Professor Puts Sexual Violence in Perspective.
“Radical statement: If you want to stop sexual violence, address shared risk and protective factors for other public health problems.”
This was one of the slides in a presentation by Emily Rothman, associate professor of community health sciences, at the international conference At the Crossroads: Future Directions in Sex Offender Treatment in Antwerp, Belgium, on March 18.
The annual conference is mainly attended by forensic psychologists and others who evaluate and treat sex offenders.
“The majority of speakers were internationally-respected experts on assessing risk in sex offenders, sex offender treatment effectiveness, and research design to evaluate sex offender treatment protocols,” says Rothman. “But they also invited one or two others to be a bit thought-provoking,” including a presentation of current thinking on why fetishes develop, and another on ethics and chemical castration.
“To spice things up,” Rothman says, “they brought me in from public health to talk about just preventing sexual violence to begin with.”
She explained how sexual violence is linked to many of the same “upstream” factors behind public health issues like substance abuse, HIV infection, obesity, mental illness, and suicide.
Tackling those risk factors—like economic inequality, community disempowerment, discrimination, harmful cultural norms—and promoting protective factors alongside those working in other public health issues, Rothman argued, can and does bring about large-scale reduction of sexual violence.
This idea isn’t so unfamiliar to the public health community, she says, but for much of the conference audience it was groundbreaking. “They aren’t used to thinking of themselves as part of a public health coalition or more broad-based movement,” Rothman says.
What she says seemed to especially strike a chord with the conference audience was when she addressed concerns about getting governments to support prevention.
“You just need to do the math of how much it will cost society to arrest a perpetrator, and provide services, and rehabilitation for a victim,” Rothman explains, “and then you show that for this amount of money you could have this program that reduces sexual violence by 50 percent.
“So everybody who wants to prevent sexual violence needs to go out and make friends with an economist.”