What role should men and boys play in sexual assault prevention?
Engaging Boys and Men in Sexual Assault Prevention: Theory, Research and Practice (Academic Press 2022), co-edited by Lindsay Orchowski, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and behavior (research) at Brown, unpacks the topic with chapters by forty-nine contributing scholars. Below, Orchowski shares more about her interest in sexual assault prevention research, how the field has shifted over the years, and how far we still must go to see real change in rates of sexual violence.
Q: First, congratulations on this important new book. Could you share a bit about your previous collaborations with your co-editor, Alan Berkowitz?
Thank you very much! I first started working with Alan Berkowitz more than fifteen years ago, in the context of a grant funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In this study, we implemented a prevention program for men across twelve campus residence halls. The program was effective in reducing men’s self-report rates of sexual aggression over a short follow-up period. Since this time, Alan and I have continued to collaborate to extend this promising line of work.
Q: When did you become interested in studying sexual assault prevention programs for men and boys?
As an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, I noticed that sexual assault prevention efforts were often limited to efforts to raise awareness about sexual assault. When I came to Ohio University to study in the Laboratory for the Study and Prevention of Sexual Assault under the direction of Christine Gidycz, her laboratory had just finished an evaluation of sexual assault prevention programming, which was different from anything that I had previously seen. She was using research to uncover the risk and protective factors for sexual violence and directly target these factors in theory-driven prevention programs. She was also committed to using outcome evaluation to show whether a program was actually making a difference in rates of sexual assault. Applying this public health approach to sexual assault prevention was tremendously novel at the time. Back in the 1990s and 2000s, the field of sexual assault prevention science was quite small; very few sexual assault prevention programs had received rigorous evaluation, and even fewer researchers were engaging men in prevention efforts. I strongly believe everyone has a role to play in efforts to bring rates of sexual assault down to zero. We can’t get there if boys and men are not involved in the solution.
Q: Why do you think the field needed a compendium specific to this area of research?
As a graduate student, I was actively involved in implementing sexual assault risk reduction and resistance education programs for women. These programs involved teaching women verbal resistance skills, and ways to fight back against attackers. This kind of empowerment self-defense work emerged amidst the feminist activism of the 1970s, where women sought to “take back the night” and push back against the harmful notion that individuals needed to adopt life-limiting behaviors – like not walking alone at night – to prevent sexual assault. The shift away from a “opportunity reduction” approach to sexual assault prevention and shift towards a “public health approach” over the past twenty years has been a necessary and critical shift for how we think about sexual assault. Despite this shift, the burden of sexual assault prevention and advocacy continues to fall on those who tend to experience victimization. Like many others, I believe that true prevention can only happen when we stop violence from happening in the first place. While anyone can be a victim or perpetrator of assault, most assaults continue to be perpetrated by cisgender men. Because most men are not violent, and because boys and men are highly influenced by what other boys and men think and do, bringing men into violence prevention initiatives is a vital part of sparking change. In this compendium, we bring together the theory, practice, and research of sexual assault prevention for boys and men, with the goal of addressing this vital part of prevention.
Q: Do any other books with this level of comprehension exist, and how is yours different?
There are several excellent books that address sexual assault prevention for boys and men. Michael Flood has written extensively on this issue. His 2019 book, Engaging Men and Boys in Violence Prevention, is an excellent review of the theory and practice of prevention efforts for men. Our new book is set apart by its focus on theory, practice, and research. We hoped to provide more information about the state of the science, and how research risk and protective factors for sexual aggression can be used to inform prevention efforts.
Q: The book includes twenty-one chapters written by forty-nine scholars, yourself and your co-editor included. Bearing in mind your expertise in the field, was there anything that surprised you in the chapters by contributors?
Preparing this volume gave me the opportunity to take stock of what has and hasn’t changed in the field over the past twenty years. And I must say that I have mixed feelings. Rates of sexual assault have not budged since Mary Koss and her colleagues' early research on acquittance rape in the 1980s. Further, while we now have programs that are research-based, which show positive effects of reducing rates of sexual violence, these programs are not widely implemented or disseminated. Nonetheless, I also have great hope for the future. Just the sheer number of researchers involved in this volume shows me how much deeper this field is now than it was twenty years ago. There are now more individuals training and researching in this field than every before. Sexual assault prevention science is also now seen as a legitimate public health issue. My hope is that I can report on even more positive changes in the field in the second volume of this compendium someday.
Q: Your book is geared toward an academic audience; what do you think the general public should know about the topic?
I hope that individuals know that everyone has a role of play in making our communities and places of work safer. We can each examine the ways in which sexism is expressed around us and take action to address it. This process also requires us to think about the harmful beliefs and norms that we ourselves may have internalized.
Q: How does this work align with your research interest in bystander intervention?
Bystander intervention efforts are a great strategy for bringing everyone into sexual assault prevention efforts. Bystander programs focus on how everyone in a community has a role of play in stepping in to say something when they see risks for sexual assault – no matter how small. This could include sexist jokes or remarks, which normalize mistreatment. Importantly, our actions to “step in” help not only to keep people safe from harm, but also serve to shift community norms regarding perpetration of violence. When we express our discomfort with words or actions, it communicates to the perpetrator of that misconduct that their behavior is unacceptable. Research suggests that perpetrators of sexual assault often overestimate the extent to which others support their behavior. Our actions as bystanders help to correct these misperceptions.
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to note?
I am grateful to have the opportunity to talk about this new co-edited volume on engaging boys and men in sexual assault prevention. Although #MeToo emerged almost five years ago, feminist scholars have been working to address sexual violence for more than fifty years. There is still tremendous work in this area that needs to be done and interdisciplinary science is needed to get there.
Engaging Boys and Men in Sexual Assault Prevention is available now on Elsevier, Amazon, and other online booksellers.