Violence Against Women: Representations, Interpretations, and Education.

Cultural representations of violence against women have been mystified, eroticized, and depicted as heroic, camouflaging, and trivializing acts of violence as a societal norm for thousands of years. This themed issue invites people to re/claim identities and power, and enter into a global cultural discourse connected with cross-disciplinary channels and creative work.

Development and validation of the LoVI: the Laws on Violence against women and girls Index.

BACKGROUND: Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a human-rights violation with adverse long-term and inter-generational consequences. Redefining VAWG as legally unacceptable is one strategy for social change. The co-occurrence of national laws against VAWG is understudied, and tools to monitor the national legal environment are lacking. We developed the Laws on Violence against Women and Girls Index (LoVI) to measure global progress to develop comprehensive national legislation against child marriage, sexual harassment, domestic violence, and marital rape. METHODS: Using data from 2016 and 2018 for 189 countries from the World Bank Women, Business, and the Law database, we used factor analysis to assess the dimensionality of the LoVI. We examined the distribution of the LoVI across countries and regions, and the relationship of national rankings on the LoVI with those for other indicators from the United Nations, Demographic and Health Surveys, and World Factbook. RESULTS: A single LoVI factor showed good model fit in the factor analysis. National LoVI rankings were positively associated with gender equality in human development and economic rights-related rankings and negatively associated with rates of justifying wife beating and of lifetime and prior-year physical and/or sexual IPV. The LoVI was not associated with national indicators for human development and income inequality. CONCLUSION: The LoVI is a concise, coherent, validated index to monitor the progress of nations on adopting comprehensive legislation to advance 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 5, to eliminate VAWG.

Innovating the Problem Away? A Critical Study of Anti-Rape Technologies.

In the context of expanding preventative strategies for addressing sexual violence, we are witnessing the emergence of an array of new anti-rape technologies targeted at women. These tools, promoted primarily through the Internet, include a variety of apps for mobile phones, signal- and alarm-emitting wearable technologies, and internal and external body devices. Based on analyses of websites promoting such instruments, we critically examine these devices with respect to their possible benefits, limitations, and unintended physical, social, and legal consequences for women. We suggest that unanticipated outcomes may undermine both victims and their cases, those the technologies are ostensibly designed to help.

Racial, Socioeconomic, and Attitudinal Disparities in Trajectories of Young Women's Willingness to Refuse Unwanted Sex.

PURPOSE: We identify trajectories of young women's willingness to refuse unwanted sex, assess racial, socioeconomic, and attitudinal variation across trajectory groups, and describe the sexual and relationship behaviors of different trajectory groups. METHODS: Panel data from the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life study facilitate a latent class analysis identifying trajectories of women's willingness to refuse unwanted sex, followed by bivariate analyses illuminating demographic, attitudinal, experiential, and behavioral correlates of each trajectory. RESULTS: Three trajectories emerge confident (stable high), moderate (slightly declining moderate), and reluctant (low-U). Socially advantaged women were most likely to follow a confident trajectory. Black women, socially disadvantaged women, women with early sexual debut, women with early births, and women who adhere to rape myths were most likely to follow a reluctant trajectory. Women whose trajectory was moderate spent the most time in relationships and had sex most often. CONCLUSIONS: How much young women are willing to refuse unwanted sex and how this willingness changes during the transition to adulthood vary with key characteristics of their demographic background, earlier sexual experiences, and perceptions of rape. The trajectories by which this willingness evolves further correspond with sexual and relationship behaviors during the transition to adulthood. Greater research on whether willingness to refuse unwanted sex affects behavior and/or vice versa is needed to more fully understand the diversity of women's sexual experiences and to develop effective interventions for improving women's willingness to refuse unwanted sex.

Exploring the Role of Race and Gender on Perceived Bystander Ability and Intent: Findings Before and After Exposure to an Online Training Program to Prevent Sexual Assault on Campus.

The current study explores the significance of race and gender on bystander attitudes before and after an online bystander intervention program to prevent sexual assault. A diverse sample of 750 college students participated in an online intervention and participants' perceived bystander intervention ability and intent were assessed. The interaction of participant race and gender had a marginally significant impact on bystander ability and intent baseline scores. Furthermore, when analyzing gain scores from pre- to posttest, there was a significant race by gender interaction. Specifically, Latinx and Black men had higher preintervention scores, and White men had higher gains postintervention. Relevant cultural and social factors and directions for future research are discussed.

Five years post Nirbhaya: Critical insights into the status of response to sexual assault.

It is five years since the fatal gang rape of Jyothi Singh (Nirbhaya), a physiotherapy student, on December 16, 2012, in New Delhi, the capital of India. The legal and policy reforms triggered by the Nirbhaya case will remain a watershed moment in the history of efforts towards seeking justice for survivors of gender-based violence in India. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 and the "Guidelines and protocols: Medico-legal care for survivors/victims of sexual violence" issued by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in March 2014 are two landmark reforms. March 2018 marks four years since the issuance of these Guidelines and five years since the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013. Any reasonable tribute to Nirbhaya would constitute fair implementation of legal reforms, efforts to strengthen multi-sectoral response and sincere attempts to reduce crimes against women, gender and sexual minorities, and children. This paper reviews the issue, through a close study of recent cases of rape, police responses, court judgements, studies, news reporting and field-based observations. It brings forth the gaps in implementation that persist, and constitute a major obstacle in making these progressive policies and reforms effective. Given the fact that the reforms are intersectoral in nature, implementation has been particularly challenging. Lack of efficient implementation of such policies and reforms amounts to denying survivors their right to justice.

Bystander Training as Leadership Training: Notes on the Origins, Philosophy, and Pedagogy of the Mentors in Violence Prevention Model.

This article outlines the origins, philosophy, and pedagogy of the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program, which has played a significant role in the gender violence prevention field since its inception in 1993. MVP was one of the first large-scale programs to target men for prevention efforts, as well as the first to operate systematically in sports culture and the U.S. military. MVP also introduced the "bystander" approach to the field. MVP employs a social justice, gender-focused approach to prevention. Key features of this approach are described and contrasted with individualistic, events-based strategies that have proliferated on college campuses and elsewhere in recent years.

Prevalence and risk factors of physical or sexual intimate violence perpetration amongst men in four districts in the central region of Ghana: Baseline findings from a cluster randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Evidence-based interventions are essential in the prevention of violence against women (VAW). An understanding of risk factors for male perpetration of VAW using population-based research is crucial for developing such interventions. This study is a baseline assessment of a two-arm unmatched cluster randomised controlled trial (C-RCT), set up to assess the impact of a Rural Response System (RRS) intervention for preventing violence against women and girls in Ghana. This study aims at assessing past year prevalence and risk factors for sexual or physical intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration among men. METHODS: The population-based survey involved 2126 men aged 18 and above living in selected communities in 4 districts in the central region of Ghana. Logistic regression techniques were used to determine risk factors for sexual or physical IPV perpetration. All models adjusted for age of respondent and took into account the study design. RESULTS: Half of the men had perpetrated at least one form of violence against their intimate partners in their lifetime while 41% had perpetrated sexual or physical IPV. Majority (93%) of the men had been in relationships in the 12 months preceding the survey, and of these, 23% had perpetrated sexual or physical IPV. Childhood factors associated with sexual or physical IPV included witnessing abuse of mother (aOR:1.40(1.06-1.86)), and neglect (aOR:1.81(1.30-2.50)). Other major risk factors for IPV perpetration were: having multiple partners (aOR:1.76(1.36-2.26)), (involvement in transactional sex (aOR:1.76(1.36-2.26)), substance use (aOR:1.74(1.25-2.43)) and gender inequitable attitudes (aOR:0.94(0.91-0.97)). CONCLUSION: Childhood violence experience and witnessing, risky behaviour (multiple partners, transactional sex, substance use) and gender inequitable attitudes are major risk factors for sexual or physical IPV perpetration. Perpetration of sexual or physical IPV tend to co-occur with non-partner violence and emotional IPV perpetration. Interventions targeting these factors are critical in reducing IPV.

Bar Training for Active Bystanders: Evaluation of a Community-Based Bystander Intervention Program.

Bystander intervention programs are proliferating on college campuses and are slowly gaining momentum as sexual violence prevention programs suitable for the larger community. In particular, bystander intervention programs aimed at bar staff have been developed in a number of locations. This study entails the exploratory evaluation of a community-based bystander program for bar staff. Using a pre-posttest design, this study suggests that evidence surrounding the effectiveness of this program is promising as it decreases rape myths, decreases barriers to intervention, and increases bartenders willingness to intervene. Future research and policy implications are discussed.

Structural, Organizational, and Interpersonal Factors Influencing Interprofessional Collaboration on Sexual Assault Response Teams.

Sexual Assault Response Teams (SARTs) are multidisciplinary teams that coordinate multiple systems (e.g., medical, law enforcement, prosecutors, and rape crisis center advocates) to provide comprehensive care to victims and to collect high-quality forensic evidence to facilitate investigation and prosecution. Relatively little guidance is provided about effective teamwork strategies in resources on forming SARTs. Using in-depth surveys with the SART coordinators and telephone surveys (including close-ended and open-ended questions) with 79 professionals involved in three active, formal SARTs in one state, this study examined structural, organizational, and interpersonal factors that influence interprofessional collaboration on SART. Study findings indicate that perceived structural factors and interpersonal factors were significantly associated with SART members'/responders' perceptions of the quality of interprofessional collaboration on their SART. Findings suggest that individuals' perceptions of professionalization and power disparities between professions pose challenges to perceived interprofessional collaboration on SART. Compared with criminal justice and medical professionals, victim advocacy rated the level of collaboration on their SART significantly lower. The overall picture from the data was that SART professionals perceived mutual respect, trust, and commitment to collaboration to be pervasive on their SARTs, even though recognition of professional conflicts was also prevalent, suggesting that professionals understood that interpersonal conflict was distinct from professional conflict. Initial SART trainings should address the benefits of the team response, professional roles, and communication and conflict resolution skills, and ongoing training should provide professionals the opportunity to raise positive and negative examples of their collaborative efforts to explore existing tensions and constraints on the team for conflict resolution.

Rape Messaging.

When feminists began advocating for rape reform in the 1970s, the rape message was clear: rape was not a crime to be taken seriously because women lie. After decades of criminal law reform, the legal requirement that a woman vigorously resist a man's sexual advances to prove that she was raped has largely disappeared from the statute books, and, in theory, rape shield laws make a woman's prior sexual history irrelevant. Yet, despite what the law dictates, rape law reforms have not had a "trickle-down" effect, where changes in law lead to changes in attitude. Women are still believed to be vindictive shrews so police continue to code rape allegations as "unfounded," and prosecutors continue to elect not to prosecute many rape cases. To many, "no" can sometimes still mean "yes." In short, criminal law reforms have only marginally succeeded at deterring rape and increasing conviction rates for rape. At the same time, criminal law reforms have entrenched gender norms and endorsed the message that acquaintance rapes are less worthy of harsh punishment. This Article argues against further ex post criminal law reforms and posits that efforts should shift to ex ante public health interventions. This Article draws from recent successful experiences with public health interventions in destigmatizing AIDS and denormalizing tobacco and advocates for a robust public health campaign to denormalize rape. It presents a detailed proposal for changing rape messaging, denormalizing rape, and ensuring better outcomes for victims.

Pharmacologic, Pharmacokinetic, and Clinical Assessment of Illicitly Used γ-Hydroxybutyrate.

γ-Hydroxybutyrate (GHB) is a common drug of abuse and poses important health risks to users in the form of respiratory, cardiovascular, mental, or traumatic adverse events. GHB has non-dose-proportional effects and pharmacologic effects such as sedation and retrograde amnesia, which can incapacitate people targeted for assault. It has Krebs cycle metabolism, rapid clearance, relative hydrophilicity, and unique drug interactions. Promptly seeking medical attention during intentional or inadvertent overdose is critical to survival, as is prompt supportive care once medical personnel are alerted. People drugged before assault also need to promptly notify authorities because the period to detect the drug in the urine or blood is brief and the ultimate metabolites are carbon dioxide and water. After acute treatment has passed, withdrawal could be severe in chronic abusers that could harm the patient directly or drive them back into reuse.

"Consent is Good, Joyous, Sexy": A banner campaign to market consent to college students.

OBJECTIVE: This study assessed the recall of, reaction to, and understanding of a brief campus banner campaign promoting consent in sexual relationships, and determined whether campaign exposure was associated with subsequent engagement in activities related to sexual assault education, awareness, and prevention. PARTICIPANTS: A stratified random sample of 1,200 undergraduates was recruited during fall of 2010; 628 (52.3%) participated. METHODS: To account for history and maturation, an experimental research design was employed with an online survey. RESULTS: Direct and indirect campaign exposure was associated with increased action. Students expressed primarily positive reactions to and appeared to understand the consent message. The campaign appealed to and was associated with increased activity among a wide range of students with one exception: a negative effect was observed for business students. CONCLUSIONS: Colorful banners with pithy, upbeat messages hold promise for engaging undergraduates in conversations and proactive activities related to sexual assault prevention.

The Survivor Master Narrative in Sexual Assault.

This article is based on data drawn from 90 Victoria Police operational files covering the period 2004-2008. Several thematic responses by sexual assault survivors are described as forming a master narrative of "identity shock." It is argued that the "minor/serious" sexual assault legal distinction is meaningless to survivors and conceals a shared felt experience. It is also argued that sexual assault is fundamentally a "public issue" of betrayal of citizen trust--not just a collection of "private troubles"--and that effective resolutions require more than individualized therapeutic and criminal justice measures.

Correlates of Self-Report of Rape Among Male School Adolescents in Ile-Ife, Nigeria.

This study examined male adolescents' self-report of rape of adolescent girls and the socio-demographic variables that correlated with self-report of rape. Descriptive-correlational design was used and the study was conducted in five public senior secondary schools in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. Three hundred and thirty-eight male adolescents participated in the study. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data. Findings from the study revealed the mean age of the adolescent males to be 16 years, with the majority (73%) of them in the middle adolescent stage. Six percent of the adolescent males reported they had raped an adolescent girl in the past. Among the boys who reported rape, 55% reported they had raped their sexual partners, and 55% reported they had perpetrated gang rape. Smoking (p = .0001), alcohol consumption (p = .001), and birth order (p = .006) predicted self-report of rape. The coefficient of birth order showed that odds of self-report of rape by first-born male increases by 6 times compared with other children. Study findings also provided evidence that adolescent males are moving from lone rape to gang rape in intimate partner relationships. Male adolescents are important group to target in rape prevention programs.

Sexual Violence in America: Public Funding and Social Priority.

We compared lifetime risk, annual incidence, and annual economic burden of sexual violence with other major public health issues in the United States: cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS. With public funding data from 2013, we examined how much public funding is allocated to these public health issues as a proxy of the social priority of addressing each of them. Although sexual violence is as prevalent as and more costly than are these other major public health issues, it receives a fraction of the public funds that they receive.

Beyond the dyad: an assessment of sexual assault prevention education focused on social determinants of sexual assault among college students.

Sexual assault is prevalent in the United States, particularly among college women. Prevention programs are implemented to combat assault, yet rates have not changed for five decades. A course designed to deconstruct contextualized factors contributing to assault was developed as an alternative prevention initiative. The current study assessed the effectiveness of the course compared with a traditional program via in-depth interviews with students. Findings indicated that students in the course were more likely to acknowledge underlying determinants of sexual assault and articulate how such behaviors could lead to assault. The course could be an effective approach to sexual assault prevention education.

Addressing intimate partner violence and sexual violence among adolescents: emerging evidence of effectiveness.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) and sexual violence (SV) are widespread among adolescents and place them on a lifelong trajectory of violence, either as victims or perpetrators. The aim of this review was to identify effective approaches to prevent adolescent IPV and SV and to identify critical knowledge gaps. The interventions reviewed in this article reflect the global focus on interventions addressing violence perpetrated by men against women in the context of heterosexual relationships. Interventions for girls and boys (10-19 years) were identified through electronic searches for peer-reviewed and gray literature such as reports and research briefs. Studies were excluded if they were published before 1990 or did not disaggregate participants and results by age. Programs were classified as "effective," "emerging," "ineffective," or "unclear" based on the strength of evidence, generalizability of results to developing country settings, and replication beyond the initial pilot. Programs were considered "effective" if they were evaluated with well-designed studies, which controlled for threats to validity through randomization of participants. A review of 142 articles and documents yielded 61 interventions, which aimed to prevent IPV and SV among adolescents. These were categorized as "parenting" (n = 8), "targeted interventions for children and adolescents subjected to maltreatment" (n = 3), "school based" (n = 31; including 10 interventions to prevent sexual assault among university students), "community based" (n = 16), and "economic empowerment" (n = 2). The rigor of the evaluations varies greatly. A good number have relatively weak research designs, short follow-up periods, and low or unreported retention rates. Overall, there is a lack of robust standardized measures for behavioral outcomes. Three promising approaches emerge. First, school-based dating violence interventions show considerable success. However, they have only been implemented in high-income countries and should be adapted and evaluated in other settings. Second, community-based interventions to form gender equitable attitudes among boys and girls have successfully prevented IPV or SV. Third, evidence suggests that parenting interventions and interventions with children and adolescents subjected to maltreatment hold promise in preventing IPV or SV by addressing child maltreatment, which is a risk factor for later perpetration or experience of IPV or SV. Results suggest that programs with longer term investments and repeated exposure to ideas delivered in different settings over time have better results than single awareness-raising or discussion sessions. However, lack of rigorous evidence limits conclusions regarding the effectiveness of adolescent IPV and SV prevention programs and indicates a need for more robust evaluation.

Sexual violence in India: addressing gaps between policy and implementation.

The savage Delhi rape of 16 December 2012 was instrumental in generating the Verma Report that framed policies for amending the Criminal Laws related to sexual violence, professionalizing forensic/medical examination of victims, and sensitizing the police, electorate and the educational sectors. Unfortunately, even after a year, the Indian Home Ministry has abysmally failed to implement most recommendations, even underutilizing budgetary allocations. This article addresses gaps in governance systems and offers solutions to the problem of sexual violence in India.

State residence restrictions and forcible rape rates: a multistate quasi-experimental analysis of UCR data.

This study examines whether the presence of state residence restrictions resulted in changes in statewide rates of forcible rape. It builds on the limited geographic coverage of prior studies by including state-level Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data across 19 years for 49 states and the District of Columbia. It uses a quasi-experimental research method based on a longitudinal fixed-effects panel model design, which can help control for relatively static differences between states. Results indicate that when a state residence restriction was present, regardless of how it was measured, rates of UCR forcible rape were higher in the state than when the policy was not present. This suggests that residence restrictions, at least at the state level, are not useful as an overall crime prevention measure, but may be useful for increasing detection or reporting levels of such crimes. However, results also suggest that the size of the increase varied by whether the policy only applied to offenders with child victims or also included those with adult victims. Implications for research and policy are discussed.