Rape Prevention and Risk Reduction: Review of the Research Literature for Practitioners

[ismnotwasm]

Saw yet another "porn reduces rape" thread--I don't participate in those, as the premise is ridiculous as well as simplistic.

But I got to looking around and found this article about rape research, nothing to do with Pornagraphy. It's a rather interesting read, and has salient points which apply when discussing the topic of sexual assault.

Rape Prevention and Risk Reduction: Review of the Research Literature for Practitioners

Kimberly A. Lonsway, Victoria L. Banyard, Alan D. Berkowitz, Christine A. Gidycz, Jackson T. Katz, Mary P. Koss, Paul A. Schewe, and Sarah E. Ullman With contributions from Dorothy Edwards

For many professionals working in the field of sexual assault, one of the most pressing questions is: ""What can we do to prevent it?"" Practitioners have been designing and implementing rape prevention programs for decades, and researchers have been evaluating them for almost as long. The purpose of this article is to summarize the answers we have so far, because the good news is that we have learned some important lessons along the way regarding the prevention of adult and adolescent sexual assault. (The prevention of child sexual abuse will not be addressed in this article). For the purposes of this review, the terms ""rape"" and ""sexual assault"" will be used interchangeably.

However, it won't take long for many readers to realize that there are far more questions than answers. The second purpose of this article is to provide concrete guidance for practitioners on how to design, implement, and evaluate rape prevention programs in the real world where we don't have all the answers from research conducted so far.

In recent years, several resource materials have been published to provide guidance for researchers and practitioners on sexual violence prevention.

For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a document in 2004 entitled Sexual Violence Prevention: Beginning the Dialogue.
Similarly, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center published Sexual Violence and the Spectrum of Prevention: Towards a Community Solution (Davis, Parks, & Cohen, 2006).
Both of these documents provide an overview for a comprehensive approach to prevention for practitioners, including detailed examples of interventions at various levels of influence (e.g., individual, interpersonal, community, societal). The CDC report also offers guidance for agencies to determine which components may best meet their organizational mission, goals, and resources. These documents can help practitioners to carefully think through their prevention strategy and understand where a particular intervention might fit within the larger picture. They can also help practitioners to identify specific goals for interventions that are targeted at different levels of influence and time points when prevention activities can occur. Many people believe that this type of an integrated approach is the most likely to create and sustain changes in broader societal norms.

http://www.vawnet.org/applied-research-papers/print-document.php?doc_id=1655

[KitSileya]

1. You know, the idea that the ubiquity of porn is the reason that there are less reported rapes

is faulty reasoning. Without research, how can we know? Just looking at the rape stats, and then looking at how much porn there is, doesn't mean that more porn means less rape. Perhaps the long, slow slog feminists have done to make rape unacceptable, to make it more acceptable for victims to report or seek help, the campaigns to change cultural views on rape would have been even more successful if at the same time, porn had become less accessible. Who knows? Weren't porn films less objectifying of women before? Less violent? Perhaps today's standard portrayal of women in porn is directly working against awareness campaigns and other attempts to change our culture, only the the attempts are more successful at lowering the number of rapes than the desensitization of porn viewers towards viewing women as humans is at increasing the number.

[ismnotwasm]

2. That's why I feel the premise is ridiculous

And using the term "causation" for rape reduction because of increased porn availability is simplistic as well as ridiculous.

People who brag about their IQ, and have or claim familarity with multifactorial causes in any other topic creep me out when they dummy down about sexual assault.

I was looking at stats, the number of unreported rapes is high and can't be included in the total as well as being technically an unknown number. That most studies are done on college students is disturbing but understandable, lots of studies are done with college students, as they are an available reachable resource --the problem of course being an automatic reduction in diversity.

There are studies showing two outcomes as far as pornography, an increase in willingness to rape and no change at all as shown in questionnaires after viewing different types of Pornagraphy. I didn't see any one I consider credible for reduction. The flaws in these studies should be obvious. Yet they are waved around like the holy grail. Stupid.