Spring 2026 Winner of the Fight Against Domestic Violence Scholarship

Arya Nagraj

John T. Fields & Associates is honored to award Arya with the Spring 2026 Fight Against Domestic Violence Scholarship. After completing his education, Arya hopes to pursue a career in which he can help address issues and crimes, including domestic violence.

Read Their Essay Here:

At 3:00am on a Tuesday, my college friend knocked on my dorm room door. She was crying, and not quietly. It was the kind of crying that comes from somewhere deep and frightened. She had nowhere else to go.

That night changed how I understood the world.

Until then, domestic violence had existed for me the way most social problems exist for people who haven’t encountered them: as a statistic, an abstraction, something that happened elsewhere to people unlike me. My friend’s experience, and the weeks of conversation that followed, removed that comfortable distance. I learned that she had been hiding what was happening. I learned that she hadn’t told anyone because she wasn’t sure people would believe her, or know what to do. I learned, eventually, that her story was not unusual at all.

Domestic violence affects roughly one in four women and one in nine men in the United States at some point in their lives. Each year, it accounts for approximately 20% of all violent crime. Its effects extend far beyond the immediate victim: children who witness abuse in the home are significantly more likely to experience mental health challenges, academic difficulties, and, in a tragic cycle, abusive relationships of their own.

What I didn’t understand that night, and came to understand only through years of direct engagement with the issue, is how deeply domestic violence is entangled with poverty.

My first internship with the City of Chicago’s Gender-Based Violence Strategic Plan gave me access to data I hadn’t seen before. Chicago’s rates of domestic violence are not evenly distributed across the city. They cluster in neighborhoods marked by concentrated poverty, housing instability, and limited access to social services. I learned that domestic violence, in part, a poverty problem, shaped by lack of resources.

My second internship, at Lawyers for Children in New York City, confirmed what Chicago's data suggested. The families I encountered, mostly mothers trying to protect their children from abusive partners, were caught in overlapping crises. They faced eviction. They faced unemployment. Leaving an abusive relationship is hard enough emotionally; it becomes nearly impossible when leaving also means losing your housing, your income, or your immigration status. Poverty traps people inside it, and strips communities of the resources needed to intervene: shelters, legal aid, counseling, crisis lines.

The solutions, then, have to match the scale and complexity of the problem.

Immediate intervention infrastructure matters enormously. Shelters, legal advocacy, and crisis services are underfunded relative to need in virtually every American city. A woman who decides to leave an abusive situation needs somewhere safe to go, and in too many communities, no such place exists, or the waitlist is months long. Funding these services adequately is a necessary investment in public safety.

More durable solutions require economic investment in the communities where domestic violence concentrates. Access to stable employment, affordable housing, and quality education changes the calculus for potential victims and perpetrators alike. When people have financial independence and community resources, the power dynamics that enable abuse shift. Economic investment in underserved neighborhoods is, among other things, a domestic violence prevention strategy.

Schools also have a role that remains underutilized. Curricula that teach young people about healthy relationships, consent, and conflict resolution can interrupt patterns before they form. Research on school-based prevention programs is encouraging: early education about relationship dynamics measurably reduces rates of dating violence among adolescents, and those effects persist into adulthood.

The night my friend knocked on my door, I didn't know any of this. I knew only that someone I cared about was in pain, and that I felt an urgent need to do something useful. It is why I am pursuing a joint JD-MBA at Northwestern: because the most durable solutions to the problem exist at the intersection of law and capital. The law protects victims and holds criminal abusers accountable, while investment creates the economic conditions that make leaving possible and staying safe sustainable. I intend to build and invest in social enterprises tackling this problem. Domestic violence in America is serious, it is widespread, and it is solvable. We have the evidence. What we need now is the will to act on it.