Tell Us About It: Victim Research Convos

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In this CVR podcast series, we talk with those doing research and serving victims and learn about the work they've done together.

Tell Us About It, Episode 8: NSVRC – Promoting Research on Sexual Violence

A convo with Kartha Vierthaler and Jennifer GroveFeb 15Time: 26:55

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On this episode of Tell Us About It, we talk with Kartha Vierthaler and Jennifer Grove of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center about the work they do in building a research base for sexual assault prevention and intervention. Our conversation focuses specifically on their research poll, which is conducted every two years to identify the top four priority needs of the research community ad is then used as a base to determine the research and practice needed in the field to address those needs.

Karla Vierthaler is the Advocacy and Resources Director at NSVRC whose team works on resource development and training around all aspects of sexual violence.

Jennifer Grove is the Prevention Director at NSVRC whose team trains and provides information and resources on primary prevention of sexual violence.

Additional Resources:

 

Transcript:

Susan Howley: Welcome to Tell Us About It: Victim Research Convos, a podcast from the Center for Victim Research with support from the Office for Victims of Crime. On each episode of Tell Us About It, we talk to researchers and practitioners about their work, the tools being built for use in the field, and how we can work together to build an evidence base for victim services. Today we’re talking to Karla Vierthaler and Jennifer Grove of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. Karla and Jennifer, can you each tell us a bit about your role at the NSVRC?

Karla Vierthaler: Hello everyone. This is Karla and I am the Advocacy and Resources Director at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. Our team works a lot on resource development and training around all aspects of sexual violence. We provide technical assistance to researchers and other requesters throughout the country and throughout the world.

Jennifer Grove: And hi this is Jennifer Grove. I go by Jen. I’m the Prevention Director at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, and on the prevention team here at the NSVRC, we do training and we provide information and resources around the primary prevention of sexual violence across the country.

Susan Howley: Well welcome to both of you. We’re so grateful you had the time to speak with us today. Jen, can you give us a quick introduction to the NSVRC, your mission, and your work?

Jennifer Grove: Yes. Well our official mission at the NSVRC is to provide leadership in both preventing and responding to sexual violence through collaborating, sharing, and creating resources, and also promoting research. But the way I like to talk about the NSVRC and what we do is that we are the place to go nationally for information and resources on responding to and preventing sexual violence. Our core funding for the Resource Center comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so our focus really is on the primary prevention of sexual violence. We have the world’s largest library on the topic of sexual violence, with just under 45 thousand unique titles. We provide customized, in-person and webinar trainings. We have a website that includes a section we call a campus, where we have a lot of online learning tools that we’ve created and other organizations have created as well. We collect materials from all over the world. We also look to see where there are gaps and we work to fill them, either through our staff creating resources or consulting with other people to create resources where there are gaps. We also coordinate the National Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And we have an initiative that provides information and guidance on how we can message our prevention work as advocates and also several resources for journalists on how to talk about sexual violence and its prevention. And last but not least, we have a very strong social media presence. We’re on pretty much every platform you can think of from Facebook to Pinterest to Instagram to Tumblr to LinkedIn, we’re there.

Susan Howley: Jen, NSVRC has a history of working to build a research base for sexual assault prevention and response. Can you tell us more about that?

Jennifer Grove: Yes we’ve always been really invested in supporting the work of researchers and making sure that advocates and preventionists and practitioners have access to that research. Really since our inception back in 2000, we’ve made a point to develop strong relationships with researchers and we also have a commitment to being an entity that researchers can tap into for those connections to the field. So when I say the field, those are the on the ground folks, the people doing a work in the communities. And so the researcher and practitioner connections have always been very important to us.

Susan Howley: I know NSVRC does a research priority poll. Can you explain a little bit about that? Karla, why don’t we turn to you?

Karla Vierthaler: Sounds great. I would love to share a little bit more. First, I want to take one quick step back and say that as the NSVRC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are one of our primary funders and part of what we do with them is they have a Rape Prevention Education grantee program where the money funnels, in most cases across the country, to the State Department of Health who again in most cases across the country, then goes to the state sexual assault coalition to work on priorities around rape prevention education. So with our priority poll, what we decided to do starting in 2016 is to reach out to state departments of health and state sexual assault coalitions and ask them what their research priorities were.

Susan Howley: Great. And then do you use that information to develop your poll or is that your poll?

Karla Vierthaler: So how we gather the information is first we reach out to both of these separate entities and ask them what their research priorities are. It’s an open-ended question and we get some responses. And then what we do with those responses is we’ll sort of synthesize the information to get to a place where we have a list of topics and then we send the survey back, where we ask them to select their top three topics from that list that we generated from the first part of the survey.

Susan Howley: Great. How often do you do this research priority poll?

Karla Vierthaler: We did a poll once every two years so so far we have done it in 2016 and we have done it in 2018.

Susan Howley: Can you tell us what changed in the 2018 poll from the 2016?

Karla Vierthaler: Interestingly enough, the first top priorities stayed the same across those two years. The first priority was culturally-relevant prevention strategies and then primary prevention strategies. But the third priority is what changed. In 2016, the third priority was people who commit sexual violence or recidivism. And in 2018, we actually had four topics rise to the top and the third was sexual violence in rural communities and the fourth was trauma-informed practice. Another change between the 2016 priority poll and the 2018 priority poll is that we heard from an additional 15 state or territory health departments and sexual assault coalitions. We heard from 40 in 2016 and in 2018, we heard from a total of 55.

Susan Howley: Great. Can you tell us a little bit about each of those priorities and a little bit more about the research that people are interested in in each of those priorities? Jen, we’ll start with you.

Jennifer Grove: So one of the first priorities was culturally-relevant prevention strategies. People really want more research on what works for communities outside of some of the mainstream prevention programming that’s out there. So some of the questions that they’re asking is can those programs be adapted for specific communities? Are there other ways to make a prevention program really fit with the culture and norms and values of a specific community? We know that programming works best when it reflects the culture and the values of that particular community that folks are working in. And so when communities can really get behind it, they can really feel like it reflects what’s important to them. We always say prevention programming is best when it’s of, by, and for the community. And so that’s what we really think about when we think about is this culturally relevant, this prevention strategy? And so they really wanted more information and research on that. The second topic was primary prevention strategies, that was a big priority and it has been for quite some time. So primary prevention, for those that might not know, is really about stopping sexual violence before it even has the chance to happen. So it’s looking at the social norms, ideas, attitudes that contribute to a culture where sexual violence is accepted and tolerated. And so with these strategies, we’re looking at what does primary prevention look like? What are we trying to prevent, and also what are we trying to promote? And thinking really deeply about what that programming looks like in communities at all stages of life, from young children all the way up through adults.

Karla Vierthaler: And I will share about the final two priorities. So the first is rural areas. And what we know about rural areas from the most recent census is that rural areas cover 97 percent of the United States land area but contain only 19.3 percent of our total population. So it’s a huge area with not a lot of people that has very different and unique considerations when it comes to sexual violence. Some things to think about in terms of rural areas or some challenges are transportation and access to victim services, the close knit nature of rural communities that can result in the lack of anonymity and confidentiality around victim services, the lack of providers in rural areas, and isolation of victims in rural areas. So these are some of the challenges that come forward. But we don’t really know a lot about the prevalence of sexual violence, specifically in rural areas, and we don’t know a lot about the needs of survivors in rural areas. So there is some research that’s been done in rural areas but not enough to really have a good grasp of the issue. And then trauma-informed practices is sort of been a buzz word in our field for a long time. And I think the best way to describe trauma-informed services is for service providers to ask “what has happened to you” when working with victims, instead of “what is wrong with you.” And to really treat survivors from the approach of you have experienced trauma – there are responses that the human body goes through that can be long term when a person has experienced trauma – and how can I meet you where you are to provide the best services possible.

Susan Howley: I can see why each of those four areas rose to the top of your priority poll. They’re all really compelling. Outside of those poll results, are there other research priorities that you will at NSVRC have identified?

Jennifer Grove: Yes. We do have other research priorities outside of the polls. We’re very connected with our funder, which we’ve talked about, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We’re very fortunate to have a good connection with them. We communicate with them about research that is coming down the pike. We have planning meetings with them and with our other national technical assistance partners. We talk with them on a regular basis about how we can promote the research and translate the research for the field. That’s a really big piece that we add to the research puzzle, if you will, because we know that not everyone has time to read through a lot of and really delve into a lot of the research that’s being done. They want to know what does this mean for me in practice? And so one of the things that we are funded to do by the CDC is to help to translate that research for the field. So some translation topics that we’ve done recently have been around research around harassment in the workplace, the global status report on violence. We have done prevention strategies for perpetration research translation. We’ve looked at alcohol policy approaches and the research there and have done translations. We also do talking points, so helping people think through how do we talk about this research? And so the talking points we’ve done have been around research on the cost of rape, the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey data, and school district sexual misconduct policies. We also have a strong connection with researchers – really like I talked about before, from our inception, we’ve had some great researchers on our national advisory council from the beginning and we currently have researchers on that advisory council. We regularly connect with them to stay abreast of what’s in the works so that we kind of have an idea of what folks are working on, what researchers are working on, and then really thinking strategically about how we can promote that and possibly translate that for the field.

Susan Howley: Great, so you have all these inputs into research needs and then you at NSVRC are able to translate. I know that you can translate the findings, how do you get the information about the research needs out to the research community and then maybe also to the practitioners who want to partner with researchers?

Karla Vierthaler: We do that in multiple ways. So we have a lot of relationships with researchers in the sexual violence field and also when folks are working around sexual violence, we are sort of a natural reaching out place for them to go to. So we make ourselves available and we definitely try to create connections between practitioners and researchers. We do get that request quite frequently of how can I have access to practitioners? How can I have access to survivors? And although we don’t do that directly, we welcome people to post their surveys or needs on our Facebook page. Another way we do that is through creating connectivity, so forming the relationships. But we also host the National Sexual Assault Conference, which is a great opportunity for us to connect with researchers who are sort of meeting the priorities that that state departments of health and state sexual assault coalitions have set forth annually and sort of connect researchers with practitioners that attend our conference. And as Jen mentioned, our advisory council is a wonderful opportunity. So we definitely have some researchers that are on our advisory council and they do a lot of connecting us to others in the research community and sort of letting folks know what we can provide as the NSVRC.

Susan Howley: I’m so glad that you mentioned the National Sexual Assault Conference. That has really been growing over time and we know that practitioners and researchers find conferences to be one of the most fruitful places to build those connections and to help really understand what’s going on in practice and in research. So I’m glad to hear that that’s really a fruitful avenue for NSVRC as well. What do you think researchers and practitioners who are interested in these topics can do right now to begin working on these priority areas?

Jennifer Grove: I would say that one of the things that we do to help people think about how they can start working on these issues is really encouraging researchers to connect with that community work to gain a better understanding of how programming and policies really play out on the ground. It’s also important for researchers and practitioners to reach out to each other and work together, and Karla talked a little bit about how we facilitate some of that relationship-building and making sure that we’re connecting folks, but really thinking about how they can work together to build the research base. There are a lot of types of evidence that come into play, especially in this type of work where we don’t always have a ton of research like some other topics do. And so we look at the different types of evidence, so not only should researchers be focusing on the best available research evidence, but they also need to realize that practitioners can help them tap into other forms of evidence like experiential. So the expertise and the intuitive knowledge that practitioners have and then also contextual evidence, which is really looking at the knowledge about how or if a strategy is useful or beneficial to a specific community and then why that is. And so I think there’s a lot that both groups can be doing to work with one another to really think through how to address these priorities. So that piece around that connectedness is something that we really are really focused on and one of the things we really encourage researchers and practitioners to do.

Susan Howley: That’s great. Broadening the understanding of what the evidence is is important for both researchers and practitioners. Can you tell us about other activities that NSVRC has to help practitioners be in the place to collaborate with researchers, to build up a basic understanding of research concepts or the use of data or things along that line?

Jennifer Grove: So one of the things that we have that we offer folks is this Ask a Researcher forum. This is an online forum that we’ve conducted in various ways over the past several years to provide an opportunity for those working in communities to directly connect with researchers. So these are topic-specific discussions. We’ve been doing some of the most recent ones via Facebook, with questions being asked and answered in real time. So again that’s one way that we’re trying to connect researchers directly with the practitioners and the communities. And it’s been really successful and we’ve had a lot of good comments that people really appreciate the assistance and sort of demystify research and researchers and really seeing that really human side to like, these are people who really want to connect and really want to understand the issue and how it plays out on the ground level.

Karla Vierthaler: So one of the ways that we connect with practitioners is through our technical assistance. You can reach us in a variety of ways, through our website, through email, through our phone lines, through social media and we really will respond to any and everything. One of the things I always talk about when I talk about NSVRC is the fact that we can send you articles and research journals without cost, because often these are inaccessible if you don’t have a subscription to an academic journal or journals, and that’s something we can share with copyright limitations. So when folks reach out, they may not even realize that they’re necessarily looking for a researcher or they may just have a question about a challenge that they’re facing in their work and because of the relationships that we have formed and the people that we know in the field and the research that we know that’s taken place in the field, we can connect them to the research, the researcher and really make it complete the circle.

Susan Howley: That’s great that you can provide that kind of personal connection to people who may not even know what they’re asking for, but you can hear their question and know how best to direct them and when it’s appropriate to bring in a researcher. I want to go back for a minute to your Ask a Researcher programs because that sounds terrific. How often do you try to hold those?

Jennifer Grove: We have about two to three a year. I think this year we had two Ask a Researcher forums. And so it really kind of depends on – I think we are funded to do two, that’s in our work plan. But we’re always open to doing more as topics arise. And so that’s our goal really is to do two though a year.

Karla Vierthaler: And we also use our research priority poll to inform what who we invite as the researcher and what topics we ask them to cover.

Susan Howley: Great. And can people find out about those by following you on social media?

Karla Vierthaler: Absolutely.

Susan Howley: I want to close with a topic that we like to ask all our guests. When you look down the horizon, what do you see as the future? What issues do you think researchers should be paying attention to that are just starting to show up?

Jennifer Grove: One of the big areas where we currently see a gap and where a lot of questions are being asked is prevention programming beyond the individual and relationship level. We have a lot of great research around how bystander programs work and what that looks like and so that’s really looking at changing individual attitudes and behaviors, changing the way people interact with their peers and families, and those relationship areas. However, where we know some of the most change can be affected when we’re doing prevention is really at those larger community and society levels. And so we really are looking at trying to figure out how can we push research and researchers to this community level prevention? What does it look like? How do we evaluate it? How do we know what to do at these levels? How do we evaluate that work? What does the larger societal- and policy-level work look like? And I think we’ve done some work around policy and looking at certain policies but there is some data out there that we can pull from other violence types where we know there’s some really great policy-level work and community-level work happening and we’re trying to look and see how does that connect in with sexual violence. And there’s a lot of shared risk and protective factors between sexual violence and intimate partner violence, teen dating violence, youth violence, and so we’re looking at learning from these other fields but we really see that this is a really hot topic. This is an area where the funding is pushing people there, but the research hasn’t caught up with that yet. And so people are asking a lot of questions about how to do the outer level work and evaluate it. I’ll use an example of Erin’s Law. Erin’s Law is an unfunded mandate that every state needs to incorporate prevention programming in K-12 public schools. And so every state has come up with – not every state because, again, it’s an unfunded mandate –  but the states who have really invested in it, every state does something different with that. We’ve captured here different ways that each state has taken that law and worked to get it to include sexual violence prevention, healthy sexuality messaging, and it just looks so different in so many different states. And I would love, personally, as someone who’s worked on the back end of that, to see a research looking at that broader level, how is this working on the policy level in each state. I would love to see more research around that. And that’s just a particular example of that policy level work.

Karla Vierthaler: From my perspective, I feel like this isn’t on the horizon – it’s been around for a bit but the tools have not been created yet, the research has not been done and that is around culturally-relevant evaluation. We’ve been looking at evaluation for a long time when we talk about rape prevention education. There are some large-scale, expensive programs who have seen some evidence-based results that are positive and have evaluation tools. But what we know is working in communities is that community-based prevention programs, and often these are done in culturally-specific communities, though that kind of standardized evaluation doesn’t work in those communities. So I think a big gap that we’re experiencing is we need to be using evidence-based tools in rape prevention education, but we don’t have the capacity to evaluate some of these smaller programs that have adapted to their community in education but have no tools to evaluate the work that they’re doing. And we have ways to see that it’s effective but not that would be considered evidence.

Susan Howley: Wow, there is so much going on. This is clearly an opportune time to use research to make a difference in sexual violence prevention and response. Karla and Jen, thank you so much for joining us today.

Karla Vierthaler: Thank you for having us.

Jennifer Grove: Thank you.