Claire Kaplan

smaller claire kaplanTALK: WOMEN’S UNTOLD, NEVER DISCUSSED SECRETS; GENDER VIOLENCE Claire Kaplan, Ph.D., is Director of Sexual and Domestic Violence Services at the University of Virginia Women’s Center and has served in this position since 1991. At UVA, she co-teaches Gender Violence, a 3-credit course, with the director of the Shelter for Help in Emergency. A California native, she joined the anti-violence movement in 1981 as a volunteer for the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women (now “Peace Over Violence”). In that capacity, she was on the organizing committee for the 1975 Take Back the Night March in LA, organized in protest over the LAPD’s failed strategies to apprehend the Southside Slayer and the department’s disparagement of his victims due to their race and class status. In 1987 she became director of training and outreach at LACAAW and in 1990, director of the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault in Washington, D.C. Kaplan manages “SAPC,” a national listserv for campus-based anti-violence educators and other organizations that work on campus in this capacity, which currently has over 600 subscribers. She has served on numerous committees, including the campus sexual assault advisory committee of Futures Without Violence; Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance, and the Virginia Campus Coalition Against Sexual Violence. She received her BS from UC Davis, her Masters degree in Professional Writing (screenplay and non-fiction) from the University of Southern California, and her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. Among her publications are: “Domestic Violence–Intimate Partner Violence,” (Emergency Medicine Specialty Reports, 2006); “Shattered Pride: Resistance and Intervention Strategies in Cases of Sexual Assault, Relationship Violence, and Hate Crimes Against Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Students”, in Toward Acceptance: Sexual Orientation on Campus, edited by Nancy Evans and Vernon Wall (University Press of America: 2000); and “Violence Against Women: Responses by Women’s Centers to Sexual Violence” for The Handbook for University and College Women’s Centers, Greenwood Publishing Group (2002). Her doctoral research focused on undergraduate campus feminist activists and their ability to sustain their activism after graduation.