Alumna Receives 2026 SSWR Social Policy Researcher Award

Dr. Annelisa Mennicke (MSW ’11, PhD ’15) received the 2026 Social Policy Researcher Award from the Society for Social Work and Research for her significant contributions to violence prevention policy. She is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and is associate director of research for UNC Charlotte’s Violence Prevention Center.

The Society for Social Work and Research, a global organization dedicated to advancing social work, represents the scientific and scholarly interests of the profession. In conferring the award, the society acknowledged Mennicke as an emerging scholar making notable research contributions that influence the direction, design, and implementation of social policy and its effects on marginalized populations.

“I was surprised because there are many outstanding social policy researchers in our field, but also very grateful. It was nice to have some recognition for the hard work and that it is valued in our profession,” shared Dr. Mennicke.

Bystander Intervention

Dr. Mennicke’s research falls under the umbrella of violence prevention but spans a variety of topics, populations and projects focusing on developing effective interventions to reduce interpersonal violence. At UNC Charlotte, she led a six-year Interpersonal Violence and Harassment Prevention Survey, the first campus culture survey that systematically documented discriminatory experiences of sexual minorities on their campus. She also helped implement Green Dot, an evidence-based bystander intervention program.

“We have work that’s funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism that focuses on how to prevent college alcohol abuse because there’s a big overlap between alcohol abuse and sexual assault,” she explained.

Using a bystander intervention framework, the project focuses on teaching people to recognize when someone might be experiencing harm and to identify such incidents and intervene. Her team has worked with UNC Charlotte’s Center for Wellness Prevention to develop a program to implement on campus. They’ve also created an intervention that is presented through a card-based group game.

“Imagine Apples to Apples, where there’s somebody who reads a scenario and people select how they would respond and the judge selects the winner,” Dr. Mennicke explained. “The hope is to give them a lot of options and self-confidence in what to do when they experience or are exposed to that.”

She also has a project funded through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on child sex trafficking prevention in Kentucky with an intervention program. The program uses an online, asynchronous, and highly engaging interactive training targeted at middle school staff. It has the same framework as bystander intervention.

Her work on bystander intervention also looks beyond the college campus, a common area of focus where violence and substance use intermingle, and into the unique ways substance use impacts interpersonal violence in areas such as maternal mortality. Her research has also used the bystander intervention model to develop screenings for pregnant and postpartum patients.

“The top 3 causes of maternal death are suicide, homicide by an intimate partner, and overdose,” Dr. Mennicke described. “Those are all preventable. People need to know what they’re looking at and have the confidence that what they’re seeing is a problem. Enhancing community connectedness helps people feel some social responsibility. They need to know what to do, and that’s a very teachable thing.”

Results of bystander interventions have also been very promising, and sometimes surprising. Dr. Mennicke noted that interventions focused on sexual assault and alcohol abuse were most effective for people most at risk of violence, reducing rates of victimization at the community level and reducing rates of perpetration.

Violence Prevention and Data

Dr. Mennicke’s research also expands upon violence prevention as it relates to gun violence, working with community partners, such as the local hospital system, to evaluate their hospital-based violence prevention program. Someone with a gunshot injury at the hospital meets with a specialist who screens them for social determinants of health and connects them with referrals and resources in the community to try to mitigate external factors contributing to their experiencing violence.

She is especially excited about the UNC Charlotte Regional Data Trust, where people from across the community can deposit identifiable person-level data into the system, which can then be accessed through a rigorous research process to better link data across systems. For example, researchers at UNC Charlotte have been able to link school system data like GPA, child abuse reports, and access to crisis assistance to attempt to identify what social determinants of health may make someone more likely to experience violence to prevent it before it happens.

Human Trafficking

“We’ve also had the opportunity to bring some of our expertise related to human trafficking prevention more broadly to North Carolina,” Dr. Mennicke remarked about working with a local legislator who is interested in addressing human trafficking in the state, replicating some work already implemented in Florida on a human trafficking data repository.

“Human trafficking is the most underreported violent experience that happens, so there are not very good records,” she expounded. “There is no reliable source on how frequently trafficking occurs in a state. The way people are doing that now is through the number of calls to a human trafficking hotline, which is really just one small piece of the puzzle.”

Florida is leading the nation, establishing a data repository system for incidents of human trafficking, one that can be shared across state lines. Texas is also working on similar legislation and Dr. Mennicke hopes to have North Carolina follow suit. Her team has developed policy briefs on the issue. With support from a small policy-related grant from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, her research team will also conduct interviews with stakeholders across North Carolina who could contribute data to the repository to learn why or why not they would be comfortable sharing information with the database.

Dr. Mennicke and her collaborators at the University of Kentucky coordinated a multistate consortium on child sex trafficking prevention with the goal of developing a research agenda on this topic area over the next 10 years. “It’s a very understudied form of trafficking and form of violence,” she emphasized. “It’s also very evolving, particularly with the way that social media and technology are used to recruit people into trafficking.

The consortium resulted in a policy brief shared with legislators across the country and an article published in the Journal of Family Violence that provided recommendations on the areas of focus and the implications for this area of human trafficking research.