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Chitra Raghavan, PhD (she/her/hers)

Professor of Psychology
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
New York, New York, United States

Dr. Raghavan's scholarship centers on the architecture of power—specifically, how coercive control operates across intimate partner abuse, sexual assault, sex trafficking, and cultic contexts. She is dually committed to conceptual construct precision and ecological validity. As such, she is invested in naming phenomena accurately as in measuring them in ways that reflect the lived complexity of captive abuse. A second thread of her research examines how prolonged captivity shapes particular expressions of trauma and dissociation—posttraumatic stress disorder, Complex PTSD, and trauma-coerced attachment—illuminating the psychological mechanisms that bind victims to their abusers. A third, less traveled path in her scholarship involves the integration of Eastern psychological traditions into self-care and pedagogy of self-care, bringing contemplative and non-Western epistemologies into dialogue with scholarship. Current projects include developing love bombing as a rigorous psychological construct and extending coercive control research across diverse populations, including queer intimate partner violence.

Dr. Raghavan has authored over sixty peer-reviewed publications appearing in journals including *Violence Against Women*, *Journal of Interpersonal Violence*, *Journal of Human Trafficking*, *Journal of Traumatic Stress*, *Sexual Abuse*, and the *European Journal of Trauma & Dissociation*, and two edited volumes: *Self-Determination and Women's Rights in the Muslim World* (Brandeis University Press, 2012) and *Domestic Violence: Methodologies in Dialogue* (Northeastern University Press, 2013). With Dr. Kendra Doychak, she is completing a third book under contract with Oxford University Press, designed to make coercive control assessment accessible to law enforcement, legal personnel, and mental health professionals.

In 2023, Dr. Raghavan was named one of ten Smith College alumnae who have shaped American psychology over the past century. A licensed psychologist, she has been qualified as an expert witness in intimate partner violence, sexual coercion, sex trafficking, coercive control, trauma, and trauma bonding. Her testimony has shaped case law in New York State.

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