Comfort Tosin Adebayo’s first external grant after receiving her Ph.D. in Communication came in the form of a NCA Research Cultivation Grant. The funding would not only shape and support the trajectory of Adebayo’s future research and career, but directly impact the lives of women living in Nigeria.
Adebayo, an Assistant Professor at Towson University, began working with one of her mentors, Lucy Mkandawire-Valhmu, a Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, in 2021. Mkandawire-Valhmu’s research often addresses both violence in the lives of African women and healthcare of immigrants and refugees. From this partnership, Adebayo began to focus her research on the experiences of Somali refugee women.
She started with a manuscript reviewing research conducted on Gender-Based Violence (GBV) among these women. According to the European Commission, GBV is any “violence directed against a person because of that person's gender or violence that affects persons of a particular gender disproportionately.” As a general category, GBV encompasses several specific forms of violence, including physical, sexual, psychological, and economic. As she read more, she began to self-reflect:
"Why is this happening? Why do they have to experience GBV again, on top of all the conflict and disruptions that they’ve already experienced in their lives? This is just a few years after the #MeToo movement, which is a global movement, and I started wondering what GBV is like in Nigeria, where I was born and raised … and specifically, I was interested in sexual violence, because we know that GBV encompasses all kinds of violence, and sexual violence is just one piece of the puzzle.”
She says she began to encounter some truly heartbreaking statistics on sexual violence, two of which she carries today: The first, that one-in-three women worldwide have been victims of sexual violence in their lifetimes; the second, that less than three percent of those cases are ever reported. Motivated by these, she read more, and began to formulate a more specific research question: What exactly are the structural and cultural barriers that impact survivors from coming forward to report the experiences of sexual violence?
The next step was to travel to Nigeria and gather an initial round of data. To accomplish this, Adebayo applied and was awarded a NCA Research Cultivation Grant (RCG). These were first given in 2021 as an initiative of NCA’s Research Council to facilitate those seeking grants without prior experience and/or those desiring to build a foundation for future grant pursuits. Most of the projects funded either propose research into understudied domains, promote Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) as defined by NCA’s strategic plan, and/or advance engaged research that has practical applications outside of purely academic settings. Applicants can apply for support up to $15,000 and applications are typically due in September.
The RCG provided Adebayo with funding to not only travel internationally, but to employ research assistants and a local collaborator to assist her in the research. This was for administrative purposes, but also for cultural ones as well:
“While I embody the Nigerian identity, by the time I went back – nine years after I left – I was seen as an outsider. In fact, I remember one of the site visits that we had, I was asked where I come from. I tried to assert my identity as a Nigerian, and they said, “No, where are you really from?” It took me aback a little bit to hear that question in Nigeria. It’s like: When I'm here, I hear that question all the time. ‘Where is that accent from? Where are you from?’ Then I go home and I'm getting the same question.”
Navigating this identity between borders was difficult even with the help of a local accent, and Adebayo had to renegotiate access with gatekeepers to prove that her purpose for collecting data was not only because she carried a genuine connection with her home, but because of the larger need to reframe communication research on the Global South.
Over the course of about five weeks in Nigeria, Adebayo and her team traveled to several Nigerian higher education and social institutions looking to speak to women over the age of 18. Sometimes she spoke to a room of 20 women; sometimes 50; once it was an auditorium of 600. In the end, she estimates that they spoke with over 1,000 women.
Before they arrived at their first site, their data collection method was to frame their presence as a sexual education talk. They wanted to be sure that, since they were collecting data in a public space, that they were preserving a survivor or victim’s privacy as much as possible. The plan was then, after speaking with Nigerian women for 15 to 30 minutes, to inform them that the team was comprised of researchers collecting data on sexual violence. Rather than solicit interviewees visibly, the team would pass out slips of paper so that they could arrange an interview privately.
When the team began to give these sexual education talks, however, they quickly learned that most of the women in the room had a very constrained view of sexual violence: “more than 50 percent of the people we spoke to believed that sexual violence was only limited to rape,” said Adebayo. “Every other thing outside of that they didn't regard it as sexual violence.”
Learning this almost forced a rethinking of the pedagogical approach to data collection, according to Adebayo. Instead of a short “pep talk,” on sexual education as just a preliminary way to inform participants about the study, the talks took on a more educational purpose:
“And so it was, you know, it was clearly an opportunity. I can’t leave the site if these women don’t understand the full scope of sexual violence. So, we just embraced that opportunity and said we're just going to educate them. And a lot of conversations came up and it turned into something very interactive, with some very engaged students and it felt right.”
For the data collection, Adebayo and her team interviewed about 60 females and over 100 females completed online surveys. Though a publication of the research is forthcoming, Adebayo says that some initial findings reveal that both the issues of sexual violence and the structural barriers to reporting are shocking and extensive:
“I think the biggest shocker for us in this study is the fact that majority of the people we spoke to never had sex education. From our data, the majority of respondents had been violated, about 70 percent, before the age of 10. About 80 percent were violated by family members. I wasn't prepared for that. We also found that only about 3 percent of our participants were violated by strangers, and the remaining population were violated by people they knew.”
She continues by pointing out the impact of knowledge and communication on someone’s ability to report the violence down to them:
“…many of them had never had any conversations about their experience; many of our participants were disclosing to us for the first time. I remember we would ask … because I did many of the interviews: ‘Why did you trust us? What gave you courage?’ And many of them would say, ‘You know, just now when you gave us that pep talk, and you just talked about it.’ The more I talked with them the more I learned that the truth is that many didn't even know they had been violated until they became adults.”
Adebayo is back in Baltimore now, but she continues to advance research and activism concerning sexual violence internationally. She recently founded the Sexual Violence Project Nigeria (SVPN) to leverage her communication background in service of this issue. The project’s mission is to not just spread information and educate people around the world, but to encourage them to share their stories and speak out against GBV in all forms.
As Adebayo continues her work, her research serves as a powerful example of how Communication research can address pressing social issues and make a tangible difference in people's lives. Her journey from receiving the NCA grant to conducting groundbreaking research and establishing an advocacy organization demonstrates the transformative potential of well-supported scholarship.