RESEARCH OVERVIEW

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Sade Eastmond's research operates as a unified, interdisciplinary inquiry into the neurological, structural, and systemic determinants of community health and safety across the urban landscape of New York City. Across four active areas of investigation, her research draws upon cognitive behavioral neuroscience as its epistemological framework, ethnography and autoethnography as its primary methodological instruments, and photojournalism as a core apparatus of documentary evidence production.

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This body of scholarship interrogates the question: by what neurological and behavioral mechanisms does the human brain (conditioned through prolonged danger, exposure to structural inequity, cultural formation, and chronic trauma) mediate the lived experiences and survival strategies of women embedded within complex urban communities (Eastmond, 2024)? The research is simultaneously biological, sociological, anthropological, and political in its analytical scope. It does not treat these disciplinary orientations as parallel tracks requiring separate treatment. It treats them as entangled, as forces whose interaction demands an integrated, neuroscientifically informed scholarly response.

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EPISTEMOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK

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Cognitive Behavioral Neuroscience

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The cognitive behavioral neuroscientific framework functions as the intellectual infrastructure beneath every dimension of this research enterprise. By interrogating how neurological processes interact with behavioral patterns, environmental conditions, and systemic social arrangements, this orienting lens reorients the central problematic of community health inquiry, displacing the descriptive question of what is happening to communities in favor of the mechanistic question of why.

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At the most fundamental biological level, chronic exposure to structural inequity, spatial displacement, and systemic neglect does not merely alter circumstance. It rewires cognition, reconfigures behavioral architecture, and compounds its neurological effects across individuals, family units, and successive generations (Yehuda et al., 2016; Valera et al., 2017). This orientation is precisely what distinguishes this scholarship from conventional public health and social science paradigms. Where aggregate data reveals disparity, the neuroscientific framework illuminates mechanisms. Where policy discourse identifies a problem, this research excavates the neurological and behavioral infrastructure sustaining it.

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METHODOLOGY

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Ethnography and Autoethnography Research

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As a Research Scientist, Sade Eastmond conducts her research through two deeply intentional and complementary methodological practices that together ensure her scholarship never loses sight of the human beings at its center.

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Ethnography Research

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Through ethnographic fieldwork, Eastmond embeds herself within the communities, institutions, streets, and urban landscapes of New York City as a trained observer oriented by a set of research problematics: How do we produce safety within New York City? What structural transformations are required? What policy and governance frameworks demand reformation, and in whose institutional interest do existing configurations operate? These questions discipline her field presence, shaping what she observes, what she documents, and how she interprets the granular textures of daily life that aggregate data is structurally incapable of capturing. Ethnography, within Eastmond's methodological framework, is not passive observation. It is a disciplined, scientifically trained, and politically conscious act of bearing rigorous scholarly witness to the conditions that formal research paradigms too frequently abstract into numbers, evacuating their human weight in the process (Geertz, 1973).

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Autoethnography Research

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Through autoethnography, Eastmond positions her own embodied experience navigating New York City's urban systems as a legitimate, analytically rigorous, and irreplaceable source of primary scholarly insight. Every personal encounter with those systems is approached through a single orienting analytical question: what can this experience illuminate about the structural conditions it reflects? That question performs a critical epistemological transformation, converting the biographical into the structural, the personal into the political, and lived experience into primary source material of genuine scholarly consequence (Ellis et al., 2011).

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Her identity as a researcher, and community member actively navigating the spatial environments, policy frameworks, and health systems she simultaneously investigates is not incidental to her scholarly contributions. It is constitutive of their analytical depth and their capacity to produce knowledge that formal methods operating from an external position cannot access. Together, ethnography and autoethnography form a methodological foundation that keeps Eastmond's scholarship epistemologically grounded in the irreducible complexity of human experience, ensuring that every finding produced carries the weight of both analytical precision and genuine human understanding in equal measure.

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RESEARCH AREAS

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I. PEOPLE

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Demographic Composition and Migration Patterns

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This area of investigation examines how population movement, cultural displacement, and the continuous reconstitution of community identity define and redefine the social fabric of New York City's five boroughs. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and photojournalistic documentation conducted across the city's most rapidly transforming neighborhoods, this research maps the lived human experience of demographic shift with both quantitative rigor and qualitative depth, resisting the reductive tendencies of purely statistical approaches to population analysis.

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Applied through the cognitive behavioral neuroscientific framework, this investigative area interrogates how the phenomenological experience of migration, cultural destabilization, and forced displacement produces measurable effects upon neurological functioning and behavioral health at both the individual and collective community level. The resulting findings contribute to a theoretically significant reconceptualization of the relationship between demographic forces and mental and behavioral health outcomes, positioning these not as parallel phenomena unfolding along separate analytical tracks but as deeply entangled processes whose interaction demands an integrated, neuroscientifically informed scholarly response (Eastmond, 2024).

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New York City is home to approximately 8.48 million residents, 52% of whom are female, approximately 4.41 million women across the five boroughs (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024). Brooklyn is the most populous borough at 2.62 million, followed by Queens at 2.31 million, Manhattan at 1.66 million, the Bronx at 1.38 million, and Staten Island at 500,000 (NYC Department of City Planning, 2025). The city's racial and ethnic composition reflects extraordinary diversity: 31.3% White non-Hispanic, 28.4% Hispanic or Latino, 20.8% Black or African American, and 15.6% Asian (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024). Approximately 37% of residents (3.1 million people) are foreign-born, comprising 45% of the city's workforce (NYC Department of City Planning, 2025).

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This demographic complexity is inseparable from the conditions of women's safety. Immigrant women face compounding vulnerabilities: language barriers, fear of deportation, limited legal status restricting access to employment and benefits, and exploitation by both employers and intimate partners (New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance [OTDA], 2024). Following the arrival of over 100,000 Venezuelan asylum seekers after 2022 (with approximately 68,000 sheltered at peak), reports emerged in 2024 of asylum-seeker women in Queens shelters being recruited into sex trafficking (CBS New York, 2024). New York State confirmed 409 trafficking victims in 2024 (OTDA, 2024).

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Methods: Ethnography, Autoethnography, Photojournalism, Demographic Analysis

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II. PROPERTIES

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Property Values, Ownership Patterns, and Land Use

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This research applies rigorous analytical scrutiny to the economic and geographic forces governing property values, ownership distributions, and land use configurations across New York State. It maps the precise intersections at which financial systems, physical geography, and municipal policy converge with the lived realities of communities on the ground, attending with particular precision to how those intersections generate or deepen the structural conditions of displacement, disinvestment, and systemic inequity.

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Examined through the cognitive behavioral neuroscientific lens, this investigative area produces empirically grounded analysis of how the chronic psychosocial instability produced by housing insecurity, neighborhood disinvestment, and involuntary displacement manifests as measurable neurological and behavioral stress within affected community populations (McEwen & Stellar, 1993; Schulz et al., 2012). Photojournalistic field documentation generates primary visual evidence of the physical and human landscapes these economic forces produce, ensuring that the materiality of spatial inequity remains visible and analytically legible within the scholarly record (Eastmond, 2024).

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Brooklyn's median monthly rent increased approximately 34% between 2006 and the early 2020s, with market rents climbing an additional 17% above pre-pandemic levels by 2024 (NYU Furman Center, 2024). Harlem's ZIP code 10039 saw home values rise 356% between 2000 and 2016, from $89,572 to $408,654 (RentCafe, 2018). Brooklyn evictions surged from 62 in 2021 during the moratorium to over 3,500 by 2023–2024, concentrated in East New York, East Flatbush, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Crown Heights, neighborhoods with high proportions of Black and Latina residents (Gothamist, 2024). The UC-Berkeley Urban Displacement Project found that over one-third of low-income households in the New York metropolitan area lived in neighborhoods at risk of displacement or gentrification, comprising 24% of census tracts (Chapple et al., 2019).

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The intersection of rising housing costs and gender-based violence creates a devastating trap. A 2019 NYC Comptroller report found domestic violence accounted for 41% of families entering the Department of Homeless Services shelter system in FY2018 (a 44% increase in five years), comprising over 4,500 women and 7,000 children (NYC Comptroller, 2019). By 2023, conditions had worsened: 18% fewer families left domestic violence shelters for permanent housing compared to 2018, and roughly half of the 2,200 families who left emergency domestic violence shelters ended up in another shelter (Gothamist, 2024). Only approximately 200 families (9%) secured permanent homes (Gothamist, 2024). Ninety-four percent of domestic violence survivors report economic abuse by their perpetrators, further constraining financial independence (NYC ENDGBV, 2024).

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Methods: Spatial and Economic Analysis, Ethnographic Fieldwork, Photojournalism, Policy Review

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III. POLICIES

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Public Health Policy and Municipal Legislation

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This research interrogates the municipal frameworks, public health legislation, and policy structures governing urban life in New York City, with concentrated analytical attention directed toward the systems affecting women, children, and structurally vulnerable populations navigating inequitable urban environments. Policy, within this body of scholarship, is never approached as abstract governance existing at a remove from human experience. It is theorized and examined as the architectural determinant of the physical, cognitive, and behavioral conditions of community life, shaping access to care, safety, resources, and opportunity at every scalar level from the individual body to the neighborhood to the borough.

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New York City has enacted a substantial legislative architecture in response to gender-based violence. The Mayor's Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence (ENDGBV), established in 2001 by the NYC Charter and expanded by Executive Order 36 in 2018, operates five Family Justice Centers (one per borough) that served 15,207 clients across 57,656 visits in 2024 (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). In January 2024, the Adams administration launched Women Forward NYC with over $43 million in new and ongoing investments across 43 commitments spanning economic mobility, health, and safety, serving over 300,000 New Yorkers in its first year (NYC Mayor's Office, 2025). NYC also became the first U.S. city to join UN Women's Safe Cities Global Initiative, a recognition of the structural dimensions of urban women's safety (NYC Office of International Affairs, 2024).

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Autoethnographic inquiry occupies a particularly central methodological position within this research area. Eastmond's own navigation of New York City's urban systems as a woman, scholar, and community member generates a critical analytical layer that formal policy analysis operating from an external vantage point is structurally incapable of producing (Ellis et al., 2011). Legislative texts are examined in direct dialectical relationship with lived experience, and photojournalistic documentation situates policy outcomes within the physical and human environments they materially govern.

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Methods: Policy and Legislative Analysis, Autoethnography, Ethnography, Photojournalism

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IV. WOMEN'S SAFETY & WELLBEING

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This research synthesizes findings across all three preceding investigative areas into a cohesive, applied scholarly examination of women's safety and wellbeing within New York City. It interrogates how demographic instability, economic displacement, and inadequate policy frameworks converge to produce measurable health disparities across the city's most underserved communities, applying the cognitive behavioral neuroscientific framework to elucidate how those disparities manifest not only in aggregate health outcomes but in the neurological and behavioral realities of the individuals and communities bearing their weight (Eastmond, 2024).

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In 2022, after pandemic-era aid expired, 23% of adults and 25% of children in New York City lived in poverty, and more than 4.6 million New Yorkers (56% of the city) had incomes below 200% of the federal poverty line (Robin Hood Foundation & Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy, 2024). The Bronx carried the highest poverty rate at 23% and the highest material hardship rate at 35%, figures that map directly onto its disproportionate rates of sexual violence and domestic homicide (Robin Hood Foundation & Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy, 2024; NYC ENDGBV, 2024).

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As of January 2026, approximately 86,000 individuals resided in NYC Department of Homeless Services shelters, including 6,950 single adult women and an estimated 30,000 or more women and girls when accounting for family shelters where women are overwhelmingly heads of household (NYC Department of Homeless Services, 2026). During 2024–2025, 156,000 schoolchildren (one in eight city students) experienced homelessness (Coalition for the Homeless, 2025). Racial disparities within the shelter system are extreme: 56% of shelter heads of household are Black and 32% are Hispanic, while only 7% are White (Coalition for the Homeless, 2025).

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This area of inquiry is directly informed by Eastmond's clinical research credentialing, community health training, and sustained field presence, ensuring that its findings maintain both the scholarly integrity demanded by rigorous academic standards and the practical applicability necessary for meaningful intervention design. The governing ambition of this research is not descriptive documentation alone. It is the production of scholarship precise enough to inform evidence-based intervention, rigorous enough to withstand scholarly scrutiny, and epistemologically grounded enough to honor the full complexity of the communities upon which it is built (Eastmond, 2024).

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Methods: Ethnography, Autoethnography, Photojournalism, Clinical Research Frameworks, Community Health Analysis

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WOMEN'S SAFETY IN NEW YORK CITY

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Sex Crimes and Rape

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The data is not abstract. It is boroughs, precincts, ages, races, and times of night. According to the NYC Mayor's Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence 2024 Snapshot, of 565,118 total criminal complaints citywide, 9,953 were sex crimes and 1,341 were rapes (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). All rapes were classified as felonies. Seventy-eight percent of sex crimes were misdemeanors. Nearly half of all victims (47%) were females aged 24 or younger, and 36% of sex crime victims were under 18 (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). Among rape victims, Black women represented the largest share at 35.1%, followed by White Hispanic women at 28.7% (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). These are not statistics. They are women. They are girls.

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The Bronx recorded the highest population-adjusted rates for both rape at 24.0 per 100,000 and sex crimes at 130.6 per 100,000, despite comprising only 16.3% of the city's population (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). The top precincts for combined sex crime and rape complaints were the 103rd in Jamaica and Hollis, Queens with 492 complaints; the 110th in Corona and Elmhurst, Queens with 400; and the 40th in the South Bronx with 291 (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). A critical contextual note: New York's Rape is Rape Act, signed by Governor Hochul in January 2024 with provisions taking effect September 1, 2024, expanded the legal definition of rape to include any nonconsensual vaginal, anal, or oral sexual contact. This reclassification contributed to an 18.7% year-over-year increase in reported rapes, an expansion of legal recognition that reflects not an increase in harm, but a more complete accounting of it (NYC ENDGBV, 2024).

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Location data reveal that 77.5% of rapes and 64% of sex crimes occurred in residential settings (apartments, private homes, and public housing), while 483 sex crimes occurred in the subway system and 288 in homeless shelters (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). Most complaints peaked between midnight and 1:00 AM. The home, the transit system, the shelter (every space a woman might reasonably expect to be safe) is represented in these numbers.

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Domestic Violence

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The NYPD recorded 249,077 Domestic Incident Reports in 2024: 116,051 intimate partner-related, 92,884 family-related, and 40,142 of unknown relationship type (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). There were 66 domestic violence homicides in 2024, 33 intimate partner and 33 family-related. Over the decade from 2014 to 2023, 612 domestic violence homicides accounted for 16.5% of all NYC homicides, an annual average of 61 deaths (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). Black females are disproportionately represented among intimate partner homicide victims, a disparity that exceeds their approximately 21% share of the city's population (NYC ENDGBV, 2024).

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Between 2022 and 2023, intimate partner homicides increased approximately 30% citywide, with Brooklyn recording a 225% spike (Public News Service, 2024). According to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, domestic violence felony assaults account for at least 40% of the citywide increase in felony assaults (Koch Law, PLLC, 2025). These numbers do not emerge from nowhere. They emerge from the neurological, structural, and systemic conditions that this research is designed to excavate.

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Street Harassment

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The Cornell University and Hollaback survey of 16,600 respondents found that 85% of U.S. women experienced street harassment before age 17 and 67% before age 14 (Stop Street Harassment, 2014). Among 110 NYC-based social service providers surveyed, 86% had received reports of street harassment from clients (Fairspace, 2023). ENDGBV established a Street Harassment Prevention Advisory Board, which launched a citywide survey in September 2023 to better quantify prevalence (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). Street harassment is not a minor inconvenience. It is the daily, ambient enforcement of women's subordinate claim to public space, and its neurological effects (accumulated across a lifetime) are indistinguishable from those of more formally recognized forms of violence (Eastmond, 2024).

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HOW VIOLENCE RESHAPES THE BRAIN

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Traumatic Brain Injury as the Hidden Epidemic

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Research over the past two decades has established that intimate partner violence produces extensive neurological damage, much of it invisible to the systems designed to identify and respond to it. Nearly three-quarters of domestic violence survivors sustain traumatic brain injuries, most of which go undiagnosed and unreported (Valera & Berenbaum, 2003). Dr. Eve Valera of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital estimates approximately 1.6 million brain injuries occur annually among domestic abuse survivors in the United States, a number eleven to twelve times greater than traumatic brain injuries among military personnel and athletes combined (Valera et al., 2019).

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Valera's pioneering neuroimaging research was the first to systematically examine brain injury in intimate partner violence-exposed women using resting-state fMRI (Valera et al., 2017). In a sample of 20 women recruited from shelters, traumatic brain injury severity correlated with loss of functional connectivity between brain regions implicated in traumatic brain injury, and this disrupted connectivity correlated with deficits in memory and learning. Her subsequent work documented white matter abnormalities using diffusion MRI (Valera et al., 2019). Critically, 64% of community-dwelling women who experienced intimate partner violence (not only those in shelters) reported partner-inflicted brain injuries.

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A landmark 2023 brain autopsy study at Mount Sinai examined 14 brains from women who experienced intimate partner violence, obtained through the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner (Dams-O'Connor et al., 2023). All 14 showed traumatic brain injury stigmata. However, unlike the chronic traumatic encephalopathy found in male athletes, these women showed a distinct pattern: substantial vascular and white matter pathology resembling stroke-like damage, evidence of disrupted blood flow from a combination of repetitive head impacts, non-fatal strangulation, and shaking. Half had epilepsy; cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease were common comorbidities (Dams-O'Connor et al., 2023). The neurological record of intimate partner violence is written into the brain itself, and it is a record of damage that current clinical, legal, and policy systems are almost entirely unequipped to read.

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Neurobiology and the Epigenetic Transmission of Harm

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Dr. Rachel Yehuda at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine has demonstrated that post-traumatic stress disorder produces a paradoxical cortisol profile: trauma survivors with PTSD show higher noradrenaline but lower cortisol levels, with enhanced glucocorticoid receptor sensitivity representing an adaptive recalibration of the stress system (Yehuda et al., 2015). Her groundbreaking work on epigenetic transmission showed that Holocaust survivors and their offspring had measurable differences in methylation of the FKBP5 gene, with an inverse correlation between parent and offspring cortisol reactivity (Yehuda et al., 2016).

 

Separate research demonstrated parallel epigenetic alterations in the NR3C1 glucocorticoid receptor gene among offspring of trauma-exposed parents (Yehuda et al., 2014). Infants born to mothers pregnant during the September 11 attacks showed similarly low cortisol when maternal PTSD was present, suggesting in utero epigenetic programming, a finding with profound implications for understanding how the violence experienced by women in New York City reverberates into the next generation (Yehuda et al., 2005). Importantly, Yehuda's team has shown these epigenetic changes are reversible through psychotherapy, a finding that locates hope not in passive resignation to biology, but in the proven power of intervention (Yehuda et al., 2016).

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Neuroimaging meta-analyses of adults with Adverse Childhood Experiences document amygdala hyperactivation, hippocampal volume reduction most susceptible to sexual abuse between ages 3 and 5, and reduced gray matter in the prefrontal cortex (Teicher & Samson, 2016). Girls show weaker prefrontal cortex–amygdala neural connections, which may explain why women are twice as likely as men to develop mood disorders (Lebron-Milad & Milad, 2012). The dose-response relationship is stark: an ACE score of 4 or more increases the odds of depression 4.6-fold (Felitti et al., 1998), while an ACE score of 6 or more is associated with a reduction in life expectancy of approximately 20 years (Brown et al., 2009).

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Allostatic Load, Weathering, and Structural Inequity

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The concept of allostatic load (cumulative physiological dysregulation from chronic stress) provides a mechanistic bridge between structural inequity and health outcomes (McEwen & Stellar, 1993). The Study of Women's Health Across the Nation, with a sample of 1,932 midlife women, found allostatic load increased approximately 2% per year, with African American race, low income, and older age as significant predictors (Bromberger et al., 2017). Schulz et al. (2012), in a multilevel analysis of 919 participants, demonstrated that neighborhood poverty was positively associated with allostatic load independent of household poverty, mediated by self-reported neighborhood environmental stress. Geronimus's weathering hypothesis posits that Black Americans accumulate biological stress faster than White Americans, a finding consistent with the disproportionate violence burden on Black women in New York City, where they are killed by intimate partners at rates far exceeding their share of the population (Geronimus et al., 2006; NYC ENDGBV, 2024).

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This is the neuroscientific argument that underlies every dimension of this case study: the violence that women in New York City experience is not merely social. It is biological. It is written into the architecture of the brain, the structure of white matter, the methylation of genes, and the cortisol profiles of children not yet born. Understanding it as such does not diminish its social and political dimensions. It amplifies the urgency of addressing them (Eastmond, 2024).

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MUNICIPAL POLICY & WOMEN'S SAFETY

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Women Forward NYC & the Commission on Gender Equity

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The Adams administration launched Women Forward NYC in January 2024 with over $43 million in new and ongoing investments across 43 commitments spanning economic mobility, health, and safety (NYC Mayor's Office, 2025). First-year results reported all 43 commitments launched or completed, serving over 300,000 New Yorkers (NYC Mayor's Office, 2025). The initiative's 2030 goals include reducing felony domestic violence assaults by 25%, reducing homicides involving women victims by 30%, and closing the gender pay gap. The NYC Commission on Gender Equity, established in 2015 under Local Law 67 and now governed by Local Law 45 of 2020, advises the Mayor and City Council on strategies to mitigate gender-based inequities across employment, housing, health, and public safety (NYC Commission on Gender Equity, 2024).

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ENDGBV & the Family Justice Center Network

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The Mayor's Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, established by NYC Charter in 2001 and expanded by Executive Order 36 in 2018, operates five Family Justice Centers (one per borough) providing integrated civil legal, criminal justice, economic empowerment, health, and social services under one roof (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). In 2024, these centers served 15,207 clients across 57,656 visits (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). Key programs include the Healthy Relationship Training Academy for ages 13 to 24, the Home+ Program providing pendant alarms, lock changes, and flexible funding to keep survivors housed, and mental health services reaching 424 clients through 2,898 visits in 2024 (NYC ENDGBV, 2024).

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KEY LEGISLATIVE FRAMEWORKS

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New York's Enough is Enough Act, signed in July 2015 under Article 129-B of the New York State Education Law, requires all colleges and universities statewide to implement uniform policies including affirmative consent definitions, amnesty provisions, and biennial climate assessments, backed by $4.5 million for rape crisis centers (New York State Senate, 2015). NYC's Paid Safe Leave Law, effective May 2018, was the nation's first to include human trafficking survivors, covering nearly 3 million workers with up to 56 hours of paid leave for safety planning, court appearances, and relocation (NYC Mayor's Office, 2018). The Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Act, reflected in Chapter 9 of the NYC Administrative Code, allows civil lawsuits against perpetrators; in January 2026, the City Council overrode a mayoral veto to reopen its lookback window for 18 months from March 2026 through March 2027, with approximately 580 cases already filed (NYC Council, 2025). NYC also became the first U.S. city to join UN Women's Safe Cities Global Initiative (NYC Office of International Affairs, 2024).

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GENTRIFICATION & DISPLACEMENT

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The Housing Crisis as a Women's Safety Crisis

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The intersection of rising housing costs and gender-based violence creates a devastating trap from which thousands of New York City women cannot escape. Domestic violence accounted for 41% of families entering the DHS shelter system in FY2018 (a 44% increase over five years) comprising over 4,500 women and 7,000 children (NYC Comptroller, 2019). By 2023, conditions had deteriorated further: 18% fewer families transitioned from domestic violence shelters to permanent housing compared to 2018, and roughly half of the 2,200 families who departed emergency domestic violence shelters entered another shelter (Gothamist, 2024). Only approximately 200 families (9%) secured permanent homes (Gothamist, 2024).

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Ninety-four percent of domestic violence survivors report economic abuse by their perpetrators (NYC ENDGBV, 2024). Financial control is a fundamental dimension of intimate partner violence, the deliberate destruction of a woman's economic independence designed to ensure that leaving becomes impossible. When that economic coercion intersects with a housing market in which Brooklyn median rents have increased approximately 34% since 2006 and in which evictions climbed from 62 in 2021 to over 3,500 in 2023–2024 in Brooklyn alone (NYU Furman Center, 2024; Gothamist, 2024), the impossibility becomes structural rather than merely personal.

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The Displacement of Safety

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When lower-income residents are displaced from gentrifying neighborhoods, they tend to move to lower-income neighborhoods with worse quality-of-life indicators (NYU Furman Center, 2024). This pattern severs connections to established domestic violence services, legal assistance, culturally specific programming, and community-based safety networks. It forces women who are already navigating the most dangerous periods of their lives (the period immediately following separation from an abusive partner is statistically the most lethal) into unfamiliar environments without the social infrastructure that makes survival possible (NYC ENDGBV, 2024; NYC Comptroller, 2019).

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UC-Berkeley's Urban Displacement Project found that over one-third of low-income households in the New York metropolitan area lived in neighborhoods at risk of displacement or gentrification (Chapple et al., 2019). East Harlem, where only 8% of privately-owned units are owner-occupied, half of rental households are rent-burdened, and 30% of residents live in NYCHA housing, represents a particularly acute case of converging structural vulnerability (RentCafe, 2018). The Adams administration launched a pilot in 2024 with New Destiny Housing to help 100 domestic violence survivors with children find permanent housing and opened a deeply affordable housing site for women-led households in March 2025, necessary steps that remain insufficient against the scale of the crisis (NYC Mayor's Office, 2025).

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EVIDENCE-BASED INTERVENTIONS

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Self-Defense Resistance Training

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The evidence base for women's safety programming is stronger than public discourse commonly recognizes, and the magnitude of the effects documented in rigorous trials demands significantly more investment than current funding levels reflect. The strongest evidence comes from the Enhanced Assess, Acknowledge, Act program (also known as Flip the Script), evaluated in a landmark randomized controlled trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine(Senn et al., 2015). Among 893 first-year university women randomized across three Canadian universities, the 12-hour program produced a 46% reduction in completed rape, a 63% reduction in attempted rape, a 36% reduction in attempted coercion, and a 34% reduction in non-consensual sexual contact, with results maintained for at least two years (Senn et al., 2015). The number needed to treat was just 22 women to prevent one additional rape.

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Real-world implementation across Canadian universities achieved 90.7% fidelity (Senn et al., 2021). A Canadian Institutes of Health Research-funded trial is now testing an internet-delivered adaptation at four sites in Canada and the United States (Senn, 2024). Empowerment self-defense programs more broadly show consistent positive outcomes. Hollander and Cunningham (2020), in a study of a nine-hour community-based empowerment self-defense course for women aged 18 to 77, found significantly less sexual assault at one-year follow-up, with greater self-efficacy and less self-silencing. A 2023 descriptive review of empowerment self-defense intervention outcomes across multiple studies found consistent evidence of improvements across physical competence, psychological confidence, and risk reduction (Decker et al., 2023).

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Bystander Intervention at Scale

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The Green Dot bystander intervention program, developed by Dr. Dorothy Edwards and evaluated by Coker and colleagues at the University of Kentucky in a 26-school cluster randomized controlled trial, demonstrated significant reductions in sexual violence perpetration and total violence perpetration at four-year follow-up (Coker et al., 2017). A meta-analysis of the Bringing in the Bystander program found significant positive pooled effects across attitudes, efficacy, and intentions from 14 evaluations (Bouchard et al., 2023). These findings establish that bystander intervention at the community level produces measurable, durable, population-level reductions in violence, effects that justify substantial investment in scale.

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NYC-Based Organizations

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The Center for Anti-Violence Education, founded in 1974 in Brooklyn, created the national Action for Safety curriculum reaching over 21,000 girls and trained more than 4,000 New Yorkers in bystander intervention through its UpStander Project (Center for Anti-Violence Education, 2024). Girls for Gender Equity operates the Sisters in Strength program for community organizing by girls of color, serves as fiscal sponsor of the 'me too' movement, and co-created the NYC Young Women's Initiative (Girls for Gender Equity, 2024). These organizations demonstrate that evidence-based, community-centered safety programming is not a theoretical aspiration in New York City. It is already being built. The question is whether it will receive the sustained institutional investment its evidence demands.

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GLOBAL & NATIONAL

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Violence Against Women Globally

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The World Health Organization's 2023 prevalence estimates found that 840 million women (one in three women aged 15 and older worldwide) have experienced physical or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetimes (World Health Organization, 2025). An estimated 316 million women (11% of ever-partnered women) experienced such violence in the past 12 months (World Health Organization, 2025). Progress has been glacially slow: only a 0.2% annual decline over two decades (World Health Organization, 2025). Globally, 38% of all murders of women are committed by intimate partners, and approximately 137 women and girls are killed by a family member every day (UNODC & UN Women, 2024).

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The United States in Comparative Perspective

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The CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey found that 47.3% of U.S. women have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner across their lifetimes (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022). Racial disparities are severe: lifetime intimate partner violence prevalence reaches 63.8% among multiracial women, 57.7% among American Indian and Alaska Native women, and 53.6% among non-Hispanic Black women (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022). Approximately 2.5 women are killed per day by an intimate partner in the United States (Violence Policy Center, 2023). The United States accounts for 70% of all female homicide cases among 25 populous high-income countries and 92% of women killed by guns in high-income countries (Hemenway et al., 2002; Violence Policy Center, 2023).

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The per-victim lifetime cost of intimate partner violence is estimated at $103,767 for female victims, yielding a total U.S. lifetime economic burden of $3.6 trillion (Peterson et al., 2018). Survivors lose 8 million days of paid work annually, and 21% to 60% lose their jobs due to abuse (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022). ACE-related health consequences cost an estimated $14.1 trillion annually (Bellis et al., 2019). Violence against women is not a social concern existing at the periphery of economic and public health policy. It is one of the costliest and most consequential public health crises of our time—and it demands a response whose scale matches its consequences.

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ABOUT SAFE BY SADÉ

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Safe by Sadé is an interdisciplinary women's safety initiative designed to equip women and girls with the critical skills, knowledge, and situational awareness necessary to navigate contemporary social, cultural, and urban environments (Eastmond, 2024). Grounded in research across psychology, anthropology, social science, and behavioral studies, Safe by Sadé integrates self-defense education, boundary-setting frameworks, and practical safety strategies within a trauma-informed and community-centered model.

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This initiative is not a response to a single event or a single community. It is the product of years of rigorous academic inquiry, independent research, ethnographic fieldwork, and direct community engagement conducted by Sade Eastmond across the urban landscape of New York City. Every framework Safe by Sadé employs, every curriculum it develops, and every space it creates is rooted in evidence, informed by neuroscience, and built around the real, documented, and deeply human experiences of the women it exists to serve (Eastmond, 2024).

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Safe by Sadé was founded on the conviction that safety is not a privilege to be distributed unevenly across lines of race, class, geography, and access. It is a right. And it is one that education, research, and community have the power to protect and defend.

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PROGRAMMING DIMENSIONS

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Five evidence-based programming dimensions:

1. Self-defense training grounded in evidence-informed physical and behavioral principles, designed to build not only physical confidence and practical preparedness but the embodied sense of agency that comes from knowing one's own capacity to protect oneself. Physical competence and psychological confidence are developed together because they are inseparable (Senn et al., 2015; Hollander & Cunningham, 2020).

2. Safety and situational awareness education rooted in cognitive and social psychology, teaching women and girls to read environments, recognize behavioral and situational risk indicators, and respond with clarity, precision, and calm. Awareness, in this framework, is not fear. It is intelligence in action (Eastmond, 2024).

3. Life skills and boundary-setting tools that strengthen relational and emotional intelligence, equipping women with the internal frameworks necessary to identify, communicate, and enforce boundaries across personal, professional, and social relationships. Boundaries are safety infrastructure. Safe by Sadé treats them as such (Eastmond, 2024).

4. Trauma-informed methodologies that support recovery, resilience, and nervous system regulation, ensuring that healing and preparedness are never treated as separate processes. For women who carry the weight of previous harm, this dimension of programming acknowledges what they have survived while building the capacity to move forward with greater safety and stability (Yehuda et al., 2016).

5. Community-based spaces that center support, empowerment, and collective protection. Safety is not only an individual practice. It is produced in relationship, sustained in community, and most powerful when it is shared (Eastmond, 2024).

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ABOUT SADE

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Sade Eastmond holds a Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy and Psychology with a concentrated minor in Political Science, a foundational academic preparation that established the epistemological groundwork for her subsequent scholarly trajectory. She is enrolled in her final semester as a Master's Candidate at the City University of New York, pursuing advanced specialization in Social Science with a concentration in Anthropology and Applied Interdisciplinary Research. Recognized as a distinguished Honors scholar in sociology, Eastmond was conferred a lifetime membership in Alpha Kappa Delta, the International Sociology Honor Society—a distinction reserved for scholars demonstrating exceptional contributions to sociological inquiry and academic rigor.

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Her clinical and scientific credentialing reflects an equally disciplined formation. Eastmond holds multiple certifications in Clinical Research and has completed comprehensive advanced training through the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative, with specialization in Responsible Conduct of Research, Social and Behavioral Research Best Practices, and General Data Protection Regulation compliance frameworks. This credentialing infrastructure situates her scholarly output within the highest standards of ethical governance, methodological accountability, and regulatory compliance operative within contemporary scientific research communities.

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Functioning as a New York City-based Research Scientist, Eastmond's scholarly practice occupies a theoretically generative intersection of cognitive behavioral neuroscience, sociocultural anthropology, public policy analysis, and urban health science for women. As Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Safe by Sadé, she operationalizes her research into applied, policy-oriented programming, translating scholarly knowledge into community-level transformation and advancing the systemic changes that the scale of this crisis demands (Eastmond, 2024).

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REFERENCES

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