Envisioning future directions: Conversations with leaders in domestic and sexual assault advocacy, policy, service, and research

This article delves into the views of 72 leaders in domestic violence and sexual assault advocacy, policy, service, and research to determine their vision for the future direction of the field. Through discussions with experts, we identified numerous strategies necessary to best meet the needs of domestic violence and sexual assault victims. Common themes focused on the need to (a) examine the context of victims’ and offenders’ experiences; (b) increase cultural competence to adequately provide appropriate victim services and criminal justice responses for underserved, marginalized, and culturally specific populations; (c) increase reliance on victims’ voices; (d) continue to develop partnerships at both the community and the state levels and ensure the role of local communities; (e) expand the concept of successful outcomes that can be reliably and validly assessed; (f) emphasize mixed-methods approaches to address these questions, in recognition that various methods complement each other; and (g) be open to novel or emerging approaches to intervention

Becoming Who We Are: A Theoretical Explanation of Gendered Social Structures and Social Networks that Shape Adolescent Interpersonal Aggression

A conceptualization of gendered interpersonal aggression that is grounded in the social ecological framework is presented to explicate factors in adolescents' gendered environments that give rise to aggression and victimization. The focus is on gendered social structures and social networks. Our framework for prevention suggests that violence prevention requires that we move our culture from one that continually recreates gendered structures that reinforce power and authority as masculine and that confer opportunities and constraints in ways that favor men over women. It will require deliberate action to legitimize the feminine in our culture and develop laws and practices that abolish gender inequities

Covariation in the Use of Physical and Sexual Intimate Partner Aggression Among Adolescent and College-Age Men A Longitudinal Analysis

A longitudinal examination of male perpetration of physical aggression toward a romantic partner and its covariation with sexual aggression reveals a decline from adolescence through 4 years of college. Witnessing domestic violence and experiencing parental physical punishment increased the likelihood of physical aggression in adolescence, but not thereafter. Prior perpetration best predicted subsequent perpetration. Although adolescence was the time of greatest risk, the 2nd year in college was an additional time of increased risk. Furthermore, physical and sexual aggression covaried with each other in the sample at rates significantly greater than chance, indicating that covariation may be a unique form of perpetration. Witnessing domestic violence and experiencing parental physical punishment were associated with an increased likelihood of men committing both forms of intimate partner aggression in adolescence

The role of high school coaches in helping prevent adolescent sexual aggression: Part of the solution or part of the problem?

In this qualitative study, we examine whether male high school coaches could effectively serve as advocates or educators for male-focused programs to prevent sexual aggression. We conduct open-ended key informant individual and focus group interviews with high school coaches and administrators. The five themes the authors identified suggest that coaches (a) believe they have influences over athletes, (b) lack education about sexual aggression, (c) endorse rape myths, (d) minimize the problem of sexual aggression, and (e) are resistant to being engaged in sexual aggression prevention. Our results reveal that coaches may need in-depth training on sexual aggression even if they do not want to engage in prevention efforts because they may be transmitting values and beliefs that support and condone sexual aggression of their athletes

Measuring campus sexual misconduct and its context: The administrator-researcher campus climate consortium (ARC3) survey

Objective: In response to The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault’s recommendations, the Administrator-Researcher Campus Climate Collaborative (ARC3) has curated an empirically sound, no-cost campus climate survey for U.S. institutions of higher education. The ARC3 survey contains 19 modules that assess a range of Title IX violations, including sexual harassment, dating violence, and sexual misconduct victimization and perpetration; sexual misconduct prevention efforts, resources, and responses; and key predictors and possible outcomes of sexual misconduct. This article describes the ARC3 survey development and pilot test psychometric data. Method: A total of 909 students attending one of three U.S. universities responded to the survey; 85% of students who began the survey completed it. Students completed the ARC3 survey in slightly less than 30 min, on average. Results: The majority of measures produced evidence for at least acceptable internal consistency levels (a > .70), with only two short item sets having marginal reliability (a = .65–.70). Correlations among scales matched expectations set by the research literature. Students generally did not find the survey distressing; in fact, students viewed the climate assessment as important and personally meaningful. Conclusion: The survey performed sufficiently well in pilot testing to recommend its use with U.S. college populations

Women's Leadership Network

The Women’s Leadership Network for Safe and Healthy Relationships (hereafter referred to as the Women’s Leadership Network) is an innovative approach to community-based domestic violence resistance programming that infuses best practices in the area of family violence prevention programming, the principles of community organizing, and participatory research methods. We define domestic violence resistance programming as community-based programming that encompasses activities designed to prevent new domestic violence from occurring and to respond to domestic violence that already exists within a community. The Women’s Leadership Network involves equipping a core group of adult female community residents with the knowledge, skills, and resources needed to plan, develop, and implement domestic violence resistance programming within their own communities. The Women’s Leadership Network was implemented in a lower-income, predominantly African American neighborhood in an urban area in North Carolina, and the results of the case study evaluation suggest that the program had a positive influence on the participants and their community

Precision SUSY Measurements at LHC

If supersymmetry exists at the electroweak scale, then it should be discovered at the LHC. Determining masses, of supersymmetric particles however, is more difficult. In this paper, methods are discussed to determine combinations of masses and of branching ratios precisely from experimentally observable distributions. In many cases such measurements alone can greatly constrain the particular supersymmetric model and determine its parameters with an accuracy of a few percent. Most of the results shown correspond to one year of running at LHC at ``low luminosity'.Comment: 52 pages, Latex with 42 postscript figures. Postscript version also at http://www-physics.lbl.gov/www/theorygroup/papers/39412.p

Through the Eyes of a Survivor: Implementation and pilot evaluation of a photovoice-based support group for female survivors of family-based interpersonal violence.

The article discusses a pilot study which aimed to examine the effectiveness of a photovoice-based methodology to elicit experiences and provide support to women survivors of family-based interpersonal violence. It defines photovoice as a technique of putting cameras into the hands of participants and making them take photographs and write narratives about the images and give participants an opportunity to define their problem through their own perspective. Participants were made to take photographs representing the individual, family and community. Participants claimed that they benefited from the program because they were able to creatively document their own stores while being supported by other group members with similar experiences

Empowerment or Engagement? Digital Health Technologies for Mental Healthcare

We argue that while digital health technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, smartphones, and virtual reality) present significant opportunities for improving the delivery of healthcare, key concepts that are used to evaluate and understand their impact can obscure significant ethical issues related to patient engagement and experience. Specifically, we focus on the concept of empowerment and ask whether it is adequate for addressing some significant ethical concerns that relate to digital health technologies for mental healthcare. We frame these concerns using five key ethical principles for AI ethics (i.e. autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and explicability), which have their roots in the bioethical literature, in order to critically evaluate the role that digital health technologies will have in the future of digital healthcare