By. Cailtyn Brown
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) recently began to create and distribute programs aiming to help disseminate information to the public. These Technical Packages encourage the community to take advantage of gathered evidence and practices in a variety of topic areas.
This blog covers the second of multiple Technical Package resource posts and focuses on preventing sexual violence. This particular technical package covers the most recent research and provides techniques for professionals and communities that can help to prevent sexual violence. Each report section goes through the rationale for the topic, approaches to implementing the prevention strategy in the community and the outcomes of such techniques. Below, we summarize a couple sections of the Preventing Sexual Violence technical package.
Promote Social Norms that Protect Against Violence:
This section goes through the different suggestions for approaches to protecting individuals from sexual violence. The approaches categorized different individual populations who can act as allies in the community, such as bystanders in order to increase recognition of abusive behaviors.
Teach Skills to Prevent Sexual Violence:
There are multiple approaches discussed in this section that aim to teach and promote individual skill-based learning regarding sexual violence prevention. These approaches include social-emotional learning, teaching healthy, safe dating and intimate relationship skills to adolescents, promoting healthy sexuality and empowerment-based training for women in order to reduce the risk of victimization. Each of these approaches is discussed in detail and includes potential outcomes and evidence that supports each approach.
Provide Opportunities to Empower and Support Girls and Women:
This section discusses approaches that aim to empower and support the female population of all ages with opportunities in varying areas of their day-to-day life that can reduce their risk for victimization. These approaches can occur in a variety of areas such as education, employment, and income support. By creating stability in educational areas, occupation, and housing, a community can strengthen the resilience and increase empowerment of the girls and women living there.
Support Victims/Survivors to Lessen Harms:
This section discusses the approaches that a community could implement to reduce the long-term effects on psychological well-being that victims of violence could potentially experience. Much like our webinar in August that focused on the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) on an individual’s long-term well-being, this section goes through evidence-based services that aim to decrease that impact.
If you would like to read the CDC’s Preventing Child Abuse & Neglect technical package, you can access it here.
Be on the lookout for our future blogs on some of the CDC’s other technical packages.
Blog Image: Photo of Centers for Disease Control Technical Package – Preventing Sexual Abuse
