Pranks, Obscene Chatters, and Ambiguous Content: Exploring the Identification and Navigation of Inappropriate Messages to a Web-Based Sexual Assault Hotline.

Sexual assault crisis hotlines provide crucial support for survivors. Though some hotline users engage in inappropriate conduct (e.g. prank or obscene calls), few studies explore these interactions. To address the lack of literature exploring inappropriate hotline interactions, we conducted a secondary data analysis of chat transcripts (n = 233) shared with the research team as part of the formative evaluation of a university-based sexual assault program's web-based crisis hotline. From those transcripts, we analyzed potentially inappropriate interactions (n = 38), most of which (n = 28) hotline responders flagged as inappropriate in post-chat log forms. We used codebook thematic analysis to explore how hotline responders identified and navigated these interactions. Our analysis generated three themes describing the processes through which responders seemed to identify potentially inappropriate chats - detecting implausibly graphic and abusive content, identifying patterns of presumably inauthentic chat topics, and interpreting ambiguous content. Hotline responders seemed to navigate ambiguous and less egregious boundary violations by gently redirecting conversations, and addressed clearer violations by setting firm, direct boundaries. Chatters responded to boundary setting by desisting and disconnecting or attempting to reengage responders. Findings highlight ambiguities and challenges web-based sexual assault hotline responders face and suggest a need for additional responder support, training, and debriefing options.

Improving Access to Postassault Healthcare for College Students: Creating a Campus-Based Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner Program.

ABSTRACT: National prevalence data indicate that college students are at a high risk for sexual assault, but most institutions of higher education do not provide postassault medical forensic examinations as part of student-facing healthcare services. College sexual assault patients might have access to sexual assault nurse examiners (SANEs) in local hospitals, if they are available where they are attending school, but unfortunately, many student victims do not have options for postassault health services. Creating campus-based SANE programs could address this gap in services and increase access to healthcare. In this article, we describe how we created a free-standing, campus-based SANE program at Michigan State University. We worked with a multidisciplinary community advisory board to identify core guiding principles to inform stakeholder engagement, program location decisions, program policies, training protocols, staffing plans, and collaborative partnerships with other disciplines (e.g., advocacy, law enforcement, prosecution, forensic sciences). We discuss how we navigated opening the program in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic and share lessons learned for creating campus-based SANE programs.

Adopting a "Both/And" Mindset to Address Relationship Violence and Sexual Misconduct (RVSM) in Institutions of Higher Education.

Michigan State University (MSU) created a long-term, values-based strategic plan to increase help-seeking and reduce the incidence of relationship violence and sexual misconduct. Creating systemic change in institutions of higher education is challenging, particularly so in the wake of massive institutional crises and betrayal, as we had at MSU. In this paper, we address the challenges and critiques of our strategic planning efforts offered by esteemed scholar-activists: Jacobson López (2023), Hirsch and Khan (2023), McMahon (2023), and Boots et al. (2023).

Creating a University Strategic Plan to Address Relationship Violence and Sexual Misconduct (RVSM): An Application of Principles-Focused Evaluation at Michigan State University.

This paper describes a multi-year initiative at Michigan State University (MSU) to change our institutional response to relationship violence and sexual misconduct (RVSM) in the aftermath of a large-scale institutional crisis. While the circumstances at MSU are unique, many universities have faced or will face moments that bring RVSM issues into the spotlight. To inform other colleges and universities, we describe how we developed a 5-year strategic plan to transform services for survivors and develop prevention programming for multiple audiences and at multiple levels of analysis. We titled this framework Know More. Do More. Support More, whereby "know more" reflects our ongoing use of campus climate surveys and data sharing to educate our community about RVSM; "do more" includes our institutional-level strategic plan for culture change; and "support more" provides guidance to our community members on how to respond to disclosures in a trauma-informed way and connect survivors to support services. We discuss the challenges and opportunities that stemmed from our choice to work "within the system" to create this model, as well as the ethical dilemmas we faced in these partnerships.

"It's Hard to Show Empathy in a Text": Developing a Web-based Sexual Assault Hotline in a College Setting.

To increase access to counseling and advocacy services and respond to changes in communication preferences, many victim service programs are expanding their traditional telephone hotlines and adding web chat or text hotlines. However, there is little research available about these web and text-based hotlines. We examined program data collected in the first year of operation of a web-based crisis hotline for sexual assault survivors at a large Midwestern university in the United States as part of a larger evaluation project. We examined how often the web-based chat hotline was used and explored patterns of use by time of day and month, comparing to records from the phone hotline operated by the same campus-based victim service program. We also conducted interviews and two group discussions with volunteers and staff about their experiences with providing crisis intervention in a web-chat medium. Findings suggest that the web-based crisis hotline is being used frequently, nearly as often as the telephone hotline and doubling the total number of crisis contacts the organization had in the year prior to adding the web-based chat hotline. Staff and volunteers identified a number of advantages of a web-based hotline, including increased privacy and accessibility for survivors. Difficulty identifying and conveying emotions in the web-chat context was one of the primary challenges described by staff and volunteers. Operating the web-hotline, therefore, requires additional training for volunteers and staff on how to translate crisis intervention skills into a text-based medium. Suggestions for how to communicate effectively in text-based crisis intervention are discussed, along with other considerations for designing a web or text hotline.