Accidents & Violence, Author Interviews, Sexual Health / 06.01.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Angie Kennedy, PhD Associate Professor School of Social Work Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?   Response: Nearly half of women (44%) experience physical or sexual partner violence by young adulthood, with 1 in 5 girls in high school reporting abuse within the last year. Sexual violence typically co-occurs with other forms of partner violence; co-occurring sexual and physical violence among adolescent girls is linked to health-risk behaviors including alcohol and drug use, unhealthy weight control, sexual risk-taking, and suicidality. As such, it represents a serious public health problem. To better understand this issue, we wanted to explore risk factors for sexual violence during young women’s adolescent and young adult relationships, i.e., what predicts attempted rape and rape by a partner during this vulnerable period? We took a novel approach: We examined predictors across multiple relationships, beginning with the first one, and we recruited a diverse sample of young women from a four-year research university, a two-year community college, and community sites serving low-income young women. (more…)
Accidents & Violence, Author Interviews, JAMA, Sexual Health, UCSD / 26.12.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: John W. Ayers, PhD, MA Vice Chief of Innovation | Assoc. Professor Div. Infectious Disease & Global Public Health University of California San Diego MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?   Response: The greatest barrier to understanding trends around sexual violence is they are largely hidden because victims are unable speak up publicly. Moreover, ongoing monitoring relies on proxies that underreport the scale of the problem such as police or medical records where only the most severe instances or a fraction of all instances of sexual violence are represented. As a result, we know very little about the scale of America's sexual violence problem. It was this backdrop that inspired #MeToo to call on victims to publicly voice their stories thereby revealing the scale of the problem. Our goal was to, for the first time, assess how this change inspired the public to engage with sexual violence issues. By tracking private aggregate internet search query trends we can begin to understand the scale of public engagement with issues around sexual violence including the precise motivation for a search, such as reporting episodes of sexual violence or learning how to prevent sexual violence. (more…)
Accidents & Violence, Lancet, Sexual Health / 14.02.2014

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Professor Naeemah Abrahams Senior Specialist Scientist:  Gender & Health Research Unit, South African Medical Research Council Extraordinary Professor:  Faculty of Community Health Sciences -School of Public Health: University of the Western Cape Associate Professor: Faculty of Health Sciences - School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences: University of Cape Town MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study? Prof. Abrahams: We found a global estimate of non-partner sexual violence of 7.2%  for women 15 years and older - but this estimate varied across the globe. The regions with the highest prevalence was Sub Sahara Africa Central and Southern with a prevalence was 21% in the central region and  17.4 % in the Southern region. This is nearly 3 times the global estimate . The region with the lowest prevalence was  Asia South at 3.3%. The low level could be due to a number of reasons. Firstly data from this region was very limited – from 2 countries only  and we have found that if sexual violence questions are added to other larger studies the level of disclosure is not very high. It is also  more likely that people from Asia region do not disclose the violence in research studies because of stigma and shame. (more…)