Preventing Sexual Violence

As recent headlines attest, sexual predators can come from all walks of life. Public Health professors Amanda Birnbaum and Stephanie Silvera will evaluate efforts at reducing sexual violence from predators in New Jersey with a $141,000 subaward from the New Jersey Department of Children and Families that is partially funded by a Rape Prevention and Education grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/Centers for Disease Control.

“We hope to help increase the capacity for effective and sustainable monitoring and evaluation of statewide efforts to reduce sexual violence,” explains Birnbaum, who chairs the University’s Public Health department, adding that they will track data that includes children and men as well.

The state will then use the data to monitor and evaluate the New Jersey Rape Prevention and Education program efforts.
According to Silvera, current initiatives in the field focus on reducing predation, rather than preventing victimization: “As a result, the responsibility for prevention falls to us all collectively, requiring that we address underlying factors that contribute to sexual violence and shift the ways that gender, power and violence relate to one another.”