Responding to Victims of Crime: Basics for Interns

This curriculum kit provides college students an introduction to basic skills for interacting with victims of crime in an internship or field placement setting

Teaching About Criminal Victimization: Guidelines for Faculty

These guidelines are designed to provide support to college and university faculty in teaching about criminal victimization, regardless of the course or discipline the material will be presented in

Providing Care and Support for Victims of Crime: Exercises and Assignments

Exercises and assignments created to provide college students with a foundation on how to be present for and provide resources to people in their lives who are victimized by crime, including those who share their campus environment

Teaching About Victimization

Given the prevalence of victimization, especially among college-age populations, we all have students who have experienced their own victimization or the victimization of someone close to them. Violent victimization rates are highest among those age 18 to 24, an estimated one in four to five women experience an attempted or completed sexual assault during their college career, and most victims of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner were first victimized before the age of 25. Some victims may be visible, in that they choose to share their experiences with you or the class, or their experience is otherwise public, but many will remain invisible. Course material related to victimization holds the potential to trigger emotional reactions, which are not limited to victims and survivors. Students who have experienced other types of trauma, such as military veterans, as well as any student with the emotional capacity for empathy, could have a strong reaction to materials on victimization. For example, realizing that engaging in preventive efforts cannot guarantee safety can be very unsettling. Given this reality, how can we teach about the often complicated nature of victimization in a manner that does not inflict additional harm

Teaching About Victimization in an Online Environment: Translating in Person Empathy and Support to The Internet

With the significant increase in online education, particularly in the field of criminal justice, guidance on migrating instruction from a face-to-face format to online is needed. This is especially the case for courses focused on topics with the potential to elicit a strong emotional reaction from students, such as victimology. This article presents a framework for teaching a victimology course that allows for the full discussion of ideas in a manner that is supportive of victims of crime and does not inflict additional harm. It shares tips on what to include on a syllabus, guiding discussion, and responding to student disclosures of victimization. In doing so, this contributes to the emerging pedagogy on teaching about trauma and victimization

Reducing the Harm of Criminal Victimization: The Role of Restitution

Restitution is a court-ordered payment by offenders to their victims to cover the victims\u27 economic losses resulting from the crime. These losses can be substantial and can harm victims and victims\u27 families both directly and indirectly. But most victims do not receive reparation for their injuries, both because judges do not always impose restitution and because of problems with collecting restitution payments, even if there is a court order to do so. In this article, we review the literature on restitution and suggest that this compensatory mechanism is necessary to restore victims to where they were before the crime occurred. But monetary restitution alone is not sufficient. Making victims whole requires not only financial compensation from the offender but also procedural, informational, and interpersonal justice from the criminal justice system

How Do We Know If It Works? Measuring Outcomes in Bystander-Focused Abuse Prevention on Campuses

Objective: To address acknowledged limitations in the effectiveness of sexual and relationship abuse prevention strategies, practitioners have developed new tools that use a bystander framework (Lonsway et al, 2009). Evaluation of bystander-focused prevention requires measures, specific to the bystander approach, that assess changes over time in participants’ attitudes and behaviors. Few measures exist and more psychometric analyses are needed. We present analyses to begin to establish the psychometric properties of four new measures of bystander outcomes and their subscales. Method: We collected data from 948 first year college students on two campuses in the northeast United States. Items assessing attitudes and behaviors related to bystander helping responses in college campus communities for situations where there is sexual or relationship abuse risk were factor analyzed. Results: Measures of readiness to help (assessed specifically with scales representing taking action, awareness, and taking responsibility), intent to be an active bystander, self-reported bystander responses, and perceptions of peer norms in support of action all showed adequate reliability and validity. Conclusion: The study represents a next step in the development of tools that can be used by researchers and practitioners seeking both to understand bystander behavior in the context of sexual and relationship abuse and evaluating the effectiveness of prevention tools to address these problems. The measures investigated will be helpful for prevention educators and researchers evaluating the effectiveness of sexual and relationship abuse education tools that use a bystander intervention framework

They Were There for People Who Needed Them : Student Attitudes Toward the Use of Trigger Warnings in Victimology Classrooms

Over the last five years, vigorous debate has been waged about the purpose, use, and impact of trigger warnings in courses offered at institutions of higher education. This debate has been largely uninformed by research findings. This study fills this gap using quantitative and qualitative data collected via surveys in a large undergraduate victimology course to explore student attitudes toward trigger warnings. Findings revealed considerable, but nuanced support for trigger warning use in victimology courses. Support does not appear to differ between crime victims and non-victims; support is higher among females than males. These findings underscore that universal decisions mandating or advocating for or against the use of trigger warnings are premature. Further study is needed with a diverse range of samples to gain a fuller picture of student attitudes about trigger warnings as well as to assess any impact of trigger warnings use on student behavior and learning

Changing Attitudes About Being a Bystander to Violence: Translating an In-Person Sexual Violence Prevention Program to a New Campus

Bystander approaches to reducing sexual violence train community members in prosocial roles to interrupt situations with risk of sexual violence and be supportive community allies after an assault. This study employs a true experimental design to evaluate the effectiveness of Bringing in the Bystander™ through 1-year post-implementation with first-year students from two universities (one rural, primarily residential; one urban, heavily commuter). We found significant change in bystander attitudes for male and female student program participants compared with the control group on both campuses, although the pattern of change depended on the combination of gender and campus