Sexual Assault Survivors and Information: Needs and Recommendations

Latent profiles among sexual assault survivors: understanding survivors and their assault experiences.

Little guidance exists about how to tailor empowerment and resistance sexual assault programming to be responsive to varying groups of women. Using an investigation of 415 college women who completed a self-administered survey about a range of sexually aggressive experiences by a known male assailant, this investigation tested for distinct multivariate profiles of contextual factors among sexua...

Integrated response. Caring for survivors of sexual assault.

Social reactions to disclosure of sexual victimization and adjustment among survivors of sexual assault.

How a support provider responds to disclosure of sexual victimization has important implications for the process of recovery. The present study examines the associations between various positive and negative social reactions to sexual assault disclosure and psychological distress, coping behavior, social support, and self-esteem in a sample of college women (N = 374). Social reactions to assaul...

Nightmare frequency in sexual assault survivors with PTSD.

Sexual assault survivors with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were assessed for frequency of nightmares, measured retrospectively on the Nightmare Frequency Questionnaire (NFQ) and prospectively on nightmare dream logs (NLOG). Retrospective frequency was extremely high, averaging occurrences every other night and an estimated number of nightmares greater than five per week. Test-retest re...

Alcohol and sexual assault.

Conservative estimates of sexual assault prevalence suggest that 25 percent of American women have experienced sexual assault, including rape. Approximately one-half of those cases involve alcohol consumption by the perpetrator, victim, or both. Alcohol contributes to sexual assault through multiple pathways, often exacerbating existing risk factors. Beliefs about alcohol's effects on sexual an...