survivors’ decision-making processes, presenting a realistic roadmap of challenges and available support, without discouraging action. Decision-making is rarely a single event: for some, it means planning for safety while staying; for others, preparing to leave or taking gradual steps when possible. Each path carries risks and requires strategies for safety planning, emotional resilience, and building networks of support.
Third, in a context where formal services like police, healthcare, or legal aid are often inadequate or even harmful, and where women strongly prefer informal support, there is a need to reimagine how family and community networks can respond. Interventions that enable informal supporters to act with empathy, consistency, and care are key to meaningful support.
Yes. The First Step project was developed as part of a qualitative research study under the 2024–2025 Jeffrey Richardson Fellowship at Harvard Medical School. To support transparency and further learning, a synthesis report summarising the research findings, insights, and recommendations, along with selected research tools such as interview and co-design guides will be made available upon request. Please write to faithgonsalves.firststep@gmail.com to request these.
These materials are intended for researchers, educators, journalists, and practitioners interested in participatory, trauma-informed, and feminist approaches to violence prevention. While sensitive data and participant information have been anonymised to protect privacy, the shared documents aim to help others build on the project’s methods and findings in ethical, community-centred ways.
While First Step focuses on women, IPV also affects men and other genders, whose experiences remain underrepresented in services and prevention efforts .
However, women face disproportionately severe outcomes: they are much more likely to experience serious injuries, coercive control, or be killed by male partners (World Health Organization, 2013) . For this reason, First Step centred on women’s earliest help-seeking challenges, while designing resources to increase agency and minimise distress.
First Step is not a comprehensive directory of services or a replacement for professional legal, medical, or counselling support. While it shares information on rights, safety, and options for help-seeking, it cannot capture the full diversity of women’s lived experiences across India, nor address the specific needs of every survivor. Access to services often depends on location, language, and local resources, and in many cases formal systems such as police, healthcare, or legal aid remain difficult to navigate or unsafe to rely on consistently.
The resource is also primarily focused on Delhi-based services and networks, which means some of the guidance may not directly apply to survivors in other parts of India. In addition, the stories and insights centre on the experiences of women, even though IPV affects people of all genders.
Finally, because First Step is a pilot project and exploratory study, it is limited by its scale: the insights are based on qualitative research with a smaller group of survivors and service providers, and may not represent all contexts.
Despite these limitations, the resource provides an important starting point: raising awareness, offering survivor-informed tools, and supporting safer decision-making.