Monthly Archives: June 2009

Everything you ever wanted to know about sexual assault forensic exams

Posted on by

Karen Carroll, Associate Director of the Bronx Sexual Assault Response Team, was kind enough to talk with me last week about the basics of sexual assault forensic exams. You can listen and/or download part 1 here and part 2 here. (The podcast is not that long, under 30 minutes total, but for some reason our server refused to upload it as one file even though it let us upload the previous ones. No explanation. If it ever gets its act together, I’ll replace the two files with one file.)

Carroll helped dispel some of my CSI/NCIS fueled uncertainties about whether sexual assault forensic exams always produce evidence—they don’t—and how fast they provide that evidence—depends on the state and it’s current backlog at the labs, but it won’t be tomorrow like on TV.

She also made a recommendation, which I heartily endorse, that colleges and universities have a sexual assault response team, composed of campus police, medical professionals, student services administrators, counselors, etc., that meet regularly to keep up-to-date on sexual assault crisis responses on campus. Evidence collection and analysis techniques change, and everyone needs to be aware of both the best practices and how to correctly interpret any results. She mentions Montclair State University as one school with such a team in place, and you can get a good sense of how such a program works from their website. She also offers a helpful reality check on the possibility of getting nurses trained to perform sexual assault forensic exams on staff or on call at campus health centers. At the end of the day it seems like it is more a question of will then insurmountable cost—not that that surprises me in the slightest.

On a positive note for New Yorkers, it turns out the New York City offers better crisis services and evidence processing than many other places in the country—no L.A. backlogs here—but there is always more to do to make sure that everyone has access to the best possible services. Carroll collaborates with the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, which runs an extensive set of programs to increase access to highly-trained, survivor-sensitive crisis services across the city; check them out.

I hope this interview will answer a lot of your questions—if more pop up for you, leave them in the comments and I’ll see if we can get answers for them! Thanks again to Karen Carroll, and I hope you all enjoy what she has to say.

Forced Pregnancy; More Bad Frat Behavior; Publishing Survivors’ Names and Masculinity: A Weekend Round-Up

Posted on by

Hello internet! Sorry for the weekend absence. Here’s some of what was going on while I was being a neglectful blogger…

This is why reproductive rights and sexual violence are connected. Alternet published this disturbing piece by Lynn Harris on a different kind of intimate partner violence: forced pregnancies/contraception refusal. The article discusses the phenomenon at length, detailing the many ways in which some men exert their control over their partners bodies, and the stories range from straight-up rape, to contraception sabatoge, to an aggressive refusal to use contraceptives. The piece draws a lot on the research of Dr. Elizabeth Miller, whose work with low-income teen girls in Boston uncovered a shockingly high proportion of girls in abusive relationships where pregnancy manipulation was apparent. This seems to me to be a clear example of violence being done to a woman’s body, coercing or tricking a girl into becoming pregnant. From the article:

“It’s clearly out-and-out control of a woman’s body. Control for control’s sake,” says Miller. It’s an urge that stems, experts say, from an inability to manage their own fears and insecurities.

In one 2007 study, some boys acknowledged outright that they insisted on condomless sex as a way to establish power over female partners. (There is evidence of analogous male-on-male sexual violence, but it hasn’t been studied in depth.)

Other research found that some men took a woman’s request for a condom as an accusation of cheating, or an admission that she had slept around or strayed. And for some, yes, the goal is fatherhood — but not so much of the “involved” variety; rather, it’s a desire — as with Janey’s ex — to mark one woman as “mine” forever. Or, according to Patti Giggans, young men in gangs say, “I’m not gonna be around forever. I’ve gotta leave my legacy.

It’s an important piece. Check it out. Cara has more on this.

I’ve talked about fraternities before. And though I hate to keep harping on the point, I couldn’t ignore this article about the investigation of hazing at Sigma Phi Epsilon on the University of Arizona campus. Continue reading →

Senate Appropriations Committee provides $435 million for the Office on Violence Against Women

Posted on by

From CALCASA and the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence comes this good news:

The Senate Appropriations Committee past its FY 2010 appropriations bill for the Departments of Commerce, Justice, NASA, the National Science Foundation and several independent agencies. Overall, the bill totals $64.9 billion in discretionary spending for FY 2010, an increase of about $7.3 billion over last year and $200 million above the President’s budget request.

The Committee provides $435 million for the Office on Violence Against Women INCLUDING $15 million for the Sexual Assault Services Program. This is $2 million more than in the house bill.

There is also $9.5 million for Campus Grants and $3 million for Engaging Men and Boys.

As I understand it, these numbers could change before the President signs the bill, but it’s a good sign! Thanks to all the advocates who worked hard behind the scenes to make this happen!

h/t abyss2hope on Twitter

News Flash: You Can’t Strip Search a Child on No Evidence for Something Minor

Posted on by

The Supreme Court has taken the US public school system one tiny step back from the brink of total insanity by deciding that a school principal was wrong to order a 13 year old strip searched (down to her underwear and then made to move around and shake out her bra and panties) on an unsubstantiated accusation that she might have – duh, duh – prescription strength ibuprofen. Shockingly, several lower courts have ruled that this was, in fact, legal, and Judge Clarence Thomas even agreed.

I mention this on this blog because (a) it is nice to see even this tiny (and the decision, at least from early reports, is the opposite of sweeping) bit of respect granted to the importance of bodily autonomy and privacy for children. When we say over and over “your body is your own,” but then “but any adult with even a smidgen of authority or cause can make you do something that makes you feel exposed and embarrassed,” we help set children, and the adults those children become, up to be afraid to report abuse. and (b) I used this case, and the early word that the Supreme Court was likely to uphold the school’s behavior, as an example in a discussion with one of the other SAFER members about how limited high schoolers’ rights to protest their administration were in relation to those of college students (which is one of the major reasons SAFER does not work directly with high school students). This decision going the right way certainly doesn’t change all the other ways in which that is true, but it does keep a tiny dividing line between high school and prison when it comes to personal bodily autonomy.

(Not that I don’t think prisoners should have the right to personal bodily autonomy, see Sarah’s links on prison rape below and check out Just Detention International for more.)

Wednesday Linkage!

Posted on by

Bad study of the week indeed! Discover Magazine’s blog takes on the “women who dress slutty get raped” study so we don’t have to.

Marcella on the terrible news that LA County has run out of money for processing rape kits and California state isn’t far behind

Rachel at The-F-Word (one of my favorite bloggers!) reflects on catcalls.

Charlotte Hilton Andersen writes at Alternet of her (triggering!) experience as a peer counselor dealing with rape victims, and the media’s glamorization of sexual assault.

J writes an awesome post about breaking the bystander effect on I’ll Follow the Sun.

Two different stories on sexual assault in prison: one study says that corrections officers are now more sensitive to sexual assault issues, while Renee at Womanist Musings posts about the 60,000 sexual assaults that occur in prisons each year.

When Campus Crime Stats Are Too Low…

Posted on by

The past week has been filled with news on college crime and drinking statistics. First this federal report let us know that alcohol abuse and associated crime are up on campus, despite attempts to curb drinking. Then the case against Dominican College over their misrepresentation of assault statistics opened the door for the states to prosecute schools who don’t report or report incorrectly for violations of state fraud laws. Today we have an article in the Daily Record, aptly named “Campus Crime Stats Don’t Tell the Whole Story.”

Fairleigh Dickinson and Drew universities stand about a mile apart, have similarly small student populations and, yet, looking at the crime data each reports, they couldn’t appear more different.

Drew University in Madison reported 10 sexual offenses on campus during the past six years, while FDU’s College at Florham campus reported just three between 2002 and 2007. Drew reported 19 burglaries on campus in 2007, while FDU reported just six. And Drew cited students for 402 liquor-related offenses in 2007, while FDU had just 104 liquor violations.

The data, self-reported by colleges to the U.S. Department of Education, is required each year under the Clery Act.

Parents preparing to send their high school graduates off to college this fall may get the wrong impression just by looking at statistics provided by colleges, campus security experts said. Parents and students need to look beyond these numbers and ask college officials about what services and enforcement policies are in place.

YES! The Clery Act is super important, and schools need to be held accountable for accurately reporting crime statistics. But the focus of every incoming parent and student is better placed on services, not numbers—does the school have a comprehensive assault prevention program in place? Do they have confidential reporting for assault victims? Do they offer free counseling for assault victims? Does their health services offer emergency contraception? The answers to these questions have a lot more to do with the reality of how a campus culture treats assault because…take it away Daily Record!

While parents may be encouraged by low numbers of reported crimes or disciplinary action for alcohol and drug violations, security experts say that is not always a good sign. Higher numbers reported, especially for sexual offenses, generally indicate a more open climate on campus that is supportive of students reporting crimes.

“Generally, institutions with a greater support system are those schools with higher numbers, sometimes dramatically higher numbers,” said S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for Security on Campus, a college watchdog group based in King of Prussia, Pa.

In the case of sexual offenses on campus, the problem is broad-based and occurs on every campus, Carter said. Even those institutions that have the best reporting systems in place have understated data, Carter said.

A 2000 U.S. Department of Justice survey found that fewer than 5 percent of sexual assault victims reported the crime to police. The survey also reported that between one-fifth and one-fourth of women may experience rape or attempted rape during a five-year college career.

The study found that victim underreporting is due to several factors, such as embarrassment, blaming themselves for the attack, not understanding the legal definition of rape or not wanting to call someone they know a rapist. The majority of college victims — 90 percent — knew the offenders.

(Emphasis mine. I know we push those statistics a lot…but they’re still important, so I’m gonna keep publishing them until everyone believes them)

This is not a comment about Drew or Fairleigh Dickinson, or—again—is it meant to downplay the importance of campus reporting. But the fact is that no school is going to have accurate reports on the number of rapes and sexual assaults that occur on their campus if the crimes are rarely actually reported. And it does stand to reason—since we know that assaults are occurring on campus—that the schools with the higher reporting rates are the ones who offer the most support to survivors and have the strongest sexual assault policies (although I’m sure there are exceptions to this rule). So there’s some food for thought about campus stats. If you want to see how your school’s sexual assault policy stacks up, check to see if it’s on SAFER’s College Sexual Assault Policies Database. If it isn’t, get it added!

Sexual assault office is forced to take a summer break

Posted on by

A concerned student at Harvard sent us a link to a worrying article—”Harvard Sexual Assault Office To Close for July.” Apparently, someone at Harvard thinks that closing down the sexual assault crisis and prevention program for a month is a good way to save money. It’s not clear who that someone is, as the director of University Health Services couldn’t say how much money it would save and admitted that the service is used during the summer, so you get the impression that he’s not in favor of the closing. The Dean of Students for Harvard Summer School is unhappy, the Director of the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response is unhappy, the students are unhappy—seems to me that someone should be standing up to explain why the closing is a good idea or Harvard should be making a different budget choice based on how many people are clearly not behind this one.

The argument, made halfheartedly by the Health Services Director, and probably with more vigor by budgeting administrative types, is that the gaps in the service won’t be that noticeable or that drastic because there aren’t that many people who use them over the summer anyway and they can be covered by other services like the student health clinic or Boston’s rape crisis center. There’s several responses to this, including:

  • While from a statistical/budget perspective, “we’ve never had a summer where no people use it at all,” might suggest an unnecessary resource since only a few people are being helped, from the perspective of those few people, they’ve experienced what was probably one of the worst days of their lives and they’d like a little help, please
  • Presumably, a central, Harvard-based office for all things sexual assault related was created for a reason (survivors shouldn’t be confused about where to go or have to tell their stories over and over to different offices to get help, Harvard would like to know about all assaults that happen to their students so they can adequately support survivors and determine what prevention is needed, etc.), so saying that all the scattered resources that existed before a central office was created still exist isn’t exactly comforting
  • The word “Prevention” is in the title of the office for a reason. These kind of offices do a lot of work besides crisis services; as the director notes,

    “There’s projects we’ve wanted to work on that won’t happen this summer—training programs to develop, communities we wanted to reach out to,” Rankin said, noting that she and her Office’s two other staff members also prepare for freshman orientation over the summer. “Those projects will have to be put on the backburner.”

  • Could somebody please remember and acknowledge that sexual assault is a violent crime, probably the most violent one many Harvard students will ever experience, and put in that perspective doesn’t it seem like there should be something less crucial to cut back on? (I started a rant about a number of things I would propose, but I thought it sounded a little rabid, so just trust me that there’s a lot of waste at major universities.)

    • Getting students to come forward to tell someone they have been assaulted is difficult, and it really only happens when the assaulted student feels like she or he can trust the person he or she is telling. And that’s the most important reason not to shut down, even for a month. It has, I’m sure, taken years of hard work to make sure that students at Harvard know to go to the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response if they need help and to establish enough student trust in the office that people do go. This closing raises confusion and creates distrust (if Harvard really cared about my safety, they wouldn’t choose this office to close…), and in doing so risks all the efforts of the office to create a culture of reporting and survivor support.

Skin color affects forensic exams

Posted on by

This is actually old news, but I was mired in dissertation land when it came across the wires, so I never got to blog about it. It’s also a great teaser for my upcoming podcast with Karen Carroll, Associate Director of the Bronx Sexual Assault Response Team, an expert on sexual assault forensic exams (colloquially, and it turns out not entirely correctly, known as rape kits).

In the October issue of the American Journal of Emergency Medicine (I know the blurb says November, but I checked and the blurb is off), a study was published revealing that external genital injuries were more likely to be detected on women with light color skin than dark color skin. There’s a certain amount of “no, duh” to this, as most of us probably have some experiential knowledge that it is harder to see bruises on our dark-skinned friends than on our light-skinned ones, but there are several important implications to the study.

The study found that detection differences correlated most strongly with the skin tone of the volunteer (the exams were conducted on women who had had consensual sex) not the race or ethnicity of that volunteer. This is an important finding, as it suggests that a genuine physical difference, not examiner bias, was the primary driver of the difference in reporting. This matters because the remedy is different in the two cases—this data suggests that additional training on correctly detecting signs of sexual assault on dark skinned women is probably needed for most forensic examiners (and next week you can hear Carroll speak to her sense of the importance of examiners having a strong familiarity with a wide range of skin tones).

This data of course doesn’t mean that in real world cases the combination of racism and genuine physical differences (compounded by examiner unfamiliarity with the detection of signs of sexual assault on people with darker skins) couldn’t lead to many, many cases where signs of sexual assault were overlooked and survivors were accused of lying and denied redress through the criminal justice system. Non-white women have historically had a much more difficult time prosecuting their rapists (for many reasons beyond forensic exams, obviously), and one reason to widely advertise this study is to give people with darker skin tones an authoritative piece of data to wave in a prosecutor’s face and say “just because my exam didn’t show anything doesn’t mean I wasn’t assaulted.” One piece of data is far from enough to overcome real prejudice, but it might be helpful in overcoming ignorance.

The other thing that really stood out to me—even in the easiest-to-see cases of light-skinned women, external genital injuries were visible only 68% of the time (granted these were volunteers who had had consensual sex, but there are automatic, unconscious physical responses of lubrication, etc. that kick in in most assault cases as well). You’ll hear Carroll say this next week as well: many sexual assaults produce few or no visible injuries. Just because the exam doesn’t show anything doesn’t mean an assault didn’t occur.

What’s the upshot for a college campus? (1) Your administration should make sure that the sexual assault examiners available to students—be it through student health services, the local emergency room, or the local rape crisis center—are fully trained in evaluating survivors of all skin colors. (2) Anyone charged with interpreting sexual assault forensic exams as part of a judicial process—Dean of Students, judicial board member, campus police officer—should be fully trained in the limitations of such exams, including the possibility that survivors with darker skin tones will not exhibit as many visible signs of sexual assault.

The Hook Up Culture

Posted on by

This article suggests that the “hook up culture” that permeates many college campuses is somewhat responsible for sexual assaults that take place there. Apparently, since guys like to brag about getting laid, they must be raping women in order to feed both their libido and ego. I’m not denying that drunken college students are more inclined to sexually assault others and be sexually assaulted, but blaming casual sex for rape is ridiculous.

The sexual ethos that exists on college campuses seems to lack the ability to suffocate rape and, worse, may even nourish it.
******
Among the most effective means of reducing the incidence of sexual assault is to quash the congratulations offered to those people who lead successful “conquests”, even if performed legally. Men who commit forms of date rape, the most common form of collegiate rape, do not do so for the physical satiation, but for the tremendous sense of egotistical satisfaction it offers the rapist, who now too has savored the fruits of the Hook Up culture, albeit in gross violation of the consent principle.

If a woman says no, it’s no. If a woman is too drunk to realize she’s having sex, it’s also no. Implying that less sex = less rape is a little extreme. Sarah recently made a post about alcohol/assault statistics that makes it clear that binge drinking definitely leads to an increase in sexual assault. So-called “Gray rape” in particular is more fueled by alcohol than by casual hookups. Blaming promiscuity for rape is lazy and makes human beings seem like they have no conscience or understanding of the word “NO.”