Abstract
The first three articles in this issue of Violence Against Women report research on issues related to the sexual assault of college women. First, Terri Messman-Moore, Rose Marie Ward, and Kathleen DeNardi note that although empirical evidence indicates that intoxication reduces sexual performance and satisfaction, many young women nevertheless expect alcohol to enhance their sexual encounters. Messman-Moore et al.’s research indicates that sexual enhancement alcohol expectancies among college women are indirectly related to alcohol-involved rape in that they are related to heavy episodic drinking, greater likelihood of having sex while intoxicated, and number of sex partners—all risk factors for sexual assault. They discuss the implications of their findings for sexual assault prevention.
The second article, by Michelle Deming, Eleanor Krassen Covan, Suzanne Swan, and Deborah Billings, also has important implications for sexual assault education programming. Deming and her colleagues conducted focus groups with 1st- and 4th-year college women, asking them to interpret a variety of scenarios that met the legal definition of rape, but contained some ambiguities by conforming to several popular rape myths. For example, in some cases, the scenario depicted a date rape; in others, consent was blurry. Deming et al. report that for many young women, rape myths continue to inform or guide their interpretations of “ambiguous” sexual assaults. Despite efforts to reduce rape myth acceptance, then, this research shows that much remains to be done in this area.
The Deming et al. study also has relevance for the third article on rape disclosure by Lisa Paul and her colleagues. Paul et al. report that being told about a sexual assault by a friend is a relatively common experience among college women. How friends react to these disclosures may be beneficial or detrimental to rape victims. In their study, Paul et al. found that a high percentage of participants who had received a rape disclosure encouraged the victim to report the assault to authorities. These researchers examined a number of variables related to rape disclosure and reactions to rape disclosure—all of which have implications for sexual assault prevention and intervention efforts on college campuses.
Two articles in this issue deal with aspects of intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization. Cindy-Lee Dennis and Simone Vigod examine the relationship between IPV, substance use, and postpartum depression symptoms among a community sample of women in Canada. Interestingly, Dennis and Vigod found that current and past IPV victimization were positively related to postpartum depression symptoms. Moreover, while the women’s substance use was related to postpartum depression, substance use by the woman’s partner was also positively associated with postpartum depression. Dennis and Vigod recommend screening pregnant women for current and past IPV as well as own and partner’s substance use in order to identify women at risk for postpartum depression.
Maria Galano, Erin Hunter, Kathryn Howell, Laura Miller, and Sandra Graham-Bermann discuss factors they identified in their research that predict past-year shelter residence for women who have experienced IPV. They report that African American women and women with lower incomes were more likely to reside in shelters. But trauma symptoms and housing instability along with ethnicity were the best predictors of past-year shelter residence among the women in their sample. Galano et al. call for additional research to identify which outreach and intervention programs would be most successful with specific groups of women.
In the final article in this issue, Anita Raj and Ulrike Boehmer discuss the problem of child marriage. As Raj and Boehmer demonstrate, child marriage (i.e., marriage before the age of 18) has multiple serious negative consequences for girls and women. Raj and Boehmer analyzed national-level data, largely from United Nations reports, for 97 countries for which child-marriage data were also available. They found that although child marriage was unrelated to HIV risk, it was related to nonutilization of maternal health services as well as higher maternal and infant mortality. Raj and Boehmer made several recommendations for addressing the problem of child marriage. Although it is tempting to argue that immediately outlawing child marriage would be the best way to reduce its incidence and, therefore, related problems, our experience with other forms of gender-based violence and discrimination (e.g., female genital mutilation) reminds us that the solutions to such problems are rarely quick and simplistic.