DOWG Members: Lita, Jacquie, Tiombe, Alena

When someone says “You really should have been there” or “You missed a wonderful event”.  This is truly accurate when referring to the 2010 CALCASA Statewide Pre-Conference.  On the first day, CALCASA was deliberate in having a plenary discussion that addressed inclusive leadership for the next generation.  This plenary was facilitated by the CALCASA Dismantling Oppression Work Group (DOWG).  DOWG’s intention at this statewide plenary was to seed conversation in preparing California rape crisis centers to develop inclusive leadership for the next generation of advocates and to provide tools to support participants in becoming strong allies committed to organizations, programs, and services.Participants in this plenary where actively involved in trying to achieve the following objectives:

• Learn and practice a common, social-justice language of equity and alliance.
• To deepen practical understanding of how inequity impacts leadership opportunities.
• To critically analyze current succession planning efforts.
• To use a transition framework to harness creative, inclusive leadership development.

The DOWG was established in 2005 by a small group of activist from the CALCASA Council and membership organizations who perceived a critical need to address issues of oppression and equity within the movement to end sexual violence.  The DOWG consist of a five person panel: Lita Mercado, Jacquie Marroquin, Alena Marie, Tiombe Preston, and Allan Creighton.  The DOWG participated as or were primary trainers at the following events:

• CALCASA Social Justice and Inclusion
• CALCASA Executive Director Meeting
• 2010 CALCASA Statewide Pre-Conference
• 2010 National Sexual Assault Conference

To find out more information about DOWG and or CALCASA trainings, please contact Kavin Black at CALCASA – kavin@calcasa.org or (916)446-2520 ext 305.  Please provide comments in the box below regarding this article

Conference Announcement!

The program for the 2010 National Sexual Assault Conference is out, as is the program supplement with all of the workshop room locations.  Conference participants: remember to pick up a program and program supplement at the Registration Desk on the Mezzanine (M) of the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel if you haven’t already upon checking-in for NSAC.

NSAC 2010 Program Supplement

I think the headline says it all. After months of planning, discussion and organizing, the National Sexual Assault Conference is finally beginning on Wednesday. CALCASA is in Los Angeles at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel where the conference is being held.

Today kicked-off the California Statewide Pre-Conference. In this morning’s plenary session, attendees discussed confidentiality, mandated reporting and record keeping. Tomorrow is the CALCASA Annual Meeting. And Wednesday is the big day!

People from all over California, across the country and around the world will be attending NSAC. There are expected to be about 900 people at the conference. Some of the presenters are already arriving, and we’re excited to learn from them. The conference will feature workshops and plenaries about intervention, prevention, wellness, military, technology, film & media, legal and leadership as they relate to the movement of ending sexual violence.

Attendees are  tweeting — so join in the tweeting frenzy! The hashtag is #NSAC. And don’t forget to follow @CALCASA. We Tweet, You Tweet, Re-Tweet! If you have comments, questions or suggestions while at NSAC, feel free to use Twitter to communicate with CALCASA staff.

We’re so excited and honored to be hosting this conference. We hope everyone enjoys it just as much as we’ve enjoyed bringing together all the voices that are dedicated to building the world that we want to live in — a world free from violence.

Next week almost 900 people will gather in Los Angeles at the 2010 National Sexual Assault Conference. The 2010 National Sexual Assault Conference Program is now available so you can review the program descriptions and speaker biographies.

Soon we will post information about the speakers in the plenary sessions. Materials from the conference workshops will be also be available after the conference. If you are not able to attend this conference (it sold out over a month ago), follow the conference on Twitter using the hashtag #nsac.

There will be over 80 workshops offered in the following tracks:

• Advocacy & Intervention
• Eliminating Prison Rape (sponsored by Just Detention International)
• Leadership Development
• Legal Advocacy (sponsored by Legal Aid Society – Employment Law Center)
• Military
• Prevention (sponsored by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
• Sex Offender Management (sponsored by Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers)
• Technology
• Wellness (sponsored by Joyful Heart Foundation)

See you in Los Angeles or online next week.

Digital Story from Jack

I am exciting about the workshops at the National Sexual Assault Conference next week in Los Angeles, especially the prevention sessions.  Van Lan Truong from Close to Home will lead a workshop titled on “Introducing Vietnamese Community Organizing Work to Prevent Domestic and Sexual Violence Using Community Asset-Based and Close to Home’s model.” (She is also co-leading as session on Participatory Assessment: Mobilizing Communities to Prevent Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault with Allison Berry.)

This session is exciting because she will share her experiences to develop a prevention activities within the Vietnamese community using the values, language and resources of the community to make change.  The lesson learned apply not only to the Vietnamese community, but to anyone working to develop a culturally specific prevention effort.

Check out the digital story (link above) from a young man involved to prevent violence in the Vietnamese community.

I look forward to seeing you at the National Conference.

Riverside, CA – When an incident of sexual violence is a reported, a chain of responders and services come into play.  When sexual violence is reported on a college/university campus, an additional institution with a hierarchy of stakeholders are legally responsible to provide adequate and timely services to survivors as well as corresponding disciplining of the student assailant.  Coordinated community response teams involve a multi-disciplinary response that hinges on partnerships with diverse campus and community stakeholders.

As the OVW Campus Grant states, “coordinated community response teams and task forces should reflect the wide variety of organizations that are involved in campus life in order to involve all the different entities who have a role in meeting the needs of victims of violence against women on campus and holding offenders accountable.”  Building and sustaining a CCRT is challenging, daunting and inherently critical to combatting sexual violence and creating safer communities.

Over the course of four days in early August, Donna and Paul visited the University of California at San Francisco, University of California at Irvine and University of California at Riverside to provide a foundation for effective response teams rooted in safety and communication with campus and community partners.  One day was devoted to meeting with the University of California Steering Committee, the leadership that drives the CCRT at each UC campus.  Meeting the diverse group of committed individuals across the state reminded me not only of the challenges that confront students, staff and faculty but ultimately the tremendous progress made to improve campus response to sexual violence.

PreventConnect.org

Registration has opened for the next PreventConnect web conference titled Under Control: Countering the Value Placed on Power and Control Through Norms Change.

Countering norms that reinforce power and control over others is an opportunity to prevent violence in a lasting, comprehensive way. This web conference highlights specific strategies and efforts that seek to change norms related to gendered violence. Different norms will be examined with regard to their historical context, distinct challenges, and opportunities for collaborative work.

The web conference will be hosted by PreventConnect’s David Lee and lead by Annie Lyles and Christine Chang of the Prevention Institute.  Invited guests include Anna Sharratt, Prevention, Education & Outreach Coordinator, Our VOICE, Inc. and Shannon Breitzman, M.A., Director, Injury, Suicide and Violence Prevention Unit, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

This web conference is part of a series on countering norms that contribute to sexual violence and domestic violence.

This web conference will be held on Thursday, August 26, 2010 and repeated on Wednesday, September 8, 2010. This ninety-minute session will start at 11 AM Pacific DST on August 26, and will be repeated at 11 AM Pacific DST on September 8.

Click here to register for this web conference before it is full.

David Lee presenting on opportunities to prevent teen dating violence

The Family Violence Prevention Fund, Peace Over Violence and Rainbow Services hosted a briefing late week titled “Linking Local Providers with Federal Funding.” The room was packed at Peace Over Violence’s offices as representatives of local service providers learned about opportunities for funding.
I was there to share about statewide and national efforts to address teen dating violence, including exciting national efforts such as CDC’s Rape Prevention and Education and DELTA programs, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Blue Shield Foundation’s Start Strong initiative. I was encouraged when one of the participants shared how successful prevention efforts have been in the schools where she  works.

Representative Lucile Roybal-Allard opened the session encouraging the audience to make sure their voices are heard in congress about the need for domestic violence and sexual assault services. Funding opportunities from the Family Violence Prevention and Services Program, Office of Women’s Health and Office on Violence Against Women were described followed by a detailed presentation on  how to apply for federal grants by Jewish Women International ’s Deborah Rosenbloom.

Along with updates about the status of efforts preparing to renew the Violence Against Women Act in 2011, a panel including representatives from Peace Over Violence, California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, Jewish Women International, CALCASA, and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence addressed local, statewide and national efforts to address teen dating violence.

Click here to get materials from this session.

As a man working in sexual violence and domestic violence movement, frequently I am asked “why do you do this work?” Why do people ask this question?  Is it because they ask everyone (female and male) why do this work? Or are they surprised that a man is engaged in this work?

Another reason is that they want to figure out how to bring more men to violence against women prevention work.  In the article “How Can I Not?”: Men’s Pathways to Involvement in Anti-Violence Against Women Work recently published in the journal Violence Against Women, authors Casey and Smith explore why men get involved in anti-violence against women work.

This qualitative study used interviews with 27 men. While there are some significant limitations of this sample (for example all the men were white), the authors ask an interesting question.  The authors describe their findings as:

First, all men but one had some sort of “sensitizing” or priming experience that raised their level of consciousness regarding issues of violence or gender inequity and seemed to lay the groundwork for being open to involvement when an opportunity arose. Second, all men had at least one tangible opportunity or entrée into an antiviolence group, volunteer opportunity, or job. Third, the meaning that participants had come to attach to the initial sensitizing and/or to the opportunity experience seemed to be a critical component of men’s decision to devote time to antiviolence work.

From your experience, how do men get involved in this work? Myself, I like to point to how my  mother modeled getting involved as she volunteered in a battered women shelter in the 1970s. Her example demonstrated that everyone (including her sons) should do something to end violence against women .

PS. A small correction: the authors describe recruiting through the “Prevention Institute Sexual Violence Listserve” but I think they meant the Prevention Connection Listserv (since Prevention Institute does not have a sexual violence listerv and requests to participate in this study were posted in 2008.)  A lost chance to have Prevention Connection named in a peer reviewed journal.

Below is the full citation and abstract to the article.

“How Can I Not?”: Men’s Pathways to Involvement in Anti-Violence Against Women Work.

Casey E, Smith T. Violence Against Women 2010; 16(8): 953-73.

Click here to see the article on the journal’s web site.

(Copyright © 2010, Sage Publications)

Despite growing male participation in ending violence against women, little is known about the factors that precipitate men’s engagement as antiviolence “allies.” This study presents findings from a qualitative analysis of interviews with 27 men who recently initiated involvement in an organization or event dedicated to ending sexual or domestic violence. Findings suggest that men’s engagement is a process that occurs over time, that happens largely through existing social networks, and that is influenced by exposure to sensitizing experiences, tangible involvement opportunities and specific types of meaning making related to violence. Implications for models of ally development and for efforts to engage men in antiviolence work are discussed.

Uploading photographs or videos from your smart phone or digital camera to the internet has become as common place as taking a breathe.  Photographs are shared with family, friends and strangers displaying moments in your life.  You share photos and videos of your pets, your children, that weekend in Tijuana, or that wonderful dessert you baked that has all the flavor and absolutely no calories.

When you upload those photos or videos to the internet, you may be sharing more than special moments.  You may be unwillingly giving a complete stranger a way to find where you work, live, and play through geotagging.

Many smart phones and digital cameras have built in Global Positioning Systems (GPS) chips.  When a photo or video is taken from these devices, it is embedded with data that stores the longitude, latitude, and sometimes altitude, bearing and distance of where the picture was taken.  This data is not seen in the photo but is stored in the metadata and can be read by devices or websites with software that has the capability to process the information.  In other words, geotagging can tell the user the location of the content of a given picture or video.

Geotagging has become a topic of debate for people that have concerns about their safety and privacy as well as for people that see the benefits of  the application.

Smart phones and digital cameras that have GPS have a means by which the geotagging feature can be disabled.  The procedure for turning off geotagging is not the same on every device and can usually be found within layers and layers of the menu.  Beware that disabling this function on your device may cause other features to become inoperable.

To read more about geotagging go to;

The New York Times – Web Photos that Reveal Secrets

MSN – Geotagging Goes Mainstream

What is geotagging

The 2010 National Sexual Assault Conference (NSAC) — taking place Sept. 1-3 in Los Angeles — will welcome a diverse population largely due to the recipients of the National Scholarship. Survivors and underrepresented populations from across the United States and its territories have been awarded the opportunity to be in attendance.

Throughout the application process, I’ve been communicating with award recipients, and I have learned about the dedication and passion that many have for the field of violence against women as volunteers, employees of organizations or as community activist across our nation and the territories of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Mariana Islands.

National Scholarship awardees will bring a voice from rural, tribal and urban communities that will tell the stories of the challenges and triumphs in their respective areas of work to eradicate sexual violence against children, adults and elders. Their attendance will add to the dialogue and exchange of ideas to achieve the goal of empowerment and progress in the movement.

This week’s news includes popular headlines that Proposition 8, passed by voters in November of 2008, was overturned by 9th Circuit District Court Judge Vaughn Walker. The outcome of the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, indicates the Proposition discriminates against gays and lesbians.

Although Proposition 8 fails to possess even a rational basis, the evidence presented at trial shows that gays and lesbians are the type of minority strict scrutiny was designed to protect…

As a matter of practice, CALCASA does not take formal positions on inititatives. The Association did, however, note our deep concern regarding Proposition 8 specifically as it relates to our work as allies and as advocates who believe that oppression in all its forms, plays a fundamental role in the persistence of sexual violence in our culture. Our statement in 2008 could easily be repeated today in our celebration of the ruling:

Anything that undermines the status of an already marginalized class of people inherently serves to further oppress them. That oppression comes in the form of sexual violence, creating obstacles to service, and reduced public support for providing service and advocacy to often-underserved populations. CALCASA supports the work of many of our colleagues and sister organizations who work tirelessly as allies and or who identify as part of the queer community who would be affected by this initiative.

See the full text of the decision below:

Does this decision impact the work you do in your community?

Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson

Passengers on cruise ships headed from or toward American ports will gain increased security, services and rights when the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act of 2010 is  implemented thanks to the leadership of a California Congresswoman, vocal survivors and the President of the United States.

On Tues. July 31, the President signed H.R. 3360, the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act, sponsored by Congresswoman Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento). In a press release, the Congresswoman credits “Laurie Dishman, a Sacramento, CA resident and a constituent of Rep. Matsui’s, who wrote to her Representative after being sexually assaulted on a cruise ship – and asked for help. After several Congressional hearings which brought to light the gross inadequacies of current safety requirements on cruise ships, Rep. Matsui introduced H.R. 3360 in the House of Representatives.”

Congresswoman Matsui states that “H.R. 3360 will improve the safety and security of all cruise ship passengers traveling in and out of U.S. waters, and provide common-sense security measures to prevent crimes from occurring – and protections and support for victims and their families if and when they do.”

Also applauding the enactment was Ken Carver, President of International Cruise Victims Association (ICV): “Today marks the beginning of a new accountability for any crimes that are committed against passengers on cruise ships…This came about because a small group of victims joined together four and one-half years ago to form ICV. From just a few families, ICV now has membership in over 20 countries. The lesson learned from this is that no one should ever underestimate the power of organized victims, who all are volunteers, to make changes. The passage of this legislation would not have happened without the dedicated support of Sen. Kerry and Rep. Matsui who joined our efforts to pass this historic legislation. This legislation will protect millions of passengers in the coming years and we are deeply indebted to all of those that help make this happen.”

A brief description of the policies signed into law are as followed:

• Prevention
  • Mandate all passenger and crew cabin doors be equipped with peep holes or other mean of visual identification
  • Mandate all passenger and crew cabin doors be equipped with security latches and time-sensitive key technology
  • Require cruise ships to maintain electronic video surveillance to assist in documenting crimes and provided as evidence for prosecution
    • Video records shall be made available to law enforcement, upon request, during an investigation
  • Cruise operators are mandated to provide a “security guide” to each passenger that describes medical and security personnel designated to prevent and respond to criminal and medical situations within 24-hour contact instructions
    • Security guide will also provide information to passengers on how to report crimes to appropriate US law enforcement REGARDLESS of where the crime is committed (US waters, high seas, in any country visit on the voyage)
    • Security guide must be published on the website of cruise ship owners/operators
  • Limits on Crew Access
    • Vessel owners/operators must implement procedures and restrictions concerning which crewmembers have access to passenger cabins
    • And limit the periods of time crew will have access to passenger cabins
• Intervention
  • Mandate operators/owners to maintain on the vessel adequate, in-date supplies of anti-retroviral medication and other medications designed at preventing STDs
    • required to maintain adequate equipment and materials for performing a rape exam/rape kits to evaluate the patient for trauma, provide medical care, and relevant medical services
  • Vessels are required to make available at all times medical staff (licensed physician or RN) who have undergone a credentialing process
    • Medical staff must have at least 3 years post-graduate/registration clinical practice and emergency medicine
    • Is able to provide assistance in the event of a sexual assault and to conduct rape kit exam
    • Meet guidelines established by the American College of Emergency Physicians related to the treatment and care of SA victims
    • Prepare and provide SA victims with medical documentation of the findings of the exam
    • Required to provide patient with free and immediate access to contact local law enforcement, FBI, Coast Guard, or Embassy or Consulate, and the National Sexual Assault Hotline program or other third party victim advocacy hotline service
    • Required to provide telephone line and internet-accessible computer terminal by which the SA victim may confidentially access law enforcement, attorney and information and support services available through National Sexual Assault Hotline Program or other third party advocacy service
• Victim Privacy
  • Masters of the vessel are required to treat all information, especially medical information, confidential and shall not be released to cruise line or owner of vessel or any legal representative thereof without the prior knowledge and written approval of patient, or patient next-of-kin
  • Exceptions include:
    • information, other than medical findings, shall be included in centralized crime log
    • information to secure the safety of passengers or crew on board the vessel
    • any information to law enforcement official performing official duties in the course of investigation
• Record Keeping
  • All vessels are required to keep a centralized log book of all complaints of crimes and make log book available upon the request to any agent of the FBI, Coast Guard, and law enforcement official performing official duties int he course of investigation
• Reporting
  • Owner/operator of vessel must contact nearest FBI field office or legal attache as soon as possible after the occurrence of specified crime commitment
  • Shall file a report of the incident on an Internet based portal maintained by the Secretary
  • Borderless Reporting
    • Reporting crimes within this measure are applicable regardless of vessel registry and if the vessel is owned in whole or in part, by a US person/corporation, regardless of the nationality of the victim if committed within the maritime jurisdiction of the US
    • if the offense of concern is committed by or against a US national outside of the jurisdiction of any nation
    • if the offense of concern occurs in the Territorial Sea of the US
    • if the offense of concern is committed by or against a US national on a vessel during a voyage that departed from or will arrive at a US port
• Information
  • Secretary shall maintain a statistical compilation of all incidents on an Internet site that provides numerical accounting of missing persons or alleged crimes.
  • Data shall be updated quarterly and each cruise line shall be identified by name, and each crime shall be identified as to whether the crime was committed by a passenger or crew member
  • Cruise lines taking in or discharging passengers in the US shall provide a Internet website link to Federal database on their website
• Staff training/certification
  • The Secretary shall issue guidelines, training curricula, and inspection and certification procedures within 6 months of enactment of Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act of 2010
  • Within 1 year of enactment the Secretary and director of FBI shall develop training standards and curricula for security personnel, crewmembers, and law enforcement officials on the appropriate methods of prevention, detection, evidence preservation, and reporting of criminal activities in international waters.
    • This act also establishes minimum standards in which this training must adhere on page 8 Section 3508(b).
  • Beginning 2 years after these standards are established, no ship may enter US port or carry a US citizen as a passenger unless there is at least 1 crewmember onboard who is certified as having successfully completed training in prevention, detection, evidence preservation, and reporting of criminal activities
• The Act also lists a litany of penalties if any of these sections are violated by ship operators/owners.

Let us know what your thoughts are concerning the signing of the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act.

In July 2010, the Internal Revenue Service released information to help small nonprofit organizations who are in danger of losing their tax exempt status for failure to file Form 990-N or Form 990 -EZ.  This relief is not for all tax exempt organizations. 

If your organization is required to complete Form 990 or Form 990- PF and have not filed for three consecutive years; your tax exempt status can be automatically revoked.

In September 2009 I provided information regarding the IRS new regulations for Form 990 and the possible implications for rape crisis centers.  In March 2010 I followed up with a webinar titled “Are You Ready for the New 990” in which Steve Zimmerman of Spectrum Nonprofit Services provided extensive information regarding what steps non profit organizations should take to prepare for filing Form 990.

For more information on this topic, go to:

Internal Revenue Service

Guide Star

The “Financial Series” webinars focusing on nonprofit finances has been rescheduled for September 2010.  This multi webinar series is intended for Financial Administrators, Executive Management, New Managers, and anyone who wants to learn about trends, practices, and procedures for responsible fiscal management operation of a nonprofit organization.  As a California rape crisis center, you can participate in all three sessions or select the ones that are most relevant to you.  The description for each webinar is listed below:

Financial Leadership in Turbulent Times

Tuesday, September 7, 2010 at 10:00 am – 11:30 am (Pacific Standard Time)

How do you know how your organization is performing if you don’t have the financial information you need?  Even in the best of times financial information can be confusing.  This 90 minute webinar aims to cut through the clutter of financial information and help participants understand the crucial components of their financial reporting to assess their financial health.  To participate in this webinar , please register.

The Art & Science of Budgeting

Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at 10:00 am – 11:30 am (Pacific Standard Time)

Organizational budgets are meant to be numerical expression of the organization’s program plan for the coming year.  To do this, there need to be an inclusive process.  This on-line training will walk participants through the five stages of budgeting, including roles and time-lines in putting together the budget.  To participate in this webinar, please register.

Dashboard Driving

Tuesday, September 21, 2010 at 10:00 am – 11:30 am (Pacific Standard Time)

Engaging your board of directors in a strategic conversation about your organization while trying to keep them informed can be challenging.  In this session, we’ll introduce you to the “dashboard” – an engaging brief document that highlights the key metrics for your organization in a way that every board member can understand and allows you to drive the conversation toward those things that matter most.  This webinar coves the concept as well as process for implementing.  To participate in this webinar, please register.

For more information please contact Kavin Black at kavin@calcasa.org or 916-446-2520 x305.

The California Safe at Home Program continues to expand and service more victims each year, according to the quarterly newsletter distributed by the Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s office, who is responsible for administering the confidential address program.

“Since 1999, Safe at Home has helped shield the home addresses of more than 5,000 survivors of domestic violence, stalking and sexual assault, as well as reproductive health care doctors, nurses, volunteers and patients. Now 35 states have confidential address programs, many of which were modeled after California’s program,” stated the newsletter.

The state’s program and Safe at Home participants also received a policy boost from the U.S. Department of Treasury that issued a November 2009 ruling “allowing national banks and credit unions to accept the contact address of a state’s confidential address program rather than a residence address” as previous mandated before the federal clarification.  This new ruling gives victims further confidentiality and protection.

Even as California continues to suffer from record deficits and slow economic recovery, this essential victim’s service continues to train and conduct outreach through low-cost communication alternatives such as Internet webinars and telephone training. “Safe at Home staff have completed phone training for 15 new enrolling agencies and provided refresher trainings to another 17 agencies.”

The newsletter also includes an update on Senate Bill 1233 by Senator Jenny Oropeza (D-Long Beach), that would remove the Jan. 1, 2013 program sunset and make the Safe at Home program a permanent addition to the state’s victims’ service apparatus.  The Secretary of State urges you to “phone, email or write your Assemblymember and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and emphasize why you support a permanent confidential address program in our state.”

To find your Assemblymember, access the Assembly’s “Find My District” tool.

You can also contact the Governor’s office at his Contact page.

Let us know how the Safe at Home program has served victims and survivors in your community.

At this week’s National Coalition Against Domestic Violence Conference, hundreds of people gathered in Anaheim, CA, to rejuvenate, learn and network.  From the opening session, we considered what leadership in the domestic violence movement looks like.  I have the opportunity to co-lead a session with Casey Keene of VAWnet titled “Web 2.0: Using Online Technology to Advance the Movement to End Domestic Violence.”

At our workshop we were pleased to see that more and more advocates see the value of using tools such as Facebook and Twitter in their work. Check out all of the domestic violence, sexual violence and feminist organizations that I follow on Twitter.  We gave examples like Pixel Project and iHollaback.

How do you use online technology to advance the movement to end violence against women?

Lesbian relationships, like those that do not appear to adhere to the white heterosexual middle-class norms, have been misrepresented by the mainstream in the United States for decades.  Similarly, sexual violence has also been grossly misrepresented by the media.  Violence within lesbian communities more so.

The U.S. mainstream media features stories about lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer (LGBTQ) communities through such mediums as:

(1) characters on scripted and reality shows;

(2) marriage for same-sex couples has become a rallying cry for mainstream LGBTQ organizations (which is not indicative nor reflective of the diversity of behaviors and opinions around state regulation of queer relationships) and;

(3) legislative efforts suggest the United States provides legal protections for individuals that self-identify as or are perceived to be LGBTQ when targeted in acts of violence

An article in The Washington Post describing an abusive relationship in the political circle of Washington, D.C. reminds us of the tremendous work we have in dismantling stereotypes and re/constructing narratives.  Judge Russell F. Canan sentenced Taylar Nuevelle, 41, to the maximum sentence under the court’s guidelines of 5 1/2 years for domestic violence of a her former partner, Judge Janet Albert.  In February 2010, a jury found Nuevelle guilty of stalking Judge Albert.

Merely having media representation of queer individuals and/or relationships mirrors what Sarah Schulman in Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences refers to as “falsely cod[ing] that work as progressive.  But, if the actual meaning and content of the specific representation is examined, many of these representations are retrograde” (2009).

What does the media articulate as suitable for public consumption?  The article lacks context surrounding domestic violence and stalking in lesbian relationships.  Such a gap further reinforces the second-class treatment the media deploys by portraying queer* relationships and/or individuals as pathological or lesser than heterosexual rather than using the opportunity to draw attention to unhealthy and unsafe relationships.  Mentioning the emotional trauma experienced by Judge Albert as a result of the abusive relationship does not make up for the lack of context, especially when choosing to end the article by quoting Nuevelle’s attorney, “The lesson of this is don’t have a bad breakup with a lesbian judge. It means you go to jail for 5 1/2 years.”

In other words, abusive relationships go unnoticed unless one person in the relationship holds a position in court?  Abusive relationships are the norm and should continue to go unnoticed, unreported, and therefore unchanged, otherwise people are punished?  Latif Doman, Nuevelle’s attorney, seems to discourage readers/public from challenging relationship norms.  For those of us in the field of ending gender-based/sexual violence, Mr. Doman reminds us of the importance in developing partnerships with allies including attorneys, judges, law enforcement and journalists so as to counter the victim-blaming narrative so often portrayed in the media and legal system.  Reframing the narrative of relationship violence is critical work when prosecuting perpetrators/abusers and protecting survivors as a means of intervention.

*In this post, I used queer as an umbrella term to refer to individuals and/or relationships that are not defined or self-identified as heterosexual.

It’s almost here, CALCASA’s 2010 Statewide Pre-Conference and the 2010 National Sexual Assault Conference (NSAC) in Hollywood, beginning Aug. 30 through Sep. 3. As we work on the final details of both conferences, we are excited to report that CALCASA was able to support CA Rape Crisis Center Staff in attending both conferences by providing about 120 scholarships!

Scholarship were made available to current 2010 CALCASA Member Rape Crisis Centers, and CalEMA grant recipients, to help support their participation at both conferences this year. Scholarships will cover participant’s travel costs as well as limited, discounted registration fees. All scholarships are on a reimbursement basis and about 55 CA Rape Crisis Centers accessed scholarships for staff to attend.

We are excited to have CA Rape Crisis Center Staff attend both conferences and hope that these events will provide opportunities to learn, network and simply have a great time meeting new people. We look forward to seeing everyone there!

On May 25, 2010, Erica Olsen, Technology Safety Specialist, at the National Network to End Domestic Violence and Valenda Applegarth with the Greater Boston Legal Services co-facilitated “Technology and Safety on Campus.”  Below is the presentation in pdf.

Technology and Safety on Campus

College and university students organizing to combat sexual violence use a multi-tiered approach to advocate for themselves, their peers, and for future generations of students. Some students use Take Back the Night marches which draw attention to sexual assault and other forms of sexual violence. Performance theatre, dance, art and film are hugely popular with college students when looking to convey stories of survivors. However educational, powerful and provocative such strategies are to those engaged in the work or to observers, they require little to no institutional support.

Gaining institutional support is central when collaboratively developing a victim/survivor centered sexual assault policy that outlines what constitutes sexual violence, sanctions for perpetrators and campus/community resources for survivors and/or those that have witnessed violence. Students Active For Ending Rape (SAFER) is an organization based in New York City that fights sexual violence and rape culture by empowering student-led campaigns to reform college sexual assault policies.

To learn more about SAFER, listen to the interview with SAFER’s Sarah Martino, Communications Coordinator and Christine Borges, Policy and Research Coordinator.

At the Start Strong Annual Meeting in July 2010, the 11 sites funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Blue Shield of California met to learn from each other. Each site brought teen leaders who spent the meeting sharing with each other and developing a PSA, learning to tweet and writing OpEd pieces. This teen dating violence initiative is one of the most exciting new developments in teen dating violence prevention as each site has developed a campaign that integrates education for 11-14 year olds, the engagement of teen influencers (including parents and older teens), communications campaigns and policy development.

Each site has developed its own effort.  Here are some examples: Peace Over Violence in Los Angeles holds its annual Denim Day; Start Strong Idaho has used the Twilight movies to anchor its prevention efforts; Start Strong Boston recently held a Break Up Summit ; Start Strong Rhode Island is developing a teen dating violence video game; Start Strong Bridgeport rated recent films and videos on how they address relationships, and Start Strong Oakland has “I Am Jane” campaign.

I left this meeting excited about the creativity of each of these sites to integrate youth leadership with education, marketing and policy.  While these programs use either SAFE DATES or the 4^th R educational curricula, what separates Start Strong prevention efforts from most other prevention efforts is the comprehensive mix of activities.

Teen dating violence and sexual violence prevention is more than changing people’s knowledge, it is about changing our culture.  It is clearer to me more than ever that changing culture takes more than classroom presentations; it will also need to include poetry slams, youth-led gatherings and creative use of media to advance change.

Come back here for blogs with more details about these Start Strong programs.

Stanford, CA – Saunie Schuster and W. Scott Lewis, partners at the National Education for Higher Education Risk Management (NCHERM), led the National Institute on Responding to Sexual Misconduct, a two day training at Stanford University on how to develop responsive sexual misconduct policies and training hearing boards.  Participants that currently serve on their judicial affairs/disciplinary boards attended the Institute to enhance their capacity building around sexual misconduct cases.  The first day focused on understanding the federal laws that provide the legal framework for college campuses to address sexual misconduct policy.  On the second day, participants from across California, Oregon and Washington discussed challenges surrounding training hearing boards and engaged in case scenarios to hone their skills as hearing officers.

Youth Radio, a fabulous program based in Oakland, California (also Los Angeles, Washington DC and Atlanta), created this video from the youth who attended the July Violence Against Women and Teen Dating Violence Prevention Forum held in Sacramento.

Youth Radio’s BOM teen dating violence prevention program uses media to engage youth in a discussion about dating. “Dial Down Your Drama” is a key element of this program that values youth voices being in the forefront.

What other examples do you know where youth have a meaningful voice in prevention efforts?

On July 27, 2010, the Campus Program hosted a webinar on “Creating an effective protocol to intervene in violence against women” led by Dr. Peter J. Meagher at Reed College.

Webinar Materials

Text chat transcription

Webinar recording (NOTE: recording starts from slide 13)

Creating an Effective Protocol to Intervene in Violence Against Women

Since the National Sexual Assault Conference (NSAC) is going to be in the Movie Capital of the World — Hollywood, Calif. — it’s only fitting to include a Film Festival as a component of the conference.

The full lineup is yet to be released, but I can say who will be opening and closing the festival. On Wednesday, Steve Rosen and Terri DeBono will be showing their film Boyhood Shadows. They will show a film that follows the journey of a man named Glenn Kulik, revealing a story that began as a young boy under the power of a sexual predator. The story chronicles Glenn’s struggle as he tries to make sense of his life as a youngster, keeping his secret and shame inside, promising to tell no one.

Glenn, along with other crew from the film, will be at the festival to discuss the making of the film, its message and why it’s so important for survivors to speak out.

The last film to screen at NSAC is Nancy Schwartzman‘s THE LINE. This film asks the question: Where is the line defining consent? Told through a “sex-positive” lens, it is a 24 minute documentary about a young woman who is raped, but her story isn’t cut and dry. She’s not a “perfect victim” and decides to confront her attacker, recording the conversation with a hidden camera. The documentary includes discussions about justice, accountability and “rape culture” from sex workers, survivors and activists.

The NSAC film festival will be sure to incite emotional conversations, artistic discussions and bring to light difficult realities that conference attendees are working to change.

L to R: Chief Justice Ronald George, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Judge Tani Cantil-Sakauye. Photo: Governor's Press Office

On Thursday, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger nominated Judge Tani Cantil-Sakauye to replace retiring Chief Justice Ronald George as the state’s top judge.  If confirmed by voters, Cantil-Sakauye would become California’s first woman and Asian-American Chief Justice. Also, if confirmed, California’s supreme court will have a female majority for the first time in it’s history.  Listen to KQED’s profile of Judge Cantil-Sakauye below:

Watch the Governor’s announcement below:

Earlier this month, CA Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald George announced his retirement after serving on the state’s high court for 19 years. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger released a statement highlighting George’s “tremendous commitment to justice with extraordinary dedication to upholding impartiality under the law.”  KQED did a profile on George’s retirement announcement:

Tell us what you think about the changing chief’s on the state’s Supreme Court.

CA Supreme Court Justices (L to R): Carlos R. Moreno, Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, Joyce L. Kennard, Chief Justice Ronald George, Marvin Baxter, Ming Chin, Carol Corrigan

On Monday June 21, 2010, the California Supreme Court unanimously upheld and protected the state’s rape shield law, that would prevent specific instances of a victim’s sexual conduct from being admitted as evidence or proof of consent by the victim in a prosecution of a sexual assault or other sex offense.  The 7 to 0 opinion of the court sets an optimistic precedent for the protection of future victims and prevents defendants from using a victim’s sexual history as proof of consent.

More details on this decision and the specifics of this case after the break…

The Supreme Court heard the case of People v. Fontana in which the background and decision is as followed:

The crime occurred in San Francisco in March of 2003 at the Windsor Hotel where the offender, Danny Fontana, a registered sex offender, was residing. Fontana and the 19 year old victim, hereby known as “Irene S.,” had become acquaintances because they were both regular customers at a local discount store. Irene had expressed interest to the store owner that she was looking for a cheap laptop for school. Soon after, the offender had mentioned he had a laptop in his room for sale but did not want to bring it to the store and that Irene would have to come to his room to view the discount laptop. After initially refusing, Irene eventually made her way to the offender’s hotel and was forced into his room where she was threatened with her life, strangled, sexually assaulted, and then photographed.

When Irene was able to eventually leave the offender’s premises, she later reported the rape to the discount store owner and soon after her father who notified law enforcement.

The offender, Danny Fontana had been previously convicted of rape in 1975, as well as false imprisonment, assault with intent to commit rape, and attempting to dissuade a witness in a 1992, where he threatened a woman at knife point to perform oral copulation. Fontana had been classified as a high-risk sex offender and was on parole. Fontana admitted to strangling Irene, but as a defense against the victim coming onto him and offering to perform sexual acts in exchange for the laptop. He also claimed to strangle her because of his ”lifelong fear of having his penis bitten off” when she offered to perform oral sex. Additionally, he claimed that the victim’s genital injuries were caused by her consensual sex with her boyfriend several hours prior to suspected assault and he knew about it because he witnessed seminal fluid “in her privates.”  During the investigation, Irene admitted to having sex with her boyfriend twice that morning.

The defense attorney petitioned the trial court judge to have an evidentiary hearing without the jury present, in order to prove that Irene’s sexual activities earlier that day were relevant to Fontana’s defense that he did not cause the rape-related injuries. Forensic experts agreed that her genital injuries could have been caused by regular sexual activity, but that her other injuries were absolutely caused by strangling and the defendants claims could not explain the injuries to her oral cavity.  The trial court judge denied the defense’s petition to include the victim’s sexual history, citing the lack of relevance that would allow the lowering state’s rape shield law. The jury found Fontana guilty of forcible digital penetration, forcible oral copulation, assault with intent to commit rape, digital penetration, oral copulation, and all by use of a deadly weapon.  Fontana was sentenced to 75 years to life plus a determinate 14 years for forcible oral copulation.

The Court of Appeal reversed the trial courts decision, finding that the trail court erred in excluding evidence of Irene’s consensual encounter earlier that day, which could have provided an alternative explanation for injuries to Irene.

The Supreme Court, upon review, rejected Fontana’s claim that the trial court deprived him of his right to confront witnesses or his right to present a defense. They stated the following reasons:

1. “The inability of the defense to prove that her oral injuries were caused by her consensual sex earlier in the day.”
2. “The trial jury found beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant digitally penetrated the victim, as the victim had testified and contrary to the defendant’s testimony that he had no sexual contact with the victim at all.  In making this finding, the jury necessarily rejected the defendant’s claim that he had lashed out violently (but not sexually) at the victim because of his lifelong fear or having his penis bitten off during oral sex.” Which was thoroughly rebutted by his admissions that he demanded oral sex in 1992 and that he engaged in oral sex with his current girlfriend.
3. The Supreme Court agreed with the trial courts description that the defendant’s claims were “utterly fantastic and inherently unbelievable and [an] incredible claim that the [Irene] on her own initiative, despite refusing to come up before, on her own initiative came up to the defendant’s room after recent sex with [her] boyfriend…”
4. The Supreme Court found that the defendants contradicted his own claim by his actions of taking his shirt off and sitting next to her on his bed, “which is presumably the opposite of how one would have acted if he had seen semen ‘in her privates’ and had been disgusted.”
5. The Supreme Court also agreed with the trail court that the “defendant’s claim that there was visible semen ‘in her privates’ several hours after Irene had intercourse and despite having worn panties in the interim defies gravity and common sense, and the defendant offered no medical foundation that could link his observation to her prior conduct.”
6. Finally the Supreme Court found the “defendant had little need to establish that Irene had actually engaged in sex that day in order to support his contention that he was disgusted by the appearance of ‘her privates,’ since it can be difficult to distinguish visually between seminal fluid and cervical mucus, which is a normal discharge that increases around the time of ovulation.  Defendant’s testimony depended on his belief that what he saw was seminal fluid.”

Is California’s current rape shield statute adequate enough to protect a victim’s past from being put on trial?  We’d like your feedback.

Earlier this week, a colleague forwarded me “Surprise! Immigration is a Woman’s Issue” written by Gloria Steinem and Pramila Jayapal with the Women’s Media Center.  Steinam and Pramila argue that immigration is a woman’s issue because women and children are severely impacted by workplace discrimination, gender-based/sexual violence, a backlogged immigration system, and ineligibility for various services including health insurance.  The authors challenge the country’s inaccurate portrayal of immigrants benefiting from the resources in the United States by shedding light about how recent immigrants are impacted by systematic factors.

Some key points from the article include:

• “Many female immigrants are fleeing domestic violence, female genital mutilation, and other human rights abuses against females in their own countries.  Female immigrants are much more likely to have been the victims of violence than to be its perpetrators — just as are females in general.
• Female immigrants suffer even more workplace wage discrimination than do their male counterparts. The threat of deportation makes them fearful of reporting sexual assault, sexual harassment, domestic violence and other punishments that are overwhelmingly female.
• Women and children make up more than 90% of the thousands of unwilling immigrants brought here every year by sex traffickers, yet such victims are far more likely to end up in prison than are the traffickers.
• The average immigrant woman is better educated than her male counterpart, even when both are in low-paying jobs. Women are also more likely to be students in English language classes – many classrooms are as much as 70% female – because they want to instruct or to keep up with their children.
• Though immigrants who are permanent legal residents pay the same taxes as do citizens, they are not allowed to receive Medicaid for five years. This punishes women disproportionately because they are child bearers and caregivers It also endangers the public in general by reducing the level of health in schools and workplaces. Nonetheless, this prohibition was enshrined in the recent healthcare reform bill.”

How do we integrate this knowledge into our prevention and intervention efforts to end sexual violence on campus?  The relevance isn’t only for institutions with large immigrant student populations, but for all campuses given that a cornerstone of higher education is to further prepare students in our increasingly diverse community.  Institutions need to, if they haven’t already, assessed their outreach, service delivery, campus security, response protocol, and disciplinary policies for accessibility to underserved communities.

Sexual violence is hugely under-reported throughout the United States.  To combat sexual violence, it is critical to work with partners and allies in order to create a more inclusive campus environment.  That community-level work, however, starts first on an individual basis, whereby one self-reflects and assesses one’s own awareness and biases around immigration, privilege, and history.

Resources

• Immigrant Women and Sexual Violence
• National Network to End Sexual Violence Against Immigrant Women
• Multicultural Efforts to End Sexual Violence at Purdue University
• Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Factory by Grace Chang

If you have resources relating to immigrant women and sexual violence, please post them or contact us so we can share the information on our website by emailing livia@calcasa.org.

I was very excited when I read this in the article recently published in Family Community Health titled A Prospective Randomized Controlled Trial of an Interpersonal Violence Prevention Program With a Mexican American Community.

If a community’s challenges are viewed without consideration of the historical context of the impact of oppression, discrimination, and intergenerational trauma, they may be misunderstood and therefore be addressed in ways that perpetrate the problems rather than produce lasting change.

I had met the lead author Patricia Kelly several years ago at an American Public Health Association conference where she impressed me with her community centered approaches to violence prevention. She later joined a PreventConnect web conference on measuring prevention.

As I read this article about a Community-Based Participatory Research project in South Texas, I was pleased to see how the program was developed.  Instead of having the researchers select a curriculum to evaluation in a selected community, CBPR is a process in which the researchers work with the community members to design, implement and evaluate the program.

After careful consideration the community members decided to implement El Joven Noble, a curriculum developed in California by Jerry Tello (who was recently a guest on a PreventConnect web conference) and was adapted to address the community in South Texas

This process of having community members play an active role with researchers is a model that sexual violence and domestic violence prevention programs should consider. (In New York City, Project ENVISION is using CBPR approaches.) By having this active community engagement, the community member were able to shape a culturally relevant program with community support that demonstrated improvements in nonviolent self-efficacy and endorsement of program values.

As the authors conclude:

CBPR provides a methodology to engage groups and communities in the design, implemenataion, and evaluation of their own prevention programs. It is well suited for the inlcuison of community values, cultural heritate and hostrorical perspective into both the research process and the product. CBPR also emphasizes the empowerment of inidivudals and communities through the research process.

Below is the full abstraction and citation of this article:

A Prospective Randomized Controlled Trial of an Interpersonal Violence Prevention Program With a Mexican American Community.

Kelly PJ, Lesser J, Cheng AL, Oscos-Sanchez M, Martinez E, Pineda D, Mancha J. Family and Cmomunity Health 2010; 33(3): 207-215.

Click here for a link to the article abstract on the journal’s web site

(Copyright © 2010, Lippincott Williams and Wilkins)

Using methods of community-based participatory research, a prospective randomized controlled trial of a violence prevention program based on Latino cultural values was implemented with elementary school children in a Mexican American community. Community members participated in intervention program selection, implementation, and data collection. High-risk students who participated in the program had greater nonviolent self-efficacy and demonstrated greater endorsement of program values than did high-risk students in the control group. This collaborative partnership was able to combine community-based participatory research with a rigorous study design and provide sustained benefit to community partners.

Have you ever wished you could give more than just kind words of appreciation to that special individual who is doing an outstanding job at your local California rape crisis center?  Here is your opportunity to do so.  CALCASA is accepting nominations for its 2010 Member Recognition Awards.

  You can nominate individuals for the following categories:

• Outstanding Board Member
• Outstanding Executive Director or Sexual Assault Program Director
• Outstanding Intervention Staff or Volunteer
• Outstanding Prevention Staff or Volunteer

This is the 6th year that award winners will be honored at the CALCASA Annual Meeting that will take place at the Renaissance Hotel and Spa in Los Angeles, California on Tuesday, August 31, 2010 from 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM.  What makes this event so wonderful is that recipients will be honored by their peers.  In addition, winners in each category will receive:

• Free travel to the CALCASA Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, CA.
• Free lodging.
• Complimentary Statewide Pre-Conference and National Sexual Assault Conference registration.
• A personal award.

To see specific rules and criteria for nominating someone, please download the 2010 CALCASA Nomination Packet.  Submission of nominations must be made no later than Wednesday, August 11, 2010to be considered for the award.  For questions regarding the CALCASA 2010 Member Recognition Awards, please contact Kavin Black at 916-446-2520 x 305 or kavin@calcasa.org.

2010 CALCASA Nomination Packet (word)

2010 CALCASA Nomination Packet (PDF)

Chad Sniffen speaking at the Ending Violence Against Women and Teen Dating Violence Forum

Almost 200 people attended the California Department of Public Health’s “Ending Violence Against Women and Teen Dating Violence: A forum for Primary Prevention Advocates” held in Sacramento on July 13-14, 2010.  This fifth annual gathering focused on teen dating violence.

I gave a workshop on “Emerging Themes in Sexual Violence and Domestic Violence Prevention”, and CALCASA’s Chad Sniffen co-facilitated a panel titled “Building Intergenerational Partnerships for Preventing Teen Dating Violence.”

Other speakers included an opening keynote by Jackson Katz calling for greater engagement of men to address men’s violence against women; a session by Elizabeth Reed on “Losing the Gender in Gender-Based Violence” and Clea McNeely, author of The Teen Years Explained; A Guide to Healthy Adolescent Development discussing adolescent development.

CALCASA’s PreventConnect Project recorded many of sessions and will soon release them as podcasts.

I’ve been pondering my Utopian world. Most of my requests are petty: more Pinkberry Frozen Yogurt stores, a private jet, a 24-hour yoga studio and an on-call masseuse. I don’t think that this was what CALCASA had in mind when it picked the theme “building the world we want to live in” for its National Sexual Assault Conference (NSAC).

Let me try again. (I’m not that shallow, but I’d humbly take those luxuries if offered.) I want to live in a world where the following iPhone applications don’t exist: I’m Being Assaulted, xOffender and, my favorite, Are You Safe? According to the “Safe-o-Meter” on the Are you Safe application, I’m not safe right now. I’m at risk of motor vehicle theft, robbery, property crime, sexual offense, theft, burglary, assault and murder. I understand that this application has major flaws, but my point is that I want to live in a world where it’s not even necessary to create this application.

How I do I build that world? Dr. Dorothy Edwards addresses some of these building steps with her Green Dot model. She’ll be at NSAC talking about a comprehensive approach to violence prevention. Green Dot is a violence prevention initiative that promotes “any behavior, choice, word or attitude that counters or displaces a red-dot of violence — by promoting safety for everyone and communicating utter intolerance for sexual violence, interpersonal violence, stalking and child abuse.”

Dr. Edwards says that the building steps start with these tasks:

1. Identifying the obstacles that keep people from engaging in prevention and intervention; and
2. Minimizing, eliminating or overcoming these obstacles.

After watching some of Dr. Edwards Green Dot Training in Las Vegas, one truth that struck me was that even honest, upstanding, “good” people sometimes don’t intervene when observing a potentially harmful situation. She offers viable solutions and new directions in violence prevention efforts — and with an amazing level of passion and conviction. Her presentations are more than educational. She’s one of the only speakers I’ve ever listened to for more than an hour and still felt completely engaged and entertained.

I’ll be sure to attend Dr. Edwards workshop at NSAC — learning more about how to build the world I want to live in.

CALCASA was on board the USS Abraham Lincoln.

One exciting thing about watching all of the registrations pour in for the National Conference (NSAC) is getting a glimpse of who will be in attendance and where they are coming from. Staff at CALCASA recently noticed dozens of registrants from various branches of military. This is one signal of an ongoing shift in our field regarding the connection between victim advocacy and the military at large.

There has been a growing partnership between civilian victim advocates and those serving military populations. These ties have been particularly evident since the inception of SAPRO, along with campaigns like I. A.M. Strong, My Strength is for Defending and others. More and more, installations are turning to community-based organizations to provide services on bases, awareness raising or training.

Networking and relationship building between civilian victim advocates and military installations are just one of many different unique opportunities attendees can look forward to at the national conference. What are you looking forward to?

PreventConnect.org

Meg Stone

In this interviw, Director of IMPACT Boston Meg Stone talks about the role feminist self-defense plays in primary prevention efforts. She describes how IMPACT uses self-defense strategies to support active bystander behavior and empowers participants to take action to make changes in their community.

Click here to read a post by Meg Stone on THE LINE blog about her IMPACT empowerment experience as a student.

For the last 7 years, my children have involved me in a forced family tradition – school clothes shopping.  In mid July my children approach me and say “Dad, school starts in August.  We need new clothing because last year’s clothing is too small, too old and too worn out.”  I go to my desk and assess what bills have not been paid, what checks have cleared, what checks are outstanding and what my checking account balance is.  I immediately realize, I HAVE A CASH FLOW PROBLEM.  While the latter disclosure is a bit humorous, many rape crisis centers experience cash flow issues throughout the year.  Some agencies experience it around the time when the state of California has not adopted a new fiscal budget.  What is not so humorous is the devastating consequences when a rape crisis center (rcc) has no cash on hand and cannot afford to pay its creditors or payroll.  An rcc may be able to alleviate some occurrences of limited cash flow by strategic planning and changing some internal agency practices.

In 2009 I wrote a blog post “Financial Couch Potato or Financial Fitness Routine” that discussed how to assess the financial fitness of your agency.  In the blog post I highlight several things:

• Generate a document that shows monthly expenses, year to date expenditures and identifies how the grants are allocated.  This can be useful in helping you determine spending deficiencies and over spending in categories.
• Routinely reconcile your General Ledger with your bank statements and accounts payable.
• Generate cash flow projections documents to identify when you may need more cash for the agency and where you may need to control or decrease spending.
• Set aside a specific time every month to dedicate to billing funders for reimbursements.

Also be thoughtful when planning agency events or purchasing program supplies and equipment.  Too many purchases or scheduled agency events during the last quarter of a grant year and a possible state budget delay may cause a significant delay in your grant billing reimbursements being processed.

We all know the financial dilemma that the state of California is in.  More than ever rcc’s need to implement practices that will ensure their agency is financially viable to serve the community and survivors of sexual assault.  With strategic planning, maximizing your collaborative partnerships, accessing the resources of CALCASA, and involving your stakeholders; I honestly believe that rcc’s that are experiencing ongoing cash flow problems can move from struggling to remain financially viable an move to financially stable in this current economy.

To share your insight on this topic, please use the comment box below.

Recently, the International Association of Forensic Nurses‘ (IAFN) newsletter, On the Edge, featured an article about CALCASA and the work we do in their Education and Training section. IAFN is an international membership organization comprised of forensic nurses working around the world and other professionals who support and compliment the work of forensic nursing. The mission of the IAFN is to provide leadership in forensic nursing practice by developing, promoting, and disseminating information internationally about forensic nursing science. To access the article, click here.

The author and editor of the article, Diana Faugno, is a founding member of IAFN and serves as a staff nurse at the Eisenhower Medical Center SART team. Diane shares why she decided to highlight CALCASA in this issue of On the Edge:

CALCASA is an organization that I will frequently call upon if I am looking for a specific article or publication. They have a large lending library. I thought you might be interested to read about them.

CALCASA is pleased to be recognized by IAFN.  Thank you!

PreventConnect.org

Grant Stancliff

Ashley Maier

David Lee (@preventconnect) talks with Grant Stancliff (@soctraticgrant), who was with the Washington Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs at the time of this interview (and is currently with YWCA Spokane), and Ashley Maier (@ashleymaier) of the Oregon Attorney General’s Sexual Assault Task Force about the role of Twitter to build the capacity to conduct sexual violence and domestic violence prevention.

On July 13, 2010, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), the coalition of programs that document and advocate for victims of anti-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) and anti-HIV/AIDS violence/harassment, domestic violence, sexual assault, police misconduct and other forms of victimization, released the 2010 report of hate violence perpetrated against people that self-identify as LGBTQ and were reported in 2009.

Key findings from the report include:

Murders at second-highest rate in a decade;

Spike in anti-LGBTQ violence at time of federal hate crimes law passage;

Economic crisis depletes resources for LGBTQ survivors of violence

For the full National Report on Anti-LGBTQ hate violence, click here.  To read the press release issued by the NCAVP, click here.

Resource

For individuals, groups, and/or communities interested in starting an anti-violence program, becoming a member of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs or if you live in a region where there are no organizations addressing LGBTQ violence issues and you need help or are interested in getting involved, contact NCAVP at info@ncavp.org or 212.714.1184. They can also be reached via a 24 hour bilingual (English & Spanish) Hotline at 212.714.1141.

In the global struggle against gender based violence and HIV/AIDS, the two are inextricably intertwined as pressing human rights and public health issues that cross race, class, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, age, and ability/disability.  Sexual violence increases a victim’s risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. Today, the Obama administration unveiled the national strategy to combat HIV/AIDS which includes:

• “Broad goals as well as dozens of directives for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and other federal agencies. Those steps include developing standards to evaluate care, investigating community programs to see whether they’re effective and simplifying grant applications.
• The Bureau of Prisons would expand HIV screening of inmates, and the Justice Department would fast-track investigations of discrimination involving those with HIV.”

One notable area of concern is that no additional federal funding has been allotted to support the National Strategy.

“With new infections exceeding 50,000 a year, there may not be enough money to help provide all patients with the drugs they need.  Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced an allocation of $25 million to help states in need.” – The Los Angeles Times

How, if at all, does your campus support efforts in making the link between sexual violence and HIV/AIDS, organizationally, campus-wide and with community partners?  When engaging in discussions surrounding the stigma and prejudice survivors of sexual violence experience, does HIV/AIDS ever come up as another layer of a public health concern?  How do your health and education partners integrate sexual violence and HIV/AIDS in prevention/education programming?

Resources

Click here to read the full National HIV/AIDS Strategy released by the White House.

The United Nations Development Fund For Women: Gender & HIV/AIDS

The University of Puerto Rico is one of the four public flagship systems that currently receive funding from the United States Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women to work towards ending sexual violence.  The University of Puerto Rico system serves a predominately Spanish speaking (and increasingly multilingual) student population across 10 campuses to reduce sexual assault, domestic/dating violence and stalking on campus in Puerto Rico. The other flagship systems that receive OVW funding include the University of Iowa (3 campuses), University of California (10 campuses) and East Central University (5 campuses).

Maria Del Pilar Rodriguez, Project Director and Maria Cristina Pacheco, Education Director, took time during the Summer Campus Training & Technical Assistance Institute in Las Vegas to share their thoughts in Spanish about their experiences working on the OVW grant at the University of Puerto Rico.

In addition to viewing the Institutes as an opportunity to network with and learn from colleagues in the field, Maria Del Pilar and Maria Cristina discussed how the University of Puerto Rico also serves as a resource for campuses that have Spanish-speaking students (especially of Puerto Rican descent). It is critical to make materials culturally congruent to marginalized populations, communities of color, international students, and immigrants are often not the primary groups services are designed for when combatting sexual violence on campus.

On July 27th, the Campus Program is scheduled to have a webinar on “Creating an effective protocol to intervene in violence against women” at 11.00 a.m. (PST).  Peter J. Meagher, at Reed College, will discuss how campuses can develop a sustainable and effective protocol to address sexual violence on college campuses.

Webinar Description
Violence against women in all its forms is one of the most underreported crimes on campus. This webinar will explore impediments to reporting and will present effective and sensitive strategies to assist administrators as well as staff at residence halls, campus security and campus health centers to more effectively respond to students who report experiencing sexual assault, intimate partner violence or stalking.

Speaker Biography
Peter J. Meagher, PhD, is Associate Dean of Students at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Dr. Meagher has led training sessions in colleges and other educational settings that have focused on male violence since the late 1980s. Dr. Meagher was the Project Director for the Campus Safety Project from 2000 to 2006 at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin. While at Edgewood, he was active in all aspects of the project including creating comprehensive educational programs, coordinating the revision of the Sexual Misconduct Policy, implementing response protocols and overseeing all project evaluation activities. Before working at Edgewood, he worked at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater on a project working with athletes on alcohol, drugs and dating violence. Dr. Meagher has a passion for social justice issues and enjoys promoting the growth and development of college students.

To register for the webinar, please check the project directors listserv or check with your campus project director.  The webinar is open to current recipients of the United States Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women Grant to Reduce Sexual Assault, Domestic/Dating Violence and Stalking on Campus.  If you are not a grantee or cannot attend the webinar on July 27th, you can access materials from the webinar by visiting the Campus Program page at the CALCASA site after July 28th.

Joshua O'Donnell

PreventConnect.org

(18 min) In this interview with Joshua O’Donnell, Men’s Violence Prevention Project Coordinator at Western Washington University, the essential elements of establishing men’s anti-violence groups on college campuses are discussed. O’Donnell shares a deep range of experiences from the Prevention Project’s ten years of organizing men on the Western Washington campus, and grapples with complex issues in working on masculinity and violence.

In the Summer 2010 issue of Transforming Communities‘ newsletter Catalyst, there a a very funny and insightful glossary of common prevention terms:

Prevention: shutting down the war machine instead of applying bandages
Evidence-Based: almost impossible to replicate but a pretty good idea anyway
Positive Assets: all the things your grandparents swear that they had more of back in the good old days
Promotion: it’s sorta like having a GPS to get the world we want
Bystander: um… you, yeah you, and your friends over there, too
Adult Influencers: people over 25 who interact in some way with young people (i.e. all adults)
Evaluation and Documentation: the scrapbook you keep from a trip so other can enjoy your journey later

What other fun definitions can you think of?  ”Social Ecology:  Taking care of the earth while talking to a friend.”  Maybe I should skip the attempt for humor.

Transforming Communities is a valuable resource providing technical assistance training and resources to create safety, justice and equality. They are doing some great prevention work. This issue also has great articles on practicing transformation, including a discussion of themes of lessons from prevention work. Check it out!

The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) calls on the Attorney General to implement national standards for the prevention, detection, response and monitoring of sexual abuse in US detention facilities. CALCASA is a founding member of the Raising the Bar for Justice and Safety Coalition that calls for swift adoption of these national standards.

CALCASA continues to work with partners such as Just Detention International to address the issues of rape in prisons and other detention facilities. Lovisa Stannow, Executive Director of Just Detention International, wrote an informative blog in the  Huffington Post about the delay in adopting these standards.

Just Detention International will host several sessions at the National Sexual Assault Conference held in Los Angeles on September 1-3, 2010.  This is a good opportunity to learn more about efforts to prevent rape in detention facilities.

Recently, the Ms. Foundation for Women released a report, “Efforts to Address Gender-Based Violence: A Look at Foundation Funding”, addressing how funding currently looks for programs addressing gender based violence. The report is a compilation of information regarding how many U.S. Foundations provide funding for agencies addressing gender-based violence as well as how foundation funding has increased significantly throughout the years.

Used with permission www.unh.edu/preventioninnovations/

In the study recently ePublished in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Sharyn Potter and her colleagues at the University of New Hampshire have found that students who identify with the subjects in a poster campaign are more likely to take some action toward the prevention of violence against women.

The posters series, Know Your Power, depicts scenarios of students taking action as active bystanders to interrupt abuse. The poster above has this dialogue among three men at a party with alcohol:

“I’m gonna to get Kali so wasted she can’t say no.”

“That’s messed up. If you are going to do that you have to leave now.”

“If you want to get with a girl, that not the way to do it.”

The authors suggest:

Previous research indicates that in-person education programs tend to be more effective than passive intervention methods. Yet our findings show that the Know Your Power social marketing campaign raises awareness about the incidence of sexual violence on campus and the importance of taking action to reduce sexual violence on campus even when controlling for previous participation in a prevention program.

Indeed, changes come not only from education, but also from well planned marketing efforts.  And when education is coordinated with marketing we create an environment conducive to even more change.

It is interesting to read about how the authors measured the shifts. One tool is the “Readiness to Change” model adapted for sexual violence prevention which was developed by University of New Hampshire colleagues. More can be found in Victoria Banyard’s January 2010 article Sexual Violence Prevention: The Role of Stages of Change. Here are the different stages in this scale:

1. I don’t think sexual assault is a big problem on campus.
2. I don’t think there is much I can do about sexual assault on campus.
3. There isn’t much need for me to think about sexual assault on campus, that’s the job of the crisis center.
4. Sometimes I think I should learn more about sexual assault but I haven’t done so yet.
5. I think I can do something about sexual assault and am planning to find out what I can do about the problem.
6. I am planning to learn more about the problem of sexual assault on campus.
7. I have recently attended a program about sexual assault.
8. I am actively involved in projects to deal with sexual assault on campus.
9. I have recently taken part in activities or volunteered my time on projects focused on ending sexual assault on campus.

This scale suggests useful concepts that can support the measurement of sexual violence prevention.  By trying to have prevention efforts focus on making shifts in these nine areas, we have a useful theoretical model. I am interested in seeing this work informing more sexual violence prevention efforts.

Here is the full abstract and link to these articles.

Sexual Violence Prevention: The Role of Stages of Change

Banyard VL,  Eckstein RP,  Moynihan MM Journal of Interpersonal Violence, January 2010; vol. 25, 1: pp. 111-135.

Click here for a link to the article on the journal’s web site.

(Copyright © 2010, Sage Publications)

Increasing numbers of empirical studies and theoretical frameworks for preventing sexual violence are appearing in the research- and practice-based literatures. The consensus of this work is that although important lessons have been learned, the field is still in the early stages of developing and fully researching effective models, particularly for the primary prevention of this problem in communities. The purpose of this article is to discuss the utility of applying the transtheoretical model of readiness for change to sexual violence prevention and evaluation. A review of this model and its application in one promising new primary prevention program is provided, along with exploratory data about what is learned about program design and effectiveness when the model is used. The study also represents one of the first attempts to operationalize and create specific measures to quantify readiness for change in the context of sexual violence prevention and evaluation. Implications for program development and evaluation research are discussed.

Using Social Self-Identification in Social Marketing Materials Aimed at Reducing Violence Against Women on Campus.

Potter SJ, Moynihan MM, Stapleton JG. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 2010; ePublished June 3, 2010

Click here for a link to the abstract on the journal’s web site.

(Copyright © 2010, Sage Publications)

Bystander-focused in person sexual violence prevention programs provide an opportunity for skill development among bystanders and for widening the safety net for survivors. A social marketing campaign was designed modeling prosocial bystander behavior and using content familiar to target audience members by staging and casting scenes to look similar to the people and situations that the target audience regularly encounters. We refer to this sense of familiarity as social self-identification. In this exploratory study, we attempt to understand how seeing oneself and one’s peer group (e.g., social self-identification) in poster images affects target audience members’ (e.g., college students) willingness to intervene as a prosocial bystander. The posters in the social marketing campaign were displayed throughout a midsize northeastern public university campus and neighboring local businesses frequented by students. During the last week of the 4-week poster display, the university’s homepage portal featured an advertisement displaying a current model of an iPod offering undergraduate students an opportunity to win the device if they completed a community survey. We found that among students who had seen the posters, those who indicated that the scenes portrayed in the posters looked like situations that were familiar to them were significantly more likely to contemplate taking action in preventing a situation where sexual violence had the potential to occur. Furthermore, students who indicated familiarity with the poster content were more likely to indicate that they had acted in a manner similar to those portrayed in the poster. Future directions based on findings from this exploratory study are discussed.

PreventConnect.org

Jody Raphael

(23 min) PreventConnect’s David Lee interviews Jody Raphael of the DePaul University College of Law, and Dr. TK Logan of the University of Kentucky. Raphael and Logan wrote the whitepaper “The Use and Misuse of Data on Rape: Restoring Sexual Violence to the National Agenda” for presentation at the CounterQuo Conference in October 2008. CounterQuo is a project of the Victim Rights Law Center and The Voices and Faces Project that considered how the rights and representations of sexual violence survivors are impacted by law, media and the public engagement of survivors.

PreventConnect.org

Amanda Hess

In this interview, Amanda Hess talks about how her blog deconstructs sexism and rape culture.  Her blogs and reporting recently includes stories on groping, rape myths and an ongoing feature on songs that glorify sexual violence that she calls ”Date Rape Anthems.”

Read The Sexist online at
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist

PreventConnect.org

Olivia Klaus and Brenda Clubine

(13 min) From behind prison walls, SIN BY SILENCE reveals the lives of extraordinary women who advocate for a future free from domestic violence. Inside California’s oldest women’s prison, the first inmate-initiated and led group in the U.S. prison system was created by inmate Brenda Clubine to help abused women speak out and realize they are not alone. Over the past two decades, the women of Convicted Women Against Abuse have changed laws for battered women and raised awareness for those on the outside. SIN BY SILENCE is an emotionally packed documentary that tells the personal and shocking stories of these courageous women who have learned from their past, are changing their future and, most importantly, teach how domestic violence affects each and every person.

In this interview, Director/Producer Olivia Klaus, Co-Producer/Editor Ann-Caryn Cleveland, and Brenda Clubine talk about the making of the documentary, the achievements of Convicted Women Against Abuse, and the uses of documentary film and survivors voices for awareness-raising and prevention work.

Yesterday, the National Online Resource Center on Violence Against Women released a special collection titled Reproductive Justice & Violence Against Women: Understanding the Intersections. It includes resources about reproductive justice, focusing on the links between the elimination of reproductive oppression and domestic and sexual violence.

Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice defines reproductive justice as, “the economic, social and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about our bodies, sexuality and reproduction for ourselves, our families and our communities in all areas of our lives.”

For those interested in learning more about reproductive justice and its importance in the movement to end violence against women, the collection includes the following information:

• defining reproductive justice
• reproductive justice frameworks
• building upon reproductive health and reproductive rights
• paradigm of intersectionality — a holistic framework to ensure complete well-being
• collaboration — a key building block of the reproductive justice movement
• reproductive justice to end sexual & domestic violence
• movement building tools
• related organizations, projects and initiatives

Click here to read the collection.

I think everyone who researches domestic violence and sexual violence can learn something from the approach used in a recently epublished study on bullying in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.  What is interesting to me is the researchers focus on the different levels that contribute to bullying.  Instead of focusing primarily on individual factors, this study adapts Bronfenbrenner’s  ecological system model.

Here are levels examined:

• Children Themselves: Examines individual factors
• Microsystem: experience within interpersonal relationships.
• Mesosystem: social interconnections between participants, such as students, teachers, and peers.
• Exosystem: “encompasses the linkage and processes taking place between two or more settings, at least one of which does not ordinarily contain the developing person . . . (e.g., for a child, the relation between the home and the parent’s work place)” (Bronfenbrenner, U. (1989). Ecological systems theory. In R. Vasta (Ed.), Annals of child development (Vol. 6, pp. 197­249). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. p. 227)
• Macrosystem: societal characteristics, such as individualism and collectivism (Nesdale & Naito, 2005) and social disorganization

How do you think this would apply to sexual violence and domestic violence?

Here is the full abstract and link to the article on the journal’s web site:

An Ecological Systems Approach to Bullying Behaviors Among Middle School Students in the United States.

Lee CH. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 2010; ePublished June 3, 2010

Click here for a link to the abstract.

(Copyright © 2010, Sage Publications)

The aim of this study is to identify an ecological prediction model of bullying behaviors. Based on an ecological systems theory, this study identifies significant factors influencing bullying behaviors at different levels of middle and high school. These levels include the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. More specifically, the ecological factors investigated in this multilevel analysis are individual traits, family experiences, parental involvement, school climate, and community characteristics. Using data collected in 2008 from 485 randomly selected students in a school district, this study identifies a best-fitting structural model of bullying behavior. Findings suggest that the ecological model accounted for a high portion of variance in bullying behaviors. All of the ecological systems as well as individual traits were found to be significant influences on bullying behaviors either directly or indirectly.

Today is the opening of the summer blockbuster film Eclipse, the third film of the Twilight saga.

Bella is graduating from high school and feels pressured to make a choice between Edward and Jacob. Should your choices be defined by or limited to your relationships?

Start Strong Idaho asks this question in its Facebook campaign and last night hosted a “Campaign for the Third Choice” event (with music, fun Eclipse events and prizes) in Boise, Idaho.  As we discussed in the PreventConnect podcast Building healthy teen, vampire, and werewolf relationships, Start Strong Idaho is using the popular Twilight movies to promote prevention of teen dating violence.

Start Strong Idaho: Building Healthy Teen Relationships is an initiative in southwest Idaho to promote healthy teen relationships and prevent teen dating violence by helping 11- to 14-year-olds develop healthy and safe relationship knowledge and skills. It is part of the Start Strong Initiative, a national program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Hugo Rios, Education Coordinator at Resource Center for Survivors of Sexual Assault and Family Violence in Fresno, Calif.

Hugo Rios, Education Coordinator at Resource Center for Survivors of Sexual Assault and Family Violence (RCS) in Fresno, CA, attended the Women of Color Network‘s (WOCN) Call to Action Conference and Institute. Hugo facilitates MyStrength Clubs for young men to stand up and speak out against sexual assault.

Listen to Hugo by clicking on the recording at the bottom of this blog post. Here is a summary of Hugo’s experience at WOCN in his own words:

On May 10, 2010 my morning began at 5:30 a.m.  It was the start of a new journey for me.  I was nervous uncertain of what to expect and what the WOCN conference experience would be like.  It was my first time traveling by airplane and let me tell you, it was an experience I will never forget.  After a four-hour flight I arrived in New Orleans I knew was there for a reason but was uncertain of what exactly that reason was.  My experience checking into the hotel and trying to figure out the elevator is another long story, but another time.  You would have had to be there to know what I mean.  I rushed up to my room, rushed back to the elevator and prepared to walk into a room where I had no clue of what to expect; my new journey was about to begin.

Being in a room with over 40 men with the same needs, pain, anger and who cared about the importance of being a man, husband, father, friend and role model was powerful. I found being in a roomful of men who voiced our opinions on ending violence against all women was validated and encouraged. These men shared what violence on women has meant to us and how we as men have been affected by violence to women.

We as men praise other men for teaching young men how to hit a baseball, throw a football, punch someone, pin someone to the ground. However, when a man talks to a young man about violence against women they are viewed as different and treated as an outcast. The latter must be considered a priority for our young men in order to prevent violence against all women so our mothers and future mothers can be treated with respect and love.

Throughout the room during the two day Men’s Institute, men shared their experiences of trying to be accountable as they take on their roles in the field of domestic violence, family violence and sexual assault.  I shared experiences with what I heard from the other men about how we are seen by other men, women and among ourselves. Many of us reflected on our concerns about other men thinking something is wrong with us because we choose to be with our family instead of being out with the guys.  We explored the importance of being a good husband everyday versus being a husband when you want to or only on special occasions such as Valentines, birthdays or when you did something wrong. We talked about what it means to be a daddy versus a father.  We appreciated the importance of being a friend/role model without having to be someone else; that it is okay to be sensitive, equal, caring, emotional to a male friend without anyone thinking different about you.

All these shared and common feelings where bottled up within me. My experience at the WOCN Conference and the Men’s Institute Training allowed me to release these feelings, thoughts and values; it was accepted and it was liberating.

As I previously mentioned, arriving at the WOCN Conference I did not know what to expect; however, leaving the conference I realized that there are many men, like me, fighting the same fight.  The experience and the power of the voices of the women who are survivors of domestic and family violence made me proud and honored to have the opportunity to listen to them and meet them.  I am proud of the work I do and I am determined to work harder to lessen the number of stories of violence and increase the stories of change through the voices of women and men.  I would like to thank WOCN and A CALL TO MEN for their hard work, commitment and efforts of ending violence against ALL WOMEN.

Listen to an interview with Hugo Rios:

The Summer Campus 2010 TTI, sponsored by OVW in partnership with CALCASA, hosted the workshop “Addressing Issues of Violence Against Women in Faith-Based Institutions.” Amongst the many campuses that are funded through the OVW campus program grant, there are several that are faith based such as University of Sioux Falls, Pacific Lutheran University and St. Mary’s College.

During this workshop, the presenter, Venida Rodman Jenkins discussed secular versus sacred language that at times can cause friction in communicating how to address violence against women on campus. She mentioned that although we are saying the same thing, word choice may give the impression we are not on the same page. This was a very relevant point not only for faith-based institutions, but every campus that is doing this work that deals with challenges in communication. The misunderstanding is prompted by generational gaps, racial distinctions or moral codes. The differences in language has the potential to breed the sense of opposition, instead of unification.

After speaking with folks that attended the TTI, I found that the one sound solution is to create a safe space for similar campuses to voice openly their concerns, not as a venting session, but with the intent of removing the feeling of isolation for the sake of moving toward the solution of adherence to listening and creating a line of communication that the sacred and the secular feel comfortable speaking.

The recently published edition of Moving Upstream, the Virginia Sexual & Domestic Violence Action Alliance‘s newsletter on primary prevention,  is the first of a 2-part series examining organizational development toward primary prevention at sexual and domestic violence agencies. Check out this valuable resource.

Earlier this month, CALCASA Director of Public Affairs Robert Coombs and I left to Washington D.C. for the 2010 Advocacy Day hosted by the National Network to End Domestic Violence and the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence.

This two day event included policy briefings by the following distinguished guests:

- Lynn Rosenthal, White House Advisor on Violence Against Women
- Marylouise Kelley, Family Violence Prevention and Services Program, Health and Human Services Agency
- Judge Susan Carbon, Office of Violence Against Women
- Karen Lang, Center for Disease Control Division of Violence Prevention
- and 10 Members of Congress.

NNEDV/NAESV Advocacy Day allowed advocates from all over the United States and the territories to conduct over 150 Congressional visits.  CALCASA joined forces with our sister organization, California Partnership to End Domestic Violence (CPEDV), to meet with our homestate elected officials. Both organizations stressed that our elected members of Congress support the following proposals:

• Increase funding to the Violence Against Women Act programs: Sexual Assault Services Program (SASP), Services, Training, Officers, Prosecutors (STOP), Legal Assistance for Victims, and Transitional Housing Grants, and other VAWA related programs
• Increase funds to Rape Prevention and Education Program grants administered by the Center for Disease Control
• Reauthorize the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act

CALCASA would like to thank Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Dianne Feinstien, Congresspersons John Campbell, Maxine Waters, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Judy Chu, Adam Schiff, and Barbara Lee and all of their staffs for taking the time out of their day to meet with their constituents.

Today, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center commemorates 10 years of service to the sexual violence prevention field. To celebrate, NSVRC, which is located in Pennsylvania, is hosting an open house for the community to learn about resources and services available to the public.

NSVRC was established in 2000 as the nation’s first resource center devoted exclusively to sexual violence. For the past decade, the it has collaborated with sexual assault coalitions, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and several community-based and national-allied projects to prevent sexual violence.

“We have learned a lot in the past 10 years,” said NSVRC Director Karen Baker in a press release. “By working together and sharing our expertise, we can begin to reshape our communities into ones that are more safe, respectful, inclusive and honoring of each and every person.”

For the complete press release, click here.

AMC 2010 Closing Ceremony

Detroit, MI – After wrapping up the Summer 2010 Campus Training & Technical Assistance Institute in Las Vegas, I caught a red-eye flight to attend the annual Allied Media Conference (AMC).  Held at the campus of Wayne State University near Detroit’s downtown, the AMC drew “people involved with do-it-yourself media, alternative media makers, [and those] interested in using participatory media as a strategy for social justice organizing.”  Certainly a cultural and geographic shift trading in the western desert for the midwestern city that has struggled for years to rebuild itself.  For the next three days, I learned how local communities in Detroit are working tirelessly to improve living conditions for themselves, their families, and neighbors.

The AMC offered participants a variety of tracks designed to generate and actively engage in discussions surrounding particular areas of interest ranging from disability justice, indigenous media, creating safe communities, Medios Caminantes (the Spanish language media track), Trans & Queer Youth, and Media Policy to name a few.  The AMC’s notion of media (multiple forms of communication including print and web-based journalism, radio, writing, art, and music) has come to expand over the years which is incredibly refreshing given the ever-increasing power and range that technology has in transforming individuals and communities.

Each workshop I attended either provided participants in opportunity to learn hands-on the technology at hand (such as community mapping) and/or encouraged folks to identify needs, resources and network in order to build capacity, knowledge and access. Each workshop, keynote speaker, artist, facilitator, conference participant I heard or met, reinvigorated my commitment to building communities by evoking a language rooted in idealism, realism, and practicality.

Transformative art work at AMC 2010

Collaborative mapping, a visual representation of needs and/or assets in a given community, caught my interest given its relationship to the work I do at CALCASA.  Some examples of community mapping include: Philadelphia Place (storytelling collaboration of peoples and events in Philadelphia), Toronto Trees (uses trees as landmarks in tours of Toronto), and Green Map (identifies areas with green resources). Throughout the community mapping workshop, I frequently thought of Dorothy Edwards’ intervention to end sexual violence.  To simplify: sexual violence = red dots.  Bystander intervention = green dots.  Red and green dots spread across the United States, ideally the green dots surpassing the number of red dots and ultimately covering the country.

How can Green Dot, or any other intervention for that matter, translate itself from an initially theoretical conceptualization and practical approach to potentially technological soundboard/card conceived as a community map to further illustrate the urgency to combat sexual violence as communities?  How can survivors, bystanders, educators, and others engage with the data?  This is a question I’m struggling with and would like to hear your take on community mapping of sexual violence on college campuses.

Save the date: June 23 – 26, 2011 in Detroit for the next AMC.

Father's Day Ad in the New York Times from www.founding-fathers.org

For the 100th Father’s Day, the Family Violence Prevention Fund’s Founding Fathers Campaign has taken out a full page ad in the New York Times proclaiming “men everywhere are taking a stand to end violence against women and children around the world.”

Thanks to all of the fathers who are taking this day to  dedicate themselves to ending violence.

Coach Joe Ehrmann delivers his keynote address at the Campus Training & Technical Assistance Institute in Las Vegas.

Yesterday was the final day of CALCASA’s Campus Training & Technical Assistance Institute in Las Vegas. Present were about 500 attendees from college campuses and community agencies — these folks are ready and eager to do what it takes to end sexual violence.

Joe Ehrmann, from Coach for America, delivered one of the plenary sessions. He opened his speech by acknowledging that he was looking at an audience that represented hope. My first thought: Hope can’t be measured. It’s a word thrown around to mask inaction. Don’t get me wrong, his speech was inspiring. I felt motivated to become part of the solution to end destructive and damaging myths and stereotypes that are perpetuated by culture. But I was still struggling with the word hope. I felt as if that word made it easier to say, “Well, nice try,” when goals aren’t realized.

However, yesterday afternoon, I had my reality put in check. I was conducting an interview with Dr. Dorothy Edwards & Jennifer Sayre about their Green Dot training and, again, the word hope came up. Dr. Edwards said that the one thing she wants people to walk away with from the training is hope. Maybe I rolled my eyes, and she sensed that I needed to hear what she said next:

“We can be holding the solution in our hand, but if we don’t believe it, we will not inspire people to take it on. Those of us that are leading this work have to peel back those layers of fatigue and tired. We’ve seen victim after victim, and it’s hard to even imagine a different world. And we’ve got to step in and hold in our mind’s eye a vision — a crystallized vision — of this can happen. These numbers can come down, and it can happen as a direct result of my work. If we can hold on to that, if we can truly believe that, folks will follow us. People don’t act if they don’t believe what they’re doing will make a difference. So we’ve got to paint this picture that what you do will make a difference. We can bring the numbers down. My favorite reference is the notion that when Martin Luther King was standing up there at the great mall in Washington, D.C., he didn’t say, ‘I’ve got a great body of research.’ He said, ‘I have a dream.’ When he talked about that dream, he inspired a nation. We have to do the same thing.”

Wow, amazing. This completely changed my outlook. How can we begin to make change if we can’t even fill ourselves with a sense of hope to see a better future? Dr. Edwards’ words set me up for the endnote speaker Tony Porter who talked about how men need to understand the responsibility they have to challenge many of the norms that define manhood. I think that without my interview with Dr. Edwards, I might have walked away with a sense of false hope. But I do hope — with everything inside me — that the type of manhood Porter talked about becomes the norm. As Porter says in the above video: “We can really redefine the aspects of manhood that will then create a culture where humanity is the issue, where women are treated equal to men. And that in itself, violence will look different than it does today.”

Hope, hope, hope!

At CALCASA’s Campus Training & Technical Institute in Las Vegas, one of the themes that has been emphasized by most presenters is the necessity of campus coordinated community response (CCCR). Across the board — addressing bystander intervention, working with the justice system, attending a faith-based institutions, creating policies and approaching the needs of international students — CCCR is a key for strengthening campus responses to violence against women.

AEquitas, an organizations that provides prosecutors with resources to end violence against women, had representatives deliver presentations at the Institute. The presenters re-enforced the importance of CCCR. In the video, Jennifer G. Long and Christopher Mallios share their presentations and discuss their mission to improve the quality of justice in sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence and stalking cases by developing, evaluating and refining prosecution practices that increase victim safety and offender accountability.

As the Institute continues today, topics include alcohol-facilitated sexual assault, victim services, peer intervention and clinical forensic services. Right now, Joe Ehrmann, motivational speaker at Coach for America, is delivering his keynote. Attendees are live tweeting — for the most up-to-date information, following the hashtag #vegastti on Twitter.

Why do women want to avoid rape?  Is it because sexual assault is a violation that causes emotional and physical harm? In a recent study ePublished in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, McKibbin et. al. suggest  an additional factor: rape circumvents her choice of a sexual partner and harms her “reproductive success.”

Based on the authors’ evolutionary analysis, the resulting study examines if “rape avoidance behaviors” are associated with “(1) women’s attractiveness, (2) women’s involvement in a committed romantic relationship, and (3) the number of family members living nearby.”

To what extent does an evolutionary analysis help us understand sexual assault? While I do not want to minimize this, I cannot see how evolution is the primary factor to examine to understand rape. As someone dedicated to prevention, I am much more interested in how we can make changes to community, society and culture factors that contribute to rape.

And then there is the problematic issue of rape avoidance. While rape avoidance skills are helpful, many people critique risk reduction as the primary focus of sexual assault prevention. In this study the Rape Avoidance Inventory (RAI) is used to measure rape avoidance.  The RAI is described as a reliable and valid measure of women’s rape avoidance behaviors (in a 2009 study by the same author.) Here is the actual description of this measure from the study:

The RAI consists of 69 behaviors that women might perform specifically to avoid being raped…. The RAI consisted of four components… corresponding to s specific set of rape avoidance behaviors. The Avoid Strange Men component included behaviors in which women avoid unfamiliar or strange men (e.g. “avoid men who make me feel uncomfortable”). The Avoid Appearing Sexually Receptive component included behaviors that may diminish a women’s attractiveness to a potential rapist (e.g., “Avoid wearing sexy clothing”). The Avoid Being Alone component included behaviors that function to keep women around others (e.g., “When I go out, I stay with at least one other person I know”). The Awareness of Surrounding/Defensive Preparedness component include behaviors that serve to keep a women attentive to her surround-behaviors that enhance a women’s ability to thwart a would-be rapist (e.g., “Carry a knife).

This scale appears to be based on a set of assumptions that rape is primarily committed by strange men attacking attractive women while alone and unaware of their surroundings. I admit that is an overgeneralization but those are the factors measured.  While there is value to supporting women to avoid rape, I find this study very troubling and wary of basing a rape prevention program on its assumptions.

What do you think about these concepts in helping our understanding of how to prevent sexual assault?

Here is the full abstract and link to the article.

Individual Differences in Women’s Rape Avoidance Behaviors.

McKibbin WF, Shackelford TK, Miner EJ, Bates VM, Liddle JR. Archives of Sexual Behavior 2010; ePublished May 13, 2010.

Click here for a link on the journal’s web site.

(Copyright © 2010, Springer Science+Business Media)

Rape can exact severe psychological, physical, and reproductive costs on women, and likely was a recurrent adaptive problem over human evolutionary history. Therefore, women may have evolved psychological mechanisms that motivate rape avoidance behaviors. Guided heuristically by an evolutionary perspective, we tested the hypothesis that women’s rape avoidance behaviors would vary with several individual difference variables. Specifically, we predicted that rape avoidance behaviors would covary positively with (1) women’s attractiveness, (2) women’s involvement in a committed romantic relationship, and (3) the number of family members living nearby. We also predicted that women’s rape avoidance behaviors would covary negatively with age. We administered the Rape Avoidance Inventory (McKibbin et al., Pers Indiv Differ 39:336-340, 2009) and a demographic survey to a sample of women (n = 144). The results of correlational and regression analyses were consistent with the predictions, with the exception that women’s rape avoidance behaviors did not covary with women’s age. Discussion highlighted limitations of the current research and directions for future research on women’s rape avoidance psychology and behaviors.

from www.inpea.net

Today is World Elder Abuse Awareness Day 2010 and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center is presenting new resources related to sexual violence in later life.

The Sexual Violence in Later Life Information Packet was developed by Holly Ramsey-Klawsnik, Phd, in conjunction with the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. The packet includes a fact sheet, technical assistance bulletin, technical assistance guide, resource list, annotated bibliography and research brief.

At the National Sexual Assault Conference (NSAC) in September, one of the workshops offered will be about how musicians can help to change social norms. Ashley Maier, prevention program coordinator on Oregon’s Sexual Assault Task Force, and the band The Material will put together a panel of musicians who will make a case for and explore ways to engage musicians in the prevention of violence and the promotion of healthy relationships.

Some of the panelists include Brad Perry, from the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance, and his fellow band members from Worn In Red. The discussion will involve the way in which music shapes environments and promotes behaviors. Conference attendees will learn how to build partnerships with musicians.

For more information about NSAC, visit the Registration Page.

Today is the start of the World Cup in South Africa. Whether it is called soccer, football or futbol, many people consider the World Cup to be the most important athletic competition for fans throughout the world.  In fact, a few minutes ago, I just heard one of my colleagues at CALCASA gasp as South Africa scored against Mexico.

Yet, this event is not only about athletics.  Man Up,  a global campaign to activate youth to stop violence against women and girls, will bring together a prestigious team of delegates, along with artists, athletes and activists to launch a five-year campaign at an inaugural Young Leaders Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa during the 2010 World Cup.

What a great opportunity to bring the prevention of sexual violence and domestic violence to the world. Man Up partners include the Ms Foundation for Women, VDay, NoVo Foundation and many others. Check them out!

©xotoko's photostream

Next week is CALCASA’s Campus Training & Technical Assistance Institute in Las Vegas.  As part of our ongoing effort to increase and enhance our use of technology in the Campus program, we’ve been exploring the use of Twitter to enhance communication experiences.

Many of you may already be using Twitter to network with friends, family and co-workers.  The Campus program has been using Twitter to receive updates from campuses and, in addition, we will be using it actively at the upcoming Institute.

If you have a Twitter account, start talking to CALCASA on Twitter! Our account username is @CALCASA. Send us a “tweet” or Direct Message. The Campus team is on Twitter too, so start following us! — @theacalcasa, @DanCALCASA, @LiviaCALCASA.

To simplify your Twitter experience, we suggest downloading a free application called TweetDeck. It allows you to filter your tweets. For example, you could categorize your friends/family in one group, so you only see their tweets. And you could have another category for Campus TTI folks. TweetDeck also makes it easier to search for specific terms and keywords.

At the Institute, we’ll be using a function on Twitter called Hash Tags. That’s when you see something in a tweet that has a # prefix. A Hash Tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. For example, if you search #sexualassault, you’ll get a list of tweets related to this topic. At the Institute, we’ll be using the Hash Tag #VegasTTI.

We hope you start practicing you Twitter skills! :] Feel free to practice on us — @CALCASA.

If you’re feeling unsure about the Twitter-sphere, or you want a little more direction, our resident Twitterer is Jessica Napier. She’s our Online Media Producer, and she’ll be at the Institute in June. She’s happy to help anyone start the conversation on Twitter. If you have questions about signing up, e-mail her at jessica@calcasa.org.

Participants at the Men's Institute at the Women of Color Network's A Call to Action Conference and Institute

I had the opportunity to attend the Women of Color Network’s Call to Action Institute and Conference May 10-14, 2010 in New Orleans, LA where I co-led the Men’s Institute and a session on prevention.  As that city was awaiting the oil from the BP leak to spoil their shores, fish and other wildlife, I was reminded of how communities are impacted by disaster; I was reminded how racism played out in the neglect that contributed before, during and after Katrina. I took this conference as an opportunity to consider how I participate in efforts to end oppressions in my work to prevent domestic violence and sexual assault.

There were many important pieces of the WOCN’s powerful gathering of over 400. Here are some highlights:

• Recognize links between immigration policy and support women of color in violence prevention:  The Latina caucus identified the recent immigration law in Arizona as a significant barrier for women to seek support and as a target. In order to address and prevent sexual violence and domestic violence, we must take action about these policies.
• Men Taking Action at the Men’s Institute: 40 men met for 2 days to explore how we can be aspiring allies to women of color.  I learned from these men as we looked at our own privilege and how to support men in taking action to prevent men’s violence.
• Honoring Cultural Specific Work:  I learned from so many different women and men about prevention efforts that use the resources from their culture to build prevention that reflects the needs of specific communities.  There were so many examples: working with the Hmong in Wisconsin, Latina immigrants in New Mexico, African American communities in cities, Muslim communities throughout the United States, Vietnamese in Boston, etc.
• Mainstream women and men exploring how to support communities of color: I co-facilitated a discussion of white women and men about how to transform the work of ending domestic violence and sexual violence to support communities of color.

While we had only a little time, this conference demonstrated how people of all races, religions and communities can examine themselves, their families, their communities, and their society to make changes.  Isn’t that what the social ecological model is supposed to be about?

Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Executive Editor at Feministing.com ©jmilles' photostream

As CALCASA is in the planning stages for the National Sexual Assault Conference, we recently finalized details to have Samhita Mukhopadhyay, executive editor at Feministing.com, be a plenary speaker on Sept. 1.

This is exciting news for CALCASA since Samhita’s experience with blogging and social networking technology, combined with her knowledge about the intersection of race and gender, will stimulate conversations among attendees at the conference. Samhita is the web manager at the Center for Media Justice, a media strategy and action center that uses strategic communications and media activism to build a powerful movement for racial justice, economic equity and human rights. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Women’s Studies from SUNY Albany and a Master’s in Women’s Studies from San Francisco State.

Some of her recent blog entries include topics such as: problematic themes in Sex in the City 2; advertisement reviews; the abortion ban in Brazil; and bystander intervention.

For readers who are on Twitter, you can follow Samhita @desifeminista. Start reading some of her blog entries — we hope that you’re as excited as we are to have her speaking at the 2010 National Sexual Assault Conference in Los Angeles this September!

The theme of the American Public Health Association‘s annual meeting this year is “Social Justice: a public health imperative.” As I have explored in previous blog posts and e-learning units, social justice is an important core of preventing sexual violence and domestic violence.

So I was delighted to see the most important public health meeting highlight social justice work. The APHA Annual Meeting will take place in Denver, Colo., Nov. 6-10, 2010.

Social Justice lies at the heart of public health. It is central to its mission and is frequently described as public health’s core value. The social circumstances in which we are born, live, and work, play a greater role in longevity and overall health in the United States than genes, health insurance and access to health services. Annual Meeting sessions will explore why certain populations bear a disproportionate burden of disease and mortality and what the public health community can do to better address the causes of these inequities.

At this meeting, I will share “Prevention Connection: An online ‘community of practice’ to advance primary prevention of intimate partner violence and sexual violence” at a poster session.  If you are in Denver this coming November, stop by.

@artgodess.ning.com

In May 2010, the Women of Color Network (WOCN) hosted the first Women of Color Network Call to Action Institute and Conference in New Orleans, LA. (You can read more about this in a recent post here.) CALCASA had the opportunity to participate and provide support at the conference and I had the privilege to participate as a co-facilitator during the week long events at the Conference. The WOCN Call to Action Institute and Conference offered a variety of great workshops as well as opportunities to network and meet people many of us have only spoken to via teleconferences. I was also fortunate to co-facilitate three separate workshops as well as help co-facilitate a “Critical Conversations” session with a number of other great people at the conference.

There was opportunity for dialogues related to issues of racism within the movement as well as men’s involvement in the movement and the current, racist anti-immigrant/Latino law in AZ (SB 1070).  Being in New Orleans post-Katrina, and currently dealing with the ramifications of the BP oil spill on their shores, it seemed like an appropriate setting for these types of conversations and dialogues.  On a personal level, some of the highlights of the Institute and Conference included:

• Loretta Ross from SisterSong.   Loretta was the featured plenary speaker during the Women of Color Institute and, as always, she provided a powerful and entertaining presentation. Loretta talked about the importance of the work we are doing as well as how we can continue to support each other and our communities.
• Co-facilitating the “Intergenerational Mentoring” workshop with Angela Sutton from the WOCN. It was a great opportunity to co-present with Angela Sutton during a workshop focused on the importance of mentoring women of color advocates to ensure their retention within the movement.  We discussed the importance of developing mentee and mentor relationships organically and the roles and responsibilities of both in order to maintain a healthy mentoring relationship.
• Co-facilitating “Critical Conversations” with women and men of color. A few of us were  asked to co-facilitate an hour and a half dialogue with women and men of color focused on defining what violence, safety planning and prevention work means to communities of color.  Simultaneously, during the conversations with people of color; mainstream allies had a facilitated discussion on what their roles as allies to people of color are and what that looked like.   After the separate dialogues, both groups rejoined as one  and shared the information discussed during their individual conversations.
• Co-facilitating “Building an Inclusive Work Environment” workshop with CALCASA staff (Ellen, Villena, Althea) and Caucus Reps (Yesenia and Christina) We presented a interactive workshop on methods in which agencies can move into becoming more inclusive environments for existing staff and future staff.  We discussed what an inclusive work environment meant and what it would look and feel like in an agency. The workshop generated great discussions and idea/resource sharing!
• Co-facilitated the workshop “SA and Underserved Communities” with Yesenia Curiel and Christina Vasquez (WOC South and North Caucus Representatives) Discussed SA through the lens of communities of color and the unique barriers to reporting.   This conversation highlighted the issues around the fact that sexual assault is not discussed and is considered a taboo issue as well as the hypersexualization of women of color.   Participants were broken up into groups and discussed how centers are currently serving communities of color, what they would like those services to look like and what steps they may be able to take to get there. Great resource sharing among participants!

Belinda Rolicheck-Executive Director, Haven Women's Center of Stanislaus

Below is a guest post from Belinda Rolicheck, Executive Director at Haven Women’s Center of Stanislaus in Modesto, CA. Haven Women’s Center is a non-profit, bilingual (Spanish/English) organization consisting of a group of dedicated staff and volunteers who share their time by helping victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Haven’s services are designed to empower and support women in their personal decisions. Women are given the opportunity to safety plan and regain control of their lives.

My local newspaper periodically selects community members to write opinion columns on topics of their choice and publishes the columns one Sunday per month. One of these current ”Visiting Editors” happens to be a friend of mine and is the director of a local non-profit agency addressing the issue of literacy. Her most recent column encouraged government agencies to contract with non-profits because they can provide services at a far lower cost than government itself can. Unfortunately, while I can’t argue the premise; non-profits can and do provide services at a notoriously low cost, I can’t quite get behind the reasons why.

My friend’s piece makes two significant assertions: that non-profit salary and benefit packages are usually at or below market level and that employees of nonprofits will sacrifice pay and benefits for the opportunity to work for a cause they believe in. I would argue that while non-profit employees often do sacrifice pay and benefits, it certainly isn’t because they want to. The bigger question is why does working for the common good and performing a job that has value to you and the people you serve often mean not being able to make ends meet? Why should someone who is working for social justice and social good find it necessary to hold down a second job to pay the mortgage? More importantly, why does society assert that because people hold a passion for their work, a livable wage or health insurance are somehow unnecessary?

Just as is true in the for-profit world, part of it depends on where you’re working. State and national-level organizations have more attractive pay and benefit packages than local charities. Large foundations can afford to pay more because of their ability to raise funds from individuals and groups around the country where local agencies largely rely on the immediate community. Geography makes a difference as well; urban agencies will likely pay a little better than a small one in a rural community, again because they have more resources from which to draw. Another reality is the type of non-profit work you do and the cause you further. As I quickly learned, people are much more open to hearing about and supporting breast cancer research than women who have been assaulted by their partner. But aside from these differences that occur between non-profits, I think a significant factor is that the majority of employees of non-profit agencies are women. Whether you agree with feminist philosophy or not, the reality is that women are still paid less than men, are not as prone to try to negotiate a higher salary when they interview for a job and are more likely to consider their income as the ”second”. Historically, occupations in which the majority of employees are women have been grossly underpaid and under appreciated. It is only in recent history one will notice progress in fields such as teaching and nursing. Even that progress is limited because while the pay and benefits for a teacher in Modesto are fairly generous, the same cannot be said for a teacher in rural Florida.

I find it fascinating to look at what people are paid for the work they perform. The disparity between and within professions is mysterious to me. Why do plastic surgeons rank near the top of the pay scale among physicians? I realize they perform reconstructive surgery on patients who have been badly injured and disfigured and I applaud them for doing so. I would be curious, however, to know the ratio of these types of procedures to the cosmetic surgeries performed to enhance one’s ego. Is this service more important than that of the urban emergency room physician who treats gunshot wounds, rape victims and victims of car accidents on a regular basis? Does the computer software developer deserve to bring home a bigger paycheck than the police officer who puts her or his life on the line every time they put on the uniform? And would someone please explain to me in what universe is it rational that the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, only makes a little more than $200,000 a year? I understand the big white house comes with the job too, but seriously, folks.

I am here to debunk the myth that people who work in the non-profit world don’t care about money. While it is probably true we don’t need to become rich, a comfortable living wage is not the same. Perhaps the perception arose from the idea that if you choose to work with the needy, you won’t mind if you become needy. These are frequently people with post high-school education and degrees who work 40-plus hours a week, at jobs that can be very physically and emotionally draining. They are people with families and bills and illnesses and dreams. The work we do is important and if we have learned nothing from our recent collective economic spiral, it is that virtually any of us can stumble and find ourselves in a position of needing help. It is a shame that our society places so little value on our work that many non-profit agencies can’t even provide a retirement plan for their employees.

Finances remain a taboo topic of discussion in our society. Attempting to talk to people about their salaries, benefits, retirement and personal wealth makes them extremely uncomfortable. This is a critical conversation, however, to those currently working in the non-profit field and those considering such a career path. It is certainly worth the time of non-profit leaders, directors and board members, to advocate for change and pay equity for the employees who give so much of themselves to help others.

Belinda Rolicheck
Executive Director
Haven Women’s Center of Stanislaus

Being a parent of a middle school student has given me a lot ot worry about: drugs, sex and violence.  As a parent, I realize that we must start early if we are to prevent dating violence. Yet, many dating violence prevention efforts address high school students, but the pattern of violence often starts before then.  In an article recently published in the Journal of Early Adolescence, 60% of 6^th grade males and 45% of  6^th grade females (45.2%)  reported having a boy or girlfriend in previous 3 months. Among those students reporting having a boy/girlfriend, almost 1/3 of girls and more than ¼ of boys reported being physically aggressive toward their boy/girlfriend.

Teen dating violence prevention efforts like Start Strong highlight working with middle school age youth. It seems to me even more important now than ever to start early.

Note: The instrument used to measure the levels of violence was modified from the instrument used to evaluate Safe Dates.  I have trouble reconciling the finding that males are more likely than females to be victimized.  What do you think is going on?

Here is the full citation and link the article on the journal’s web site.

Physical Dating Violence Norms and Behavior Among Sixth-Grade Students From Four U.S. Sites.

Simon TR, Miller S, Gorman-Smith D, Orpinas P, Sullivan T. Journal of Early Adolescence 2010; 30(3): 395-409.

Click here for a link to the article on the journal’s web site.

(Copyright © 2010, Sage Publications)

Relatively little is known about the prevalence of physical dating violence behaviors and perceived norms about dating violence among early adolescents. A sample of 5,404 sixth-grade students was recruited from four diverse U.S. sites. Over half of the respondents reported that girls hitting their boyfriends was acceptable under certain circumstances (e.g., if made mad or jealous) and more than one in four reported acceptance of boys hitting their girlfriends. Among those reporting that they had a recent boy/ girlfriend, nearly one third of girls (31.5%) and more than one fourth of boys (26.4%) reported being physically aggressive toward this person (e.g., punching, slapping). These data support the need to address the problem of violence within students’ perceived dating relationships in sixth grade or earlier and suggest that preventive interventions should focus on changing norms that support violence between males and females.

If he buys her dinner, does he expect that they will have sex?  If he rapes her after dinner,  who is blamed for the rape?  In an article recently ePublished in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Basow and Minieri examine questions like this.

I remember many surveys of high school and college students over the last several decades that show similar disturbing, and unsurprising, findings. Here is another study (with data collected from a private Northeastern liberal arts school) to add to this knowledge base about social expectation on a date.

What are the implications for rape prevention?  Would splitting the bill reduce rape? I am glad that rape is no longer assumed to be committed by a “stranger jumping out of bushes” but the concept of  “date rape” might be also dated. We live in a time period where young people do use the term “dating.”   What are the implications of this for rape prevention?

Here is the full abstract and citation.

“You Owe Me”: Effects of Date Cost, Who Pays, Participant Gender, and Rape Myth Beliefs on Perceptions of Rape.

Basow SA, Minieri A. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 2010; ePublished May 4, 2010

Click here for a link to the article on the journal’s web site.

(Copyright © 2010, Sage Publications)

Sexual social exchange theory was applied to perceptions of a date rape by manipulating the cost of the date and who paid in vignettes presented to 188 U.S. college students, who then rated the characters’ sexual expectations, blame, responsibility, and rape justifiability. Findings from this between-participant design partially supported predictions: When the man paid for an expensive date, men agreed more than did women that both characters should have expected sexual intercourse. Conversely, when the costs of an inexpensive date were split, the perpetrator was assigned the most blame, and women agreed more than men that no sexual expectations were warranted. Participant gender affected some responses, although level of rape myth acceptance was the main predictor of rape perceptions.

I find the social ecological model to be a helpful framework to highlight that prevention work needs to look beyond the individual.  So I am pleased to see research that examines risk and protective factors that go beyond individual attitudes, beliefs and experiences.

In the recent article appearing in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, authors Casey and Beadnell examine the links between male adolescent peer networks and the risk to perpetrate intimate partner violence.  Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (initially collected in 1995 on teen peer networks and in 2001 for IPV perpetration), this study explores different peer networks for male teens.

While the results are uneven (some relationship were shown while other were not), Casey and Beadnell suggest

…some peer-level factors did emerge as relevant to IPV perpetration, which suggests that selected prevention programming targeting specific risk factors at the peer level may be warranted. Speci?cally, depressed, socially isolated youth in small, dense male networks appeared to be at greater risk of future perpetration than youth with much more numerous, gender-balanced, pro- social ties. It may be that structural prevention programs that aim to reduce some teens’ social isolation, build social competencies and generate positive opportunities for exposure to variety of peers may expand the range of behaviors, attitudes and relationship expectations to which youth are exposed.

I support research that challenges prevention programs to make changes to social networks as a means to change.  What do you think?

The full citation and abstract follow:

The structure of male adolescent peer networks and risk for intimate partner violence perpetration: findings from a national sample.

Casey EA, Beadnell B. Journal of Youth and Adolescence 2010; 39(6): 620-33.

Click here for a link to the article on the journal’s web site.

(Copyright © 2010, Springer Science+Business Media)

Although peer networks have been implicated as influential in a range of adolescent behaviors, little is known about relationships between peer network structures and risk for intimate partner violence (IPV) among youth. This study is a descriptive analysis of how peer network “types” may be related to subsequent risk for IPV perpetration among adolescents using data from 3,030 male respondents to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Sampled youth were a mean of 16 years of age when surveyed about the nature of their peer networks, and 21.9 when asked to report about IPV perpetration in their adolescent and early adulthood relationships. A latent class analysis of the size, structure, gender composition and delinquency level of friendship groups identified four unique profiles of peer network structures. Men in the group type characterized by small, dense, mostly male peer networks with higher levels of delinquent behavior reported higher rates of subsequent IPV perpetration than men whose adolescent network type was characterized by large, loosely connected groups of less delinquent male and female friends. Other factors known to be antecedents and correlates of IPV perpetration varied in their distribution across the peer group types, suggesting that different configurations of risk for relationship aggression can be found across peer networks. Implications for prevention programming and future research are addressed.

CALCASA’s public affairs associate, Phillip Ung, has been selected as a member of the California Judicial Council’s Violence Against Women Education Project (VAWEP) Planning Committee.

VAWEP serves as a specially convened working group of the Family and Juvenile Law Advisory Committee and provides recommendations and guidance relating to the project.  VAWEP is an initiative to provide the courts with information, educational materials, training, and technical assistance relating to the court’s role in responding to domestic violence, sexual assault, teen dating violence, and elder abuse cases.

Phillip will be joining judges, prosecutors, public defenders, law enforcement, and victim advocates to identify and develop educational materials, programming, and curricula related to domestic violence, sexual assault, teen dating violence, and elder abuse for the judicial branch.

The Governor has now issued his revised budget proposal containing drastic cuts that would be devastating to California women and families.  The CA Commission on the Status of Women wants to hear from you about the impact of these proposed cuts or any other issue that’s important to you.

The Commission will hold public hearings to provide a forum for Californians to voice their opinions and talk about real problems faced by women and girls every day. They want to hear from people throughout the state who have ideas about how California can help improve the lives of women and girls. Information obtained from the hearings will assist in the Commission’s ongoing work to achieve equal opportunities for all women and girls.

Hearing Schedule:

Friday, June 11th
1 PM to 5 PM
Pasadena Central Library
Donald Wright Auditorium
285 East Walnut Street
Pasadena, CA
* Submit sign-up form by June 3rd

Friday, June 18th
11 AM to 3 PM
Redding Library
1100 Parkview Avenue
Redding, CA
* Submit sign-up form by June 10th

Thursday, August 12th
1 PM to 5 PM
State Capitol, Room TBD
Sacramento, CA
* Submit sign-up form by August 4th

Can’t attend a hearing? Submit your recommendations in writing by August 12, 2010.

For more information, sign-up to testify, or submit your recommendations in writing, please visit www.women.ca.gov.

* Priority to testify will be given to individuals who submit their sign-up form by the dates listed

The Washington Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs has released another excellent issue of  Connections on the topic Media Savvy Youth: Challenging the Pop Culture Messages that Contribute to Sexual Violence. Articles include:

• • The power of media literacy for girls
  • Dismantling Rape Culture through songs
• Take action! Writing to editors
• 25 Positive Hip Hop and Rap Songs

Click here to check out the entire issue.

Request for Proposals
MyStrength Evaluation

The California Coalition Against Sexual Assault (CALCASA) is looking for a consultant to provide services to support CALCASA in its evaluation of MyStrength, its statewide social marketing campaign to engage young men to prevent sexual violence.

Since 2005, CALCASA has supported the MyStrength Campaign where local rape crisis centers conduct MyStrength Clubs in their local community.  This evaluation will use a case study approach to document the progress and changes in those communities and for the rape crisis centers themselves.

The case study evaluation should include multiple sites (minimum 3) and consider many elements including:

• Capacity of a rape crisis center to conduct primary prevention of sexual violence
• Engagement of men in sexual violence prevention efforts
• Community support for prevention efforts
• Impact of MyStrength campaign for MyStrength participants and the communities themselves.

The project budget is $15,000 inclusive of travel and material costs.  Site visits are expected and creative use of media is encouraged.  The final report shall include separate reports for each site as well as a comprehensive summary that includes recommendations and lessons learned. Use of various forms of media (written, visual, video, audio, etc.) is encouraged.

To apply, please send a proposal no longer than 10 pages to David Lee by 1:00 pm on Thursday, June 18, 2010 including the following:

• Selection process of sites (minimum three sites)
• Methods to collect data
• Approach to analyze data
• Experience in case study methodology

In addition to the proposal, please include the following (not included in 10 page limit):

• Sample report for a similar project
• Resume/CV and statement of experience highlighting knowledge of sexual violence prevention for key personnel
• proposed budget including details for expenses

This final report for this project will be due on September 30, 2010.  A draft of the report will be due on September 15 for feedback and direction from CALCASA.

Please contact David Lee if you have any questions.

Last month, CALCASA’s Director of Public Affairs Robert Coombs spent a weekend aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is the fifth Nimitz-class supercarrier in the United States Navy. He, along with bloggers and media, had the opportunity to explore the ship and meet with its crew.

While underway in the Pacific, Coombs learned about some of the initiatives the Navy has to deal with sexual assault. The timing was fitting because he was on board during Sexual Assault Awareness Month. In the video clip, he interviews Lt. Cmdr. William J. Marks, the ship’s public affairs officer, who talks about the Navy’s commitment to victim intervention, prevention and response.

Coombs also met S.A.V.I. advocates — that’s Sexual Assault Victim Intervention. These individuals are doing some of the same work that advocates in California are working on, in addition to dealing with the special nature of working with sexual assault in the military.

CALCASA was well represented among more than 500 people attending the Women of Color National Call to Action Institute and Conference held week in New Orleans, La. CALCASA’s Women of Color Caucus representatives Yesenia Curiel and Christina Vasquez were joined by CALCASA staff Cindy Marroquin, Ellen Yin-Wycoff and Villena Koumis to lead workshops at this conference. David Lee co-facilitated the Men’s Institute. CALCASA staff Althea Hart and Hugo Rios, MyStrength Club facilitator at Resource Center for Survivors in Fresno, also attended the week-long conference.

In the coming weeks, participants will be sharing their impressions about this conference and their role to support women of color advocates and activities working to end violence against women and families.

CALCASA is pleased to annonce the Spring-Summer 2010 Training Calendar for our Member Programs. This year’s training calendar includes web conferences and in-person trainings related to Prevention, Advocacy and Intervention and  Organizational Management.  Limited travel scholarships may be available for most in-person trainings, so please keep an eye out for more information on each training. 

If you have any questions about any of the events, please contact the appropriate person listed on the calendar.

WEB CONFERENCE

Growing Boys Into Men: Countering Traditional Masculinity Through Norms Change

Countering norms that reinforce traditional masculinity is an opportunity to prevent violence in a lasting, comprehensive way. This web conference will highlight specific strategies and efforts that seeks to change norms related to gendered violence. Different norms will be examined with regard to their historical context, distinct challenges, and opportunities for collaborative work.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010, repeated on Thursday, May 27, 2010

Presenter: Annie Lyles, Xavier Morales and Christine Chang, Prevention Institute

Guests:

• Jerry Tello, Therapist, Author, and Performer
• Craig Norberg-Bohm, Men’s Initiative Coordinator, Jane Doe Inc.

Objectives:

• Understand how norms create an environment in which violence is more likely to occur.
• Provide examples of successes from people and organizations working to counter norms of traditional masculinity.
• Identify strategies being used to effectively counter and change norms.
• Identify potential indicators for measuring progress in norms change.

To Learn More and Register, Visit Our Website: http://www.preventconnect.org

Real-Time Captioning Available: Instructions for accessing captioning during this web conference will be provided with your registration confirmation.

I wish reading research were a simple process of learning new knowledge. Instead, I have to consider the research question, methodology, strategy to select the sample, recognize the limitations of the research and evaluate the relevance to the practice of sexual violence and domestic violence prevention. And sometimes I cannot understand things like this chart below.

Here is my weekly routine:I review the summary of abstracts from recently published research as compiled by Safety Lit.  I read the title of each violence related study. For those that catch my interest, I read the abstract.  From those studies, I work with my colleagues at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center to get copies of the article that have appear to have implications for prevention practice.

Then I learn that the conclusion does not always fit what was actually studied. Or that I cannot figure out how the research leads to the conclusion.

I am not a researcher.  During my studies for my masters degree I learned to be a good consumer of research. I interpret research and know many of the questions to ask.  But I am not an expert on statistical methods nor am I always able to understand how they actually did the research.

This week I saw the interesting title of an article, Vulnerable adolescent participants’ experience in surveys on sexuality and sexual abuse: Ethical aspects from the journal Child Abuse and Neglect.  This study explores an important question about the possible discomfort of adolescents when they participate in a survey about sexuality and sexual abuse.

But as read the analysis, I do not understand what they are doing. This might be excellent research; but its methodology is too much for my skills to understand. If I cannot read research, what about people who have even less experience with research.  My colleagues at VAWnet create Applied Research papers to address this – but we need to understand research.

What do you do to understand research?

The abstract and full citation of the article follows.

Vulnerable adolescent participants’ experience in surveys on sexuality and sexual abuse: Ethical aspects.

Priebe G, Bäckström M, Ainsaar M. Child Abuse and Neglect 2010; ePublished April 18, 2010

Click here for a link the article on the journal’s web site.

(Copyright © 2010, Elsevier Publishing)

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this research was to study the discomfort experienced by adolescents when answering questions in a survey about sexuality and sexual abuse and to investigate factors that may determine possible experience of discomfort. The research focused particularly on vulnerable adolescents-sexually abused and sexually inexperienced.

METHOD: Adolescents in their final year of high school in Estonia (n=1,334) and Sweden (n=3,401) who had completed a survey about experiences of sexuality and sexual abuse answered additional questions about experiences of discomfort related to the survey questions.

RESULTS: A majority of the participants did not feel discomfort when completing the survey. This was also the case for the two vulnerable groups. Experience of penetrating sexual abuse, sexual inexperience, mental health problems, rape myth acceptance, gender, immigrant background, and country were included in a structural equation model. Experience of penetrating sexual abuse was not significantly related to discomfort in the final model, while sexual inexperience was associated with increased discomfort (standardized coefficient .20) and rape myth acceptance was the strongest indicator of discomfort (.27). The total amount of explained variance was 17%.

CONCLUSIONS: Our data do not support the view that adolescents in general or vulnerable subgroups such as sexually abused or sexually inexperienced adolescents experience discomfort when answering a survey about sexuality and sexual abuse. As discomfort ratings were not highly related to any of the predictors further research is needed that includes other factors. It is important to follow existing ethical guidelines since there may always be some individuals who feel discomfort.

Whatever your impression is of sports and athletes; there’s no denying the indelible affect on the society at large.  From the women and men that play sports at its most competitive levels, to the mother that takes her son to his soccer games and practices, or the father that is teaching his daughter to shoot a perimeter jump shot; sports are a part of many people’s lives.  Over the last decade, there has been a huge trend of getting youth involved in organized sports through sports clubs or nonprofit athletic organizations.  With the possibility of college scholarships or a chance at Olympic gold; some parents are investing money and resources in their child, in addition to the child spending an inordinate amount of time with the coach in perfecting their craft.

In April 2010 the ABC News program 20/20 highlighted the sexual misconduct of over 36 swimming coaches who have been banned for life by USA Swimming because of sexual misconduct with youth female swimmers. 

Two Seattle Times staff reports wrote an article titled Coaches Who Prey, in which 159 coaches in the state of Washington have been fired or reprimanded for sexual misconduct ranging from harassment to rape.  At least 98 of those coaches continued to coach or teach somewhere else.

Before I started coaching youth soccer, I assumed that coaches and those working with children would have had rigorous background checks completed by the organizations.  In some cases, my assumptions were incorrect.  One youth program I worked with ask for my driver’s license, proof of CPR and first aid completion, soccer training certification and required finger printing for a criminal background check.  Another organization’s screening and background check involved the Director of Operations saying “Since you show up to all your daughter’s practices, you can coach the team for the entire season – the previous coach quit.”

A 2008 survey by the National Council of Youth Sports of its member organizations indicated that 44,031,890 boys and girls participated in their sports programs.   They also had 7,343,556 adults volunteering in various capacities; this number included 2,409,020 coaches.

With the astronomical number of boys and girls participating in youth sports and the number of volunteers it takes to operate sports programs; there needs to be more consistent and thorough screening of coaches.  Also it would help if a protocol or best practices was created for the sports programs to use as a guide regarding but not limited to the following areas: hiring, investigating allegations, notifying parents and law enforcement, dismissing coaches, etc.

I have included several examples of youth sports organizations that have screening processes and protocols for coaches and volunteers.

• National Council of Youth Sports
• National Alliance for Youth Sports
• USA Track & Field
• Youth Football Coaches Association

How many local youth programs are in your community?  Do you know what their process is for screening coaches and volunteers?  This is an excellent opportunity for your rape crisis center (RCC) to connect with these youth sports clubs and organizations to discuss the educational opportunities around sexual abuse prevention to parents, staff, volunteers and athletes. 

In addition to the educational opportunity on prevention, some youth organizations may need assistance in developing a screening process for coaches and volunteers and or help with creating a protocol around the issues.

Your involvement with community youth sports programs can increase people’s awareness around sexual abuse prevention, increase the level of safety of children who participate in the programs and of course enlighten the parents and organization on what a wonderful resource the local RCC is.

When RCC’s work with youth sports programs in the community; we will hear fewer stories of coaches sexually abusing youth and more stories of good sportsmanship.  Such as the two softball players who choose to help an injured player on the opposing team; and in doing so, lost their chance of advancing to the playoffs. 

For responses to this post or questions about working with youth sports programs in your community, please use the comment box below.

In the study recently ePublished in the Journal Prevention Science, the authors Woodin and O’Leary examine a violence prevention program for couples with a history of at least one act of male-to-female physical violence in the current relationship.

Domestic violence advocates warn against activities that may place someone at great risk, such as couple-based interventions. This program includes an assessment that includes interviewing both partners together.

The study finds the use of motivational interviewing to reduce future physical aggression (as compared to those who receive “minimal non-motivational” feedback.)

What do you think?

The full citation and abstract follow:

A Brief Motivational Intervention for Physically Aggressive Dating Couples.

Woodin EM, O’Leary KD. Prevention Science 2010; ePublished April 17, 2010.

Click here to see the abstract on the journal’s website.

(Copyright © 2010, Springer Science+Business Media)

Motivational interviewing is a brief non-confrontational intervention designed to enhance motivation to reduce harmful behavior (Miller and Rollnick 2002). The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of motivational interviewing as a targeted prevention approach for partner aggression in emerging adulthood. Participants were 50 college dating couples between 18 and 25 years old who reported at least one act of male-to-female physical aggression in their current relationships. After completing a 2-hour assessment session, half of all couples were randomly assigned to a 2-hour individualized motivational feedback session targeting physical aggression and risk factors for aggression. The remaining couples received minimal, non-motivational feedback. Follow-up surveys were conducted 3, 6, and 9 months later. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses indicated that, compared to the control condition, the motivational feedback intervention led to reductions in physical aggression and harmful alcohol use and to less acceptance of female psychological aggression and male psychological aggression (among women only). Lagged analyses indicated that changes in physical aggression were predicted by reductions in psychological aggression and by lower acceptance of both male and female psychological aggression. Reductions in physical aggression predicted lower anxiety and greater relationship investment and male relationship commitment over time. These findings suggest that a brief motivational intervention is a useful prevention approach for high-risk dating couples, with benefits to both individual and relationship functioning.

On June 22-23, 2010 CALCASA will have its annual Executive Directors’ Meeting in Sacramento, CA.  This year’s meeting is titled “No Matter the Season, Good Leadership and Management are Always in Style.”

Rape Crisis Center Executive Directors from across California will come together for two days to network and develop strategies on issues that have an impact on their agencies and communities in which they work.  Participants will leave re-energized with increased skill sets in innovative leadership and responsible management practices to affect change at their agencies and in their communities.

Training topics:

• Diversity and Inclusion
• Human Resource Management
• Agency Sustainability
• CALCASA Legislative Updates
• Rape Crisis Center 2010 Salary Survey results
• CAL-EMA will be available (2nd day in the A.M.) to speak with you

The training will be facilitated by consultants, CALCASA staff and Executive Directors (your peers).  This event is free of charge and open to Executive Directors or Executive Management at California Rape Crisis Centers.

CALCASA will make travel scholarships available for this event (one per agency, unless you have multiple Executive Directors).  Registration will begin on May 7, 2010. 

For those Executive Directors who have been in the position for less than 2 1/2 years; we have a pre-session specifically for you – the New Executive Director’s Roundtable Meeting.  You will be able to register for both events starting Friday, May 7, 2010.  For further information on either event, please contact Kavin Black at (916)446-2520 ext. 305 or kavin@calcasa.org.  Click here to register for this event.

CALCASA is having its first ever New Executive Directors’ Roundtable Meeting on Monday, June 21, 2010 from 2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m at the CALCASA Offices located in Sacramento, California. This roundtable discussion is intended for California Rape Crisis Center Executive Directors or Executive Management who have been in the position for less than 2 1/2 years.  This is an excellent opportunity to network with your peers; share challenges and successes, problem solve and learn about resources available through CALCASA.

This event will precede the Executive Directors’ Meeting – No Matter the Season, Good Leadership and Management are Always in Style”

CALCASA will make travel scholarships available for this event (one per agency, unless you have multiple Executive Directors).  Registration will open on Friday, May 7, 2010.

If you are a new Executive Director or Executive Management, please do not miss out on an opportunity to Meet, Greet, Eat and Share with your peers from across California.  For further information on either event, please contact Kavin Black at (916)446-2520 ext. 305 or kavin@calcasa.org.  Click here to register for this event.

Denim Day California 2010 was another big hit in the Capitol region with hundreds of legislators and staff participating to increase sexual assault awareness and to show that there is never reason or an excuse to rape.

On a wet and rainy day, CALCASA’s Capitol event brought together legislators, agency allies and crime victim representatives to stand together against sexual assault.

Please click through the photo slideshow to see great photos of the Capitol event and watch the video to see legislators taking leadership on sexual assault awareness.

News of other successful Denim Day events permeated through the media and we want to thank all of our members and allies for making Denim Day 2010 a success. Let us work together over the next year to make sure sexual assault awareness is not just in the month of April but throughout the year.

St. Cloud, MN – When Dr. Dorothy Edwards addressed University of California staff and administrators about Green Dot in San Francisco last fall, she stressed the importance of investing time and energy to develop meaningful relationships with campus partners/allies working to end campus violence. As a social worker interested in community-based/participatory paradigms, I find Dr. Edwards’ notion of connecting with campus partners and allies relevant given that people are more likely to participate in social change when bonds are created over time specifically when there is a common language and trust.

Meeting Lee LaDue, the Project Director of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) Grant to reduce sexual assault, domestic/dating violence, and stalking on campuses, Sheila Johnson, the Project Coordinator, as well as other campus partners reminded me of the challenges faced by campuses in small communities where people know each other.  Nationwide, sexual assault is a highly under-reported crime but particularly in small, rural communities where survivors often fear for their safety and privacy should they report their experience to local police.  What most struck me during the visit, besides seeing students wearing shorts and flip-flops in chilly 60 degree weather, is how St. Cloud State benefits from having a project coordinator familiar with how individuals in law enforcement speak and relate to each other.  Knowledge of how to communicate with law enforcement is critical when collaboratively developing survivor-centered training curriculum on sexual assault, domestic violence and stalking.

Over the course of two days, I met with administrators interested in furthering the university’s efforts surrounding training opportunities and prevention efforts and students committed to challenging and changing social norms on their campus surrounding gender, sex and violence.  I also had the opportunity to listen to Suzanne Koepplinger, Executive Director of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center, talk about her agency’s recent research study that examined trafficking of Native American girls and women in the state of Minnesota.  The study involved survivors throughout the research process and in the crafting of recommendations for combatting trafficking in Indian country.

Watch the above clip with interviews of St. Cloud State students and staff talk about activities for Sexual Assault Awareness Month and what brought them into the movement to end sexual violence.

It is great to see an article in the Journal of The Medical Association of Thailand that calls for a nation wide school-based program to promote gender equity to prevent sexual violence.  When will we see this in the United States?

The full citation, abstract and link to full text follow the jump.

Gender roles, physical and sexual violence prevention in primary extend to secondary school in Samutsakorn Province, Thailand.

Chamroonsawasdi K, Suparp J, Kittipichai W, Khajornchaikul P. Journal of The Medical Association of Thailand 2010; 93(3): 358-65.

Click here for full text.

(Copyright © 2010, Medical Association of Thailand)

OBJECTIVE: To enhance positive attitude and life skills on gender roles to prevent physical and sexual violence.

MATERIAL AND METHOD: A whole school-based participatory learning program using a quasi-experimental study with pre and post test design was conducted among 2 schools during June-September, 2005. The experimental group, were 134 students in a primary school and 179 students in a secondary school. While the control group, were 122 students in a primary school and 95 students in secondary school.

RESULTS: Means score of attitude toward gender roles before implementation in the experimental group was significantly lower than the control group (p < 0.05). After implementation, the means score in the experimental group was not significantly different from the control group (p > 0.05). Means paired different score (after-before) between the two groups was significantly different (p = 0.002).

CONCLUSION: A whole school-based program on gender roles and violence prevention is suitable for youths and should be merged as school curricula and expanded as a nationwide program at all level of education. Gender equity should be taught at an early childhood. Parental involvement in school-based activities should be negotiated.

As Sexual Assault Awareness Month comes to an end, here is a video of my talk to the California National Guard for their SAAM event on April 12, 2010. I talked about the importance of preventing sexual violence, the That’s Not Cool Campaign, and Denim Day.

Canton, N.Y. – St. Lawrence University is a four year liberal arts university in the village of Canton, a rural, farming area of upstate New York near the border with Canada.  St. Lawrence is one of several institutions of higher education in St. Lawrence County, the others being: State University of New York (SUNY) Potsdam, SUNY Canton and Clarkson University.  One element that distinguishes St. Lawrence from the neighboring universities is the institutional and student support in addressing and ending sexual violence on campus.

Chris Morrin, Project Director of the U.S. Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) Grant to reduce sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence and stalking on campus, oversees the sexual violence prevention efforts.  Upon arriving in Canton, I attended “Spark Change” a student production comprised of various student groups addressing sexual violence.  Through poetry, music, and multimedia, students shared their unity publicly standing against sexual violence.  One of the powerful pieces came at the end, when male-identified student athletes and one female-identified student, all dressed in white, spoke about the tragedy surrounding the death of 14 women at the École Polytechnique on December 6, 1989, a movement appeared in Canada of wearing the white ribbon to signify opposition to violence against women.  One of the athletes, with a flower in hand, commanding the empty stage, stood before the audience and briefly but poignantly spoke about the responsibility of men in ending violence.

The next two days were filled with meetings where I met with different grant partners, including administrators, judicial affairs officers, the director of campus safety, researchers/educators and students.  The site visit ended with a lunch where I met students that form part of MAASV (Male Athletes Against Sexual Violence).  The group’s president, a female third year student not engaged in university sports, treasurer/graduating senior, and the newly elected publicity chair shared their stories of how they became involved in the movement, the struggles they have faced in challenging social norms on campus and how they plan on carrying out what they have learned from each other into their lives post St. Lawrence.

When I recently wrote about preventing domestic violence and sexual violence as a public health issue, I recognized that violence prevention is different from other traditional public health issues.  To reduce injuries to child in car accidents, policies can require the use of car seats.  But, what is the equivalent policy to prevent domestic violence?  There are some ideas that are not well thought out. Lighting up parking lots may be a good idea; making this a policy to prevent rape is misguided since it does not address the primary factors related to sexual assault.

I was pleased to see in the journal Injury Prevention the study Effects of domestic violence policies, alcohol taxes and police staffing levels on intimate partner homicide in large US cities asking this important question. While the study does not provide definitive answers, I applaud the effort to investigate the role of policy.

The full citation and abstract follow the jump.

Effects of domestic violence policies, alcohol taxes and police staffing levels on intimate partner homicide in large US cities.

Zeoli AM, Webster DW. Injury Prevention 2010; 16(2): 90-5.

Click here for the abstract on the journal’s web site.

(Copyright © 2010, BMJ Publishing Group)

OBJECTIVE: To assess the relationships between intimate partner homicide (IPH) and public policies including police staffing levels in large US cities.

DESIGN: The research uses a multiple time-series design to examine the effects of statutes aimed at restricting access to firearms for perpetrators of domestic violence, allowing or mandating arrest for violators of domestic violence restraining orders (DVROs), beer excise taxes, and police staffing levels on IPH in 46 of the largest US cities from 1979 to 2003. Both total IPH and IPH committed with a firearm are analysed. Generalised estimating equations using a Poisson distribution are used to regress IPH on the policies and potential confounders.

RESULTS: State statutes restricting those under DVROs from accessing firearms, and laws allowing the warrantless arrest of DVRO violators are associated with reductions in total and firearm IPH. Police staffing levels are also negatively associated with IPH and firearm IPH. There was no evidence that other policies to restrict firearm access to domestic violence offenders or alcohol taxes had a significant impact on IPH.

CONCLUSIONS: Reducing access to firearms for DVRO defendants, increasing police staffing levels and allowing the warrantless arrest of DVRO violators may reduce the city-level risk of IPH. Future research should evaluate factors that may mediate the effect of these laws and increased police staffing levels on IPH to determine whether there are opportunities to increase their protective effect. Further research is needed on firearm law implementation to determine why the other tested laws were not found effective.

Mia Mingus (left) facilitating a discussion at the University of New Hampshire

Durham, N.H. – At the January 2010 Campus Training & Technical Assistance Institute (TTI) in Orlando, Jane Stapleton, the project director of the U.S. Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) Grant to reduce sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence and stalking at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) attended the endnote presentation where Mia Mingus spoke about the intersection of violence and the urgency of not only responding to violence but collaborating with allies in preventing and ultimately ending sexual violence.  Jane’s enthusiasm in hearing Mia’s presentation carried over to having the out spoken activist facilitate a discussion on the intersection of violence at UNH.

A predominately white institution, with a 24 hour crisis center for students in need of services relating to sexual assault, and home to some of the country’s most exciting prevention efforts in sexual violence, UNH’s campus partners gathered for a morning filled with analysis and critique of violence as well as identifying campus resources in order to improve service delivery and responses to survivors of sexual violence.

On April 27th, CALCASA hosted a discussion on critical concepts in effective sexual assault response teams with Donna Barry, APN and Chief Paul Cell, both from Montclair State University.  Not only did they address how to create SARTs on campus, but they also discussed the importance of evaluation and developing best practice response.

Webinar materials include: powerpoint presentation (pdf), text chat transcription (doc), and the audio.

Campus webinar on critical concepts in effective sexual assault response teams (pdf)

Text chat of Campus webinar on critical concepts in sexual assault response teams (pdf)

Audio recording of critical concepts in effective sexual assault response teams

Campus Sexual Assault Response Teams: Program Development and Operational Management

Brig. Gen. Jeffrey C. Horne (I), Director, Army Human Resources Policy Directorate, introduces Robert Coombs who was a subject-matter expert at the third annual Army SHARP Summit.

Robert Coombs, CALCASA’s director of public affairs, attended the U.S. Army’s 2010 Sexual Harassment /Assault Prevention (SHARP) Summit in Arlington, Va. This is part of the Army’s I.AM.STRONG campaign, which is spreading the message to combat sexual assaults by engaging all soldiers in preventing sexual assaults before they occur.

“Every leader needs to see sexual assault as fundamentally counter to the warrior ethos,” said Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., chief of staff of the Army. “It’s all about leadership and leaders setting the right examples.”

For more information about the Summit, visit the SHARP Program website.

Gov. Schwarzenegger's public observance.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger observed April as Sexual Assault Awareness Month and released to following public statement:

“Greetings to everyone observing Sexual Assault Awareness Month. As Governor, keeping our citizens safe is my highest priority, and I applaud all those who are devoted to stopping sexual assault and helping those who have been victimized by this horrible crime. …

“The perpetrators must answer to justice, and the victims must have resources and opportunities to heal. Your actions are ensuring that these goals become realities, and I commend you for  your dedication to your fellow Californians. Thanks to your concern, our Golden State is an even better — and safer — place to call home.”

“Please accept my best wishes for a memorable observance and continued success in your noble endeavors.  Sincerely, Arnold Schwarzenegger”

CALCASA will continue to work with the Governor and the Legislature to meet our commitment to ending sexual violence in our communities.

Please comment and let us know about your Sexual Assault Awareness Month events.