The Silence Breakers are TIME's Person of the Year 2017 #TIMEPOY https://t.co/mLgNTveY9z pic.twitter.com/GBo9z57RVG
— TIME (@TIME) December 6, 2017
Categories
Righteous.
Category: Sexual Assault
The American Academy of Pediatrics has released their policy statement, Global Human Trafficking and Child Victimization. The statement is available full text from their journal site; if you haven’t yet, check out their related Call to Action, as well as the 2015 policy paper, Child Sex Trafficking and Commercial Sexual Exploitation: Health Care Needs of Victims.
Our first offering in the FHO store, Injury Following Consensual Sex is now available. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you can find it here.
Vera Institute is hosting a webinar next month, Surviving in the Shadows: Sexual Violence Against Men with Disabilities and Deaf Men. The session will be held December 12th at 1pm ET. From the website:
Male survivors face unique obstacles when trying to access sexual assault and domestic violence services. When the survivor also has a disability or is Deaf, the barriers are compounded, making it even more difficult to access services. This webinar will provide service providers with insight into the victimization of men with disabilities, explore the unique barriers that male survivors with disabilities face when trying to access services, address some unanswered questions and gaps that need further study, and provide recommendations for better serving male survivors with disabilities and Deaf male survivors.
Register here.
Our first offering in the FHO store, Injury Following Consensual Sex is now available. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you can find it here.
What could be more timely than this? NSVRC has released the Key Findings of the Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace (PDF). The study brief covers the major findings from a year-long look into harassment in the workplace by the EEOC. [The EEOC, of course, is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency charged with enforcing federal labor laws that prohibit workplace discrimination.] Terribly current, indeed.
You can read the full EEOC report here.
Our first offering in the FHO store, Injury Following Consensual Sex is now available. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you can find it here.
Before I depart for France, one more post for the week. I’ll be back next week with a few goodies, including my annual gift guide. In the meantime, enjoy this month’s Articles of Note, our regular romp through the peer-reviewed literature. New and improved, too–I upgraded my Adobe software and can now make linkable PDFs. You’re welcome 😉
And for those of you who are veterans, wishing you a Happy Veteran’s Day this week–thank you for your service, on this day and every day.
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Open in new tab Our first offering in the FHO store, Injury Following Consensual Sex is now available. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you can find it here.
Our first offering in the FHO store, Injury Following Consensual Sex is now available. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you can find it here.
I wanted to bring to your attention the new IAFN Pediatric Strangulation Case Review and Assessment. I don’t typically post pricier options for continuing education, but this one looks comprehensive and has 20 CEs to go with it, I think it’s worth your time and resources. Cost is $115, but if you attended the annual conference in Toronto, where it was previewed, you received a coupon code in your email that decreased the cost to $99. From the announcement:
IAFN and Evidentia Learning have jointly developed a new e-learning module on the topic of pediatric strangulation, which was officially launched at the IAFN conference in Toronto.
IAFN Pediatric Strangulation Case Review & Assessment contains a collection of living pediatric/adolescent strangulation patients evaluated and treated in the medical setting, presented in conjunction with evidence-based knowledge on pediatric strangulation evaluation and treatment.
Learners can assess their knowledge acquisition through a review of:
– Definitions and terminology
– Anatomy and physiology
– Manner and associated signs & symptoms
– 29 interactive cases
– Post-testing
Authors:
Jennifer Pierce-Weeks, RN, SANE-P, SANE-A
COO, International Association of Forensic Nurses (IAFN)
Ralph Riviello, MD, MS, FACEP
Professor and Vice-Chair of Clinical Operations
Department of Emergency Medicine, Drexel University
Heather Rozzi, MD
Medical Director, Forensic Examiner Team
WellSpan Health
Raquel Vargas-Whale, MD, MS, MSc, FAAP
Medical Director, CARE Team
Driscoll Children’s Hospital
Kim Nash, BSN, RN, SANE-A, SANE-P
Forensic Nursing Specialist, International Association of Forensic Nurses (IAFN)
Tracy O’Brien, BSN, SANE-A, SANE-P
Forensic Examiner Program Coordinator
WellSpan Health York Hospital
Emily Huggins, RN, BSN, MHA, CEN, SANE-A, SANE-P
Forensic Examiner Program Manager
WellSpan Health York Hospital
Diane Daiber, BSN, RN, SANE-A, SANE-P
Forensic Nursing Specialist, International Association of Forensic Nurses (IAFN)
Categories
Trauma-Informed Care
Our first offering in the FHO store, Injury Following Consensual Sex is now available. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you can find it here.
I received a request from an FHO reader looking for research about sexual assault and trauma-informed care. Conveniently enough, the recent National Best Practices doc from NIJ has an Appendix with a grid that provides the citations on this topic (p 107; click on the image to download the PDF report):
Our first offering in the FHO store, Injury Following Consensual Sex is now available. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you can find it here.
The World Health Organization has released new clinical guidelines, Responding to Children and Adolescents Who Have Been Sexually Abused. This document is unrelated to/unconnected from any of the documents upon which we typically rely within the forensic nursing community (e.g. either National Protocol); that said it’s worth reviewing. From the Executive Summary:
This guideline aims to provide evidence-based recommendations for quality clinical care for children and adolescents who have, or may have, been subjected to sexual abuse, in order to mitigate the negative health consequences and improve their well-being. The objectives are to support health-care providers to provide quality, immediate and long-term clinical care and to apply ethical, human-rights-based and trauma-informed good practices in the provision of such care. Where relevant for provision of clinical care and where there is supporting evidence, sex-based differences and gender-based inequalities are flagged.
Download the PDF here.
I am so thrilled about the response to our first offering in the FHO store, Injury Following Consensual Sex. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you can find it here. For those of you outside the US, I have fixed the glitch that would not allow you to purchase it. Please let me know if you have further issues.
KIDSta has a webinar coming up, Legal Protections and Forensic Considerations for Immigrant and Refugee Child Victims. The session will be held November 8th at 2pm ET. From the announcement:
Immigrant and refugee children suffer multiple traumas in their home countries, during their process of immigration and are highly vulnerable to victimization following their arrival in the United States. This webinar will discuss how migration, immigration status, culture and trauma impact the physical, brain and emotional development children who are victims of sexual assault and child abuse and the special needs of immigrant and refugee child victims. There are multiple forms of immigration relief that have been designed to offer protection for children who have been victims of domestic and/or sexual violence. Immigration relief is available both for immigrant child victims and for immigrant non-abusive parents of citizen and foreign-born child victims. A central focus of the webinar will be to provide practical tools for assisting abused children and their protective parents in accessing the legal remedies they qualify to receive under immigration, public benefits and family law. The webinar will include a discussion of the special role well-written reports from forensic examinations can play as evidence in immigration and family law cases involving abused immigrant and refugee children.
Register for the webinar here.
I am so thrilled about the response to our first offering in the FHO store, Injury Following Consensual Sex. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you can find it here. For those of you outside the US, I have fixed the glitch that would not allow you to purchase it. Please let me know if you have further issues.
SAFEta/KIDSta has a webinar coming up, A Team Approach: Child Life’s Role in Pediatric Sexual Abuse Cases. The session will be held Novermber 1st at 2pm ET. From the site:
This webinar will focus on the collaboration between Pediatric Forensic Examiners and Certified Child Life Specialists (CCLS), particularly on the role of Child Life Specialists during the sexual abuse medical forensic exam. As trained medical professionals, Child Life Specialists utilize knowledge of child development, stress and coping theories, and family systems theories to promote positive outcomes during pediatric sexual abuse examinations. Working alongside Pediatric Forensic Examiners, Child Life Specialists are able to promote positive coping through rapport building, preparation, and developmentally appropriate divisional activities. During this webinar, the audience will learn about the role Child Life Specialists play while supporting staff, patients, and families during pediatric medical forensic exams. After the webinar, audiences should be able to: implement basic knowledge of child development theories during medical forensic exams, understand the role of child life, and name three successful outcomes that indicate positive coping during medical forensic exams.
Register here.
I am so thrilled about the response to our first offering in the FHO store, Injury Following Consensual Sex. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you can find it here. For those of you outside the US, I have fixed the glitch that would not allow you to purchase it. Please let me know if you have further issues.
The National Criminal Justice Training Center has an upcoming webinar, Human Trafficking: Inside the Survivor’s Mind. The session will be held November 15th at 2pm ET. I do not know if they will archive it–you will need to contact them directly to find out. From the site:
The session will:
Explain the definition of sex trafficking and describe why this is a serious problem that needs our attention. Demonstrate why victims are not often identified as we look at a survivor’s police record to show the invisible signs of trafficking. Review and understand the mind of a survivor. Describe complex PTSD and why a survivor does not run from her trafficker, understand how resilience helps in recovery, and what the recovery process looks like.
Register here.
First, let me say, you guys are the best–you flooded my inbox with your thoughts about a fee-based research overview (and peppered the site with a couple comments, too 🙂 ). BTW, there’s still time to provide some feedback and be eligible for the $50 Amazon gift card. Thanks to everyone who has shared their opinions/suggestions thus far.
Speaking of research [sort of], NSVRC has a new eLearning course, Evaluation 101: Prep, Analyze, Visualize Your Data. It’s a great opportunity to immerse yourself into the evaluation process (maybe you want to look at issues like impact of patient services or training events). They’ve created a brief video to get you started, then head to NSVRC’s eLearning site to register (the whole thing is free).
Don’t forget, if you’re interested in evaluation, particularly as you look at impact of your patient services, we also published the toolkit for SANE programs that provides a step-by-step guide.
Raliance, a national partnership between the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, PreventConnect (a project of the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault), and the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence has a new report available–Ending Sexual Violence in One Generation: A progress report for the United States 2017. It’s a really interesting read, including a look at both policy and research/evaluation for the year. And while you’re at it, check out the project site itself.
Time once again for Articles of Note, my (sort of) monthly romp through the peer-reviewed literature. As always, this is not comprehensive, and most links lead back to abstracts (except where noted otherwise). Also, as always, please provide attribution if you reproduce my lists for your own purposes, don’t take my name off the document, etc., etc.
But before we get to the meat of this post, a quick question: would you be interested in an actual research digest, which provided more in-depth information about new research (including some analysis about the impact on our practice), available every 6-8 weeks–for a small fee? I would appreciate the feedback–send me a yay or nay and how much you might be willing to pay for an individual digest (downloadable electronically), if you would be so kind. In the comments, or knowing you guys, in my email, would be fine. As an incentive, there’s a $50 Amazon gift card for one lucky commenter. I’ll choose when I’m in Toronto next week, so please let me know your thoughts by 13 October, 12pm ET. Thanks!
Word doc first (active links) followed by the PDF for easy sharing (because some of you folks still want it in that format):
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Categories
US Crime Statistics, 2016
For those of you who teach, write grants, etc., the FBI has just released the US Crime Statistics for 2016. You’ll find your general violent crime stats here; human trafficking (which has been broken out from the other stats) here. There is also a specific addendum that addresses the changes in the UCR definition of rape that you can review here. It’s helpful in understanding how things have evolved, but keep in mind, we’re still only talking about reported cases…
{I’m in Germany, so postings are going to be lighter this week. I’ll try to resume a normal schedule of posting next week. Honest.}
Recent grant publication out of NIJ that might be of interest to some of you: Injury Evidence, Biological Evidence, and Prosecution of Sexual Assault (PDF). Another contributor to the question of criminal justice outcomes, it might be a good one to share with your SART or MDT. Not a huge sample size, and I have a few questions about the analysis of their findings, but what particularly caught my eye was the following: “The study found that victim-injury-evidence variables and most biological-evidence variables were not statistically related to criminal justice outcomes.”
[H/t Leslie Hagan–thanks!]
Vera’s Center on Victimization and Safety has a webinar coming up, Mandated Reporting Obligations When a Survivor Has a Disability. The session will be held October 17th at 2pm ET. Unfortunately, I cannot find any additional info on this one, other than what’s on the registration page (a search of their website using the exact title of the webinar produces nothing [insert frowny face here]). However, I include this one on the site because it is a critical issue in the work we do, and so I encourage people to consider this one for your to-do list. I’ll be out of the country the week it’s held, but I hope someone will let me know how it was (because–and I know someone will ask– I also don’t know if they will archive it). If I receive additional intel I will add it to this post.
As is often the case, I like to discuss hot topics from the IAFN community site over here, as well. In part, because FHO reaches a different audience to an extent, and in part because I have a little more flexibility on my own site. Recently a question was posed about deleting blurry or otherwise unusable photos. Kosher or no? If you delete a photo is it “destroying evidence” as some claim, or is it something less nefarious? I will repost a portion of my response to the question on the community site here and then add a bit to what I previously posted over there:
[P]hotos are taken for the purpose of documenting findings as part of the medical record. Just as our colleagues in other areas of medicine take photos to document findings (and delete photos that aren’t useful for those purposes, such as blurry ones), so too do we. Those photos may then be used, along with the rest of the medical record, in a criminal or civil proceeding. At that time I have to testify as to whether my photos are “true and accurate” depictions of what I saw on exam. I am swearing under oath that my photos display what I saw. Just as I swear under oath that the swabs were obtained from the places I say they were obtained, or that the statements in my documentation actually reflect what the patient said to me.
To be honest, the idea that we are “destroying evidence” seems to be an arbitrary one. We don’t maintain specula after female sexual assault medical-forensic exams, but certainly, we could argue there is “evidence” potentially present on them. We don’t worry about it because there are swabs that theoretically captured the same “evidence”. I view this under a similar light. And being able to discuss my (current, regularly reviewed) policies and procedures and articulate why I may have deviated from them (if in fact, I did) is what speaks to transparency, in my opinion.
People possess a variety of philosophical viewpoints about their practices, which means we will probably never achieve consensus on this issue (as is the case for many things in our field). What is true for everyone, regardless of practice philosophy, is the need, when testifying, to be able to explain the rationale for why we do what we do with patients. We probably don’t have to agree on much else, but we do need to agree on that point. And I would go a step further and say that we need to explain the clinical rationale for why we do what we do with patients. Making decisions based on what law enforcement, or prosecutors or a camera software system manufacturer think is best has the potential to put people in as uncomfortable a position as deleting the specific photos, so the question will always be, why?
- If your response is, I didn’t delete any photos because I didn’t want to destroy “evidence”, be prepared for hard questions about who asked you not to delete photos, the purpose of the photos you took, and your general alignment with investigatory vs medical procedures.
- If your response is, I delete any photos that don’t adequately document what I saw at the time of exam, be prepared for difficult questions about theoretically destroying evidence.
For what it’s worth, there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of consensus, or even guidance, on this issue in the texts I most frequently use in my practice. The Atlas of Sexual Violence doesn’t address it in any way; Forensic Emergency Medicine (2nd Ed) does address it, but states in regards to deleted digital images:
The photographer should be ready to openly explain why the image was deleted. Possible explanations include “the image was out of focus,” “lighting was inadequate,” “technical problems with the camera settings,” or “my fingers got in the way.” An open and honest response should quiet any ill-mannered attorney. (Smock & Besant-Matthews, Forensic Photography in the Emergency Department, pp 289-290).
There is no “gold standard” on this issue–just a variety of opinions on whether or not it should be done. Anyone wanting to forward me scholarly work on this topic, by all means, please–I will compile a lit review for the FHO community and for wider distribution. Until then, I actually do think we will have to agree to disagree.
So there you have it. Make informed decisions. Consider the rationale behind the choices you make. Know how to articulate your decision making at trial. Nothing new to see here, folks. But always interesting discussion.
{Not legal advice, not official guidance–the world as I see it. Take it for what it’s worth.}
[Add, 9/8: A couple folks have sent or asked about SWGIT‘s standards, which I appreciate and will simply say–yes, these are the standards for forensic photographers in law enforcement. We aren’t law enforcement, and our photographs are taken for a different reason. So again, I stand by the statement I made earlier, I don’t believe there is a gold standard in our profession at this point.]
The National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center is hosting a webinar on September 14th at 2pm ET: Introduction to a Public Health Framework for Human Trafficking. From the announcement:
This webinar will introduce you to a public health framework for human trafficking, which allows communities to identify and respond to the complex needs of all individuals who have been trafficked. A public health approach also examines the root causes that make individuals, families, and communities vulnerable to trafficking. In this webinar, we apply the “upstream-downstream” metaphor to a public health approach, and examine the success of looking upstream in building a public health response to other social issues such as domestic violence or anti-smoking efforts.
Register here.
There’s been a fair amount of attention focused on human trafficking on several of the community listservs to which I subscribe, so I am trying to post more related resources. This one is geared toward the community response: Conducting Community Inventories to Support Victims of Human Trafficking. The session is being offered by the National Criminal Justice Training Center on September 7th at 2pm ET. From the site:
Explore best practices for developing an organizational network to produce sustainable community-wide services for victims of human trafficking. Bill Kearney, author of Equipping Quality Youth Development Professionals and co-founder of WBK&A, Inc., will provide examples of community-wide efforts from across the country to promote collaboration between public agencies, private, and non-profit organizations. Participants will learn the necessary steps to conduct resource inventories within their communities and to engage various stakeholders in meeting common goals.
Register here.