New York's Kira Kazantsev bagged the Miss America title this year, making it the third time in a row that Miss New York has taken home the title.
Fellow New Yorker and first Indian-American winner Nina Davuluri handed over the crown to Kazentsev, which comes with a $50,000 scholarship. So who exactly is the new Miss America? According to media reports, she's a 23-year-old first generation American. Her parents hailed from Russia. She attended Hofstra University majoring in political science, global studies and geography, and it was during her college days that she became involved in an abusive relationship, which sowed the seeds of her transformation as a passionate advocate of domestic violence survivors.
On winning the crown, the young lady spoke about domestic violence and thanked officials who took a stand against this practice. Being a domestic violence survivor herself, Kazantsev said she wasn't aware of the various support systems in place that are there to assist such victims.
"I very well may have Googled it," she told NPR. "But that's not the mindset that you're in when you're in that situation. You just feel alone. You feel helpless. You don't feel like anyone could possibly understand."
She said that this mentality of hers led to her refusing to take help from friends and family.
"I definitely had friends that saw this and tried to help and didn't know what to do," she said. "And at that point I isolated myself. I was completely isolated from any help they were offering me."
Barbara Paradiso, director of the Center on Domestic Violence at the University of Colorado Denver appreciated the new Miss America and was happy that beauty pageant winners are using the platform to speak about such practices and educating victims on what they should do under such circumstances.
"I think we still hold on to some of those stereotypical beliefs. When we think about the typical victims of domestic violence, we think of someone who is poor, might not have many resources or is unintelligent," Paradiso said. "When you have someone who has been able to be as successful as a Miss America, that helps us put this in perspective."
