These summaries were written by SVPEP staff and are based on original papers published within the last 8 years. The information available on this web site is provided as a public service and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, the Arizona Department of Health Services, or the University of Arizona. To conduct an individual search or locate older articles use the Search Summary Database which includes over 600 articles related to sexual violence.

Bachman, R. (2000). A comparison of annual incidence rates and contextual characteristics of intimate-perpetrated violence against women from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS). Violence Against Women, 6, 839-867.

Summary: The author asserts that research efforts employing diverse methodologies have yielded very different estimates of intimate-perpetrated violence against women. The article provides a comparison of annual incident rates of rape and physical assault against women as estimated by the National Violence Against Women Survey; co-sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institute of Justice and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The author indicates that the data sets were made as comparable as possible via several data restrictions. These restrictions included restricting the NCVS data to include only incidents of rape (to the exclusion of other sexual assaults) and physical assault against women 18 years of age and older. The methodological differences of each survey, that made comparisons tenuous, are described and recommendations for policy are provided.

Topics: prevalence; statistics

Campbell, J. C. (2000). Promise and perils of surveillance in addressing violence against women. Violence Against Women, 6, 705-727.

Summary: The author asserts that surveillance in the field of violence against women is an important tool to establish and track prevalence over time, identify risk groups and factors, and evaluate interventions. They can also decrease research costs and can be established in legal, health, and social service systems – the fields that interact with victims. However, a surveillance system for sexual assault would not be a perfect system. The author examines issues specific to surveillance in this field, including its definitions, prevalence variations, sensitivity and specificity issues, and safety concerns. The author concludes by offering some creative approaches for addressing these problems.

Topics: statistics

Magid, D. J., Houry, D., Koepsell, T. D., Ziller, A., Soules, M. R., & Jenny, C. (2004). The epidemiology of female rape victims who seek immediate medical care: Temporal trends in the incidence of sexual assault and acquaintance rape. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 19, 3-12.

Summary: The emergency department is an important source of information about sexual assault occurrence since victims of sexual assault usually go to the emergency department for medical assistance after being assaulted. This is a study comparing the number of female sexual assault victims treated in a Colorado county’s emergency department between July and November of 1974 and 1991. It was hypothesized that there would be a significant increase in the incidence of sexual assault between 1974 and 1991. As predicted, there was a 60% increase in sexual assault incidence with this increase primarily caused by an increase in sexual assaults involving known assailants. Moreover, victims in the emergency department reported more physical force and physical injury in 1991 when compared to 1974. Additional differences between study years (e.g., incidence of oral/anal intercourse during assaults as well as administration of pregnancy prophylaxis and antibiotics) are also presented. Implications of these findings concerning rates of acquaintance rape, reporting rates, and changes in treatment practices are discussed.

Topics: injury; medical response; statistics

Malamuth, N. M., Addison, T., & Koss, M. (2000). Pornography and sexual aggression: Are there reliable effects and can we understand them? Annual Review of Sex Research, 11, 26-91.

Summary: The authors are responding to recent critiques of their work. Their responses delineate the arguments and data presented in those commentaries; integrate the findings of several meta-analytic summaries of experimental and naturalistic research; and statistically analyze a large representative sample. The responses support the existence of reliable associations between frequent pornography use and sexually aggressive behaviors, particularly for violent pornography and/or for men at high risk for sexual aggression. The authors suggest that relatively aggressive men interpret and react to the same pornography differently than do non-aggressive men. This perspective can help to integrate the current analyses with studies comparing rapists and non-rapists as well as with cross-cultural research.

Topics: perpetration; risk; statistics

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Updated 09/22/08