Category: Sexual Assault

The San Diego District Attorney’s Office has recently published a new site about alcohol facilitated sexual assault. Know the Price, which focuses solely on the issue of rape by intoxication, is filled with local & national resources, information about prevention & bystander intervention, and best of all, video clips that could be great teaching tools for both professionals and the general public (warning: video begins playing automatically). While the legal info is California-specific, most of the message appears to be pretty generalizable.

I haven’t finished watching all the clips, but I must admit, I’m happy to see the topic find the light of day online. Not a whole lot out there on AFSA meant for the lay public…

It’s been a busy, but productive week for me. However, I am excited at the prospect of heading home tonight. And I’m particularly excited that I have only 1 trip scheduled over the next two weeks, and it’s an overnighter at that (Quad Cities anyone?). So postings will increase again beginning next week.

Over at the Sustainability site, it was a lighter week for us, too, but you’ll still find a few of our regular features, including:

• Our weekly Coordinator Q&A, this time with Tulsa coordinator Kathy Bell.
• A great run down on fundraising blogs, courtesy of Donor Power Blog
• A two-part article on building sustainable programs from the folks at the Community Driven Institute

Have a great weekend everyone!

I’m heading to Illinois next week to teach a SANE course (adolescent/adult), and I was grumbling (to my dogs because they are always sympathetic) about schlepping my supplemental materials with me on a plane (do you have any idea how huge the binder is?). And I have been doing my very best to reduce the amount of paper I generate and streamline my approach in general, so printing things out or making copies sounded unappealing, as well. Then it dawned on me: I have a whole site at my disposal to warehouse these items.

This week at the sustainability site, we talk nursing practice, employee evaluation, collaboration and tech tools. And as a bonus, a couple woodland creatures stop by to see us:

• Some tools for evaluating potential employees, from people who know these sorts of things
• Things to consider as we (hopefully) strive for patient-centered care with a bonus TED video that challenges us to consider the merits of embracing practical wisdom
• Fieldstone Alliance comes through for us again with a review of keys to successful collaboration
• A wonky tech tool free to use and easy as cake: CometDocs makes converting your docs a breeze…
• Our weekly installment of the Friday Q&A. Now with more moose! Our guest this week is the fabulous Jennifer Meyer of Forensic Nursing Services of Providence in Anchorage, Alaska.

I’m off to Peoria, IL next week for a SANE course. Postings will be a bit lighter, but still daily, barring any major acts of God.

Enjoy your weekend–it’s 80 degrees and sunny here in the CLE!

NYSCASA is hosting a webinar May 4th: Sexual Violence in the Military. It’s advertised as being NY state-specific, so if you’re in the area, it might be a good use of time (and I’m assuming if you’re not you could probably still attend). The featured speaker is a Navy SARC; it looks like medical will be one of the things addressed in the session.

Prevention Connection has announced its next webinar: The Role of Leadership in Creating Momentum for Primary Prevention of Violence Against Women. It will be held on May 5th (with a repeat on May 7th), at 11am Pacific Time (2pm ET). Participation is free, but pre-registration is required and spots are limited (and they do fill up).

The issue of Wood’s Lamps and other alternate light sources (ALS) in sexual assault medical forensic exams came up this week and it got me thinking about how often we do things because we were taught we should, and not because they’ve been shown to be particularly useful or effective. So I thought I’d take a few minutes to highlight the literature out there on ALS in the detection of semen on the bodies of sexual assault patients.

This week, I am excited to unveil a new feature at the Sustainability blog: the Friday Q&A, featuring a coordinator from a well-established SANE program. Our guest this week is Jennifer Pierce Weeks, coordinator of the Forensic Nurse Examiner Program at Memorial Health System in Colorado Springs, CO and current president of IAFN. Definitely worth checking out. We also:

• talked leadership competencies and self-evaluation
• looked at SAMHSA’s sustainability toolkit
• considered strategies for staff retention
• and highlighted one of my favorite collaboration tools

Enjoy your weekend everyone!

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. The NSVRC has a variety of resources related to SAAM, all of which can be found on the dedicated pages of their site. This year’s theme is preventing sexual violence in our workplaces; view the current campaign here, including info about the SAAM Day of Action, April 8th.

The current issue of the NIJ Journal is now available, featuring articles on human trafficking, post-conviction DNA testing and critical incidents in schools (at least those were the highlights for me). You can download the full journal here (PDF). The complete TOC includes:

• Sex Trafficking: Identifying Cases and Victims: Robert Moossy, J.D.
• Drugs, Race and Common Ground: Reflections on the High Point Intervention: David Kennedy
• Postconviction DNA Testing Is at Core of Major NIJ Initiatives: Nancy Ritter
• Sleep Deprivation: What Does It Mean for Public Safety Officers? Bryan Vila, Ph.D.
• Protecting America’s Ports: Bruce Taylor, Ph.D., and Pat Kaufman
• Using Technology to Make Prisons and Jails Safer: Philip Bulman
• Preventing, Preparing for Critical Incidents in Schools: Beth Schuster

Yesterday, Tell Me More did a segment on prison rape. Judge Reggie B. Walton is Chairman of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission and was one of 3 featured guests on the program. His remarks alone make it worth listening to the 17 minute segment.

I’ve been wanting to start publishing guides on this site for some time, and just haven’t gotten around to doing it until now. Because there’s so much content on this site (and still more out there in the interwebs) I figured it might be useful periodically to provide a post that gives you some ideas of how to use the content more broadly than just individual professional enrichment.

I have found that while people are pretty interested in the topic of emergency contraception, there’s not a lot of understanding about how it does (or doesn’t work). In fact, I continue to be surprised at how many SANE/SAFE trainings out there don’t really cover much about EC beyond the type of meds and doses to give. So I was happy to run across Contraception Online’s downloadable slides on the topic.

Tuesday, the Department of Defense released a new report on sexual assault in the military. Those of us who do this work won’t find the results particularly shocking (no glibness intended in that statement), but they are disturbing, nonetheless. Tuesday night CBS Evening News did a report on the story. You can watch the video here. Wednesday, they followed up with a piece on whether US military policies endanger female soldiers (clip and story here).

And we’re live! I am pleased to announce the unveiling of the National SANE Sustainability TA blog (a project of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, funded by the Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women). Because I maintain that site, in my role as project manager, you will start to see some cross-referencing between the two blogs. Although the project focuses on sexual assault (across the lifespan, BTW), the resources posted there will be useful for any program manager, particularly nonprofit healthcare program managers. Sadly, there’s no email subscriber service there, but there is an RSS feed for your daily doses of sustainability information…http://www.nsvrc.org/SANE-blog.