Transaction Search Form: please type in any of the fields below.
Date: November 22, 2024 Fri
Time: 12:00 pm
Time: 12:00 pm
Results for sexual assault, adolescents
1 results foundAuthor: Campbell, Rebecca Title: Adolescent Sexual Assault Victims’ Experiences with SANE-SARTs and the Criminal Justice System Summary: The purpose of this project was to examine adolescent sexual assault survivors’ help-seeking experiences with the legal and medical systems in two Midwestern communities that have different models of Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) / Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) interventions. This project had two main objectives. First, we conducted qualitative interviews with adolescent sexual assault victims regarding their initial post-assault disclosures and their pathways to seeking help from the medical and legal systems. It is important to understand how and why teen survivors decide to seek help from these programs in the first place. Although SANE-SART interventions have the potential to be useful resources to teen victims, they are only useful insofar as they are utilized by survivors. In Study 1, we conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with N=20 adolescent sexual assault victims 14-17 years old. From these interviews, we identified three distinct patterns of survivors’ post-assault disclosures and their pathways to seeking help from SANE programs and the criminal justice system: voluntary (survivors’ contact with the legal and medical system was by their choice), involuntary (system contact was not by choice), and situational (circumstances of the assault itself prompted involuntary disclosure). Victims with voluntary disclosures patterns were more likely to remain engaged with the legal system throughout the investigation process. Those in the involuntary disclosure pattern were only sometimes willing to continue to pursue legal prosecution. There were too few situational disclosures to examine the impact of system entry on subsequent system involvement. The second objective was to conduct a quantitative analysis to determine what factors predict successful prosecution of adolescent sexual assault cases. Once teen victims are “in the system” what factors determine whether a case will be prosecuted? Criminal justice prosecution is a multi-step process, from reporting to referral, arrest, prosecution (which itself has many steps), and final case outcome. Rather than focusing at any one stage, we assessed progress through this system as an ordinal variable in order to capture incremental change. We examined how differences between the two SANE-SART models—and the evolution of these models over time—predicted prosecution outcomes relative to the predictive utility of victim characteristics, assault characteristics, and medical forensic evidence findings. In Study 2, we obtained SANE program records, police and prosecutor records, and crime lab findings for a sample of N=392 adolescent sexual assault victims who sought services from the focal SANE programs. The overall rate of guilty plea/trial convictions was 40.3% for sexual assaults committed against adolescents aged 13-17. Using multi-level ordinal logistic regression, we found that cases involving younger victims (13-15) were significantly more likely to progress further through the system than assaults against older victims, and assaults committed against adolescents with documented developmental delays were eight times as likely to move further through the criminal justice system. We found no significant effects for victim race/ethnicity and alcohol use on legal case outcomes. Victim-offender relationship was a significant predictor of case progression, such that non-stranger assaults were more likely to be prosecuted than stranger assaults. The specific kinds of forced penetrations (i.e., vaginal vs. oral vs. anal penetrations) did not affect case outcomes, but the cumulative number of the assaultive acts perpetrated against the victim did increase the likelihood that the case would progress further through the criminal justice system. With respect to medical forensic evidentiary findings, the more delay there was between the assault and when the survivor had the medical forensic exam, the less likely the case would progress through the system. Cases with positive DNA evidence were five times as likely to progress further through the system, but there were no significant effects for specific physical or anogenital injuries. With respect to site differences, there were no significant main effect differences between the two SANE/SART programs studied , suggesting that one model of SANE-SART intervention was no more or less effective than the other with respect to achieving prosecution success. Details: East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University, 2010. 164p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 23, 2011 at: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/234466.pdf Year: 2010 Country: United States URL: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/234466.pdf Shelf Number: 122466 Keywords: CounselingRapeSexual Assault, AdolescentsVictims of Sexual Assault |