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This chapter explores the language of anti-violence activists, university coordinators, and due-process activists concerned with Title IX and campus sexual violence. Using an analysis of 32 in-depth interviews with anti-violence activists, due-process activists, and campus Title IX coordinators, the authors identify key themes in Title IX discourse, including ideas about cultural change and safety. In some instances, activists and coordinators discussed the need for cultural change, though often without agreeing on which campus cultures must be confronted. The authors also found the influence of the dominant discourse of the victims’ rights movement in interview subjects’ emphasis on safety and paternalism.

This paper aims to identify the role of blogs in helping women victims of intimate partner sexual violence to restore their self-integrity.

The authors’ research uses an interpretive stance, supported by motivational and “self” theories to analyze 33 blogs reporting the experiences of women in Brazil who suffered sexual violence perpetrated by an intimate partner.

This study identifies the reasons why women who suffer violence from intimate partners write blog posts. It also develops an analytical framework that bridges the gap between the design and use of IT-artifacts and the context of sexual violence from an intimate partner. Women who suffer violence from intimate partners look for blogs in order to find a safe space for expression, a knowledge hub and a social support network. Blogs play a pivotal role in supporting the journey of reconstructing their self-integrity.

The results help to understand the role of blogs in helping victims in vulnerable situations trying to restore their self-integrity. It also contributes to improve the design and functionality of such platforms as an important resource for social support networks.

This study shows the positive impact of blogs as a tool to support victims in the process of restoring their self-integrity.

This study aims to promote the use of digital artifacts such as blogs as a complementary instrument to fight violence against women.

The analytical framework used in this paper helps to understand the role of IT-artifacts in the context of sexual violence from an intimate partner.

In order to understand how collegiate athletics fits within the wider problem of sexual violence on college campuses, the purpose of this paper is to start with an examination of the overall scope of the issue of sexual violence in the USA and the larger culture that produces it. Next, the relevant laws and adjudication of sexual violence operant in American colleges are outlined. Finally, college athletics is placed into this bigger context by highlighting a number of particular cases to illustrate a broader understanding of collegiate athletes involved in sexual violence.

The author examines the history of rape laws and adjudication and the federal laws relevant to institutions of higher education. The author investigates the debate over adjudication of sexual violence within the criminal justice system or through campus systems. The author read previous literature to determine links between sexual violence and collegiate athletes and highlights particular cases that have gotten significant media attention for clues to the rape prone culture that can be fostered within collegiate athletics.

This analysis highlights how collegiate athletics can be a context that creates a rape prone culture and that universities and the criminal justice system need further reform to overcome long-standing beliefs in rape myths which perpetuate sexual violence, discourage reporting by victims of sexual violence, deter bystander intervention and underplay the impact of sexual violence on victims. Thus, structural changes are needed within collegiate athletic cultures as well as on college campuses to address sexual violence.

College campuses and athletic departments must address climates that create rape prone cultures. There remains a need for systematic data collection of perpetrators of sexual violence, along side data collection of experiences of sexual violence. College campuses and athletic departments must have in place procedures and policy that adhere to federal law, whereby athletes are not treated differently from non-athletes and victims are offered appropriate services that recognize the trauma of sexual violence. Further progress toward a standard of affirmative consent is needed to move toward greater sexual autonomy for everyone.

There is evidence that collegiate athletes are disproportionately represented among the population of sexual violence perpetrators on college campuses. Thus, it is vital to understand this population and that connection. The value of this work is to explicate the complicated adjudication process between university disciplinary processes and the criminal justice system.

This chapter aims to question the ways in which sexual and gender-based violence have been framed in international discourse and policy and thus to examine some of the causes of the perceived failure of international responses to this violence.

The chapter is based on qualitative research carried out through key informant interviews and focus groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The research highlights the ways in which limited understandings of sexual and gender-based violence lead to interventions which have unintended and sometimes negative consequences for gender relations in the DRC.

The chapter calls on researchers, policy makers, and aid practitioners to rethink their approaches to tackling sexual and gender-based violence and to incorporate these into a more coherent overall approach to gender inequality.

The purpose of this paper is to share the challenges of, and learning gained by a voluntary sector organisation, Coventry Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre (CRASAC) in providing integrated care to victims of sexual violence.

The paper first considers the big picture, focusing on the current UK public sector commissioning environment, the policy commitment to integrated care, and challenges a current focus on definitions of integration that do not consider wider determinants of health and well-being. As an example of client groups who may not meet narrow criteria, but require person centred coordinated care, the needs of victims of sexual violence are explored, illustrated by a case study within CRASAC.

Challenges faced by CRASAC include identifying responsibility for specialist commissioning, maintaining strategic partnerships and a lack of cross-sector understanding of the needs of victims of sexual violence. Key learning points are the need to form strategic alliances and partnerships, to lobby and influence decision makers, to develop monitoring tools that demonstrate impact on long-term client outcomes and to constantly raise awareness of the needs of victims of sexual violence. Final reflections focus on the questions these issues raise for the future of specialised integrated care in the voluntary sector.

The paper is of value to commissioners in health, social care and the criminal justice system, in addition to providers of services that are in contact with victims of sexual abuse. These include health, criminal justice, education, police and social care, alongside other voluntary and community sector organisations.

Canada criminalized the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images in 2014. Lawmakers and commentators noted that this new offense would fill a legislative gap in relation to “revenge pornography,” which entails individuals (typically men) sharing intimate images of their ex-partners (typically women) online in an attempt to seek revenge or cause them harm. Feminist writers and activists categorize revenge pornography as a symptom and consequence of “rape culture,” in which sexual violence is routinely trivialized and viewed as acceptable or entertaining, and women are blamed for their sexual victimization. In this chapter, I analyze Canada's burgeoning revenge pornography case law and find that these cases support an understanding of revenge pornography as a serious form of communal, gendered, intimate partner violence, which is extremely effective at harming victims because of broader rape culture. While Canadian judges are taking revenge pornography seriously, there is some indication from the case law that they are at risk of relying on gendered reasoning and assumptions previously observed by feminists in sexual assault jurisprudence, which may have the result of bolstering rape culture, rather than contesting it.