Constructing Sacred Containers for Participatory Action Research: An Embodied Mindfulness Arts-Based Practice.

College campuses are sites of institutional betrayal and interpersonal harm for too many survivors of gender-based violence. In pursuit of change aligned with empowerment frameworks and feminist epistemologies, many of us create spaces for impacted students to engage in participatory action research and learning. This article describes a mindfulness, arts-based embodied practice for transforming settings and positioning participants as visionaries and experts on safety, power, and well-being. Through intentional dyadic and collective discussion, the Sacred Containers form the foundation for a coconstructed community. This article describes the rationale, process, impact, and recommendations via student and faculty reflections across four cohorts.

On working with poison: Reflections on painful empowerment in queer faculty-student participatory action research.

Human sexuality textbooks, like most social and health sciences products, are notoriously limited in their inclusion of queer, trans, and intersex people. While well-intentioned faculty (like the first author) do their best to address these limitations, sometimes it isn't enough. Sometimes our texts, and we, cause harm. This paper describes two phases of a participatory action research (PAR) project involving queer, trans, and intersex students and a queer, nonbinary faculty member that intended to address harm tied to a course text, support student empowerment, and move toward action to improve unjust textbook representation. Through first-person reflective storytelling, we, the faculty member and one student member of the research team, share our approach to "working with poison," including strategies for infusing trauma-informed practices into our PAR approach. We reflect on the pain of doing this work, and the ways our approach succeeded and failed. We end with recommendations for individuals, publishers, and institutions looking to minimize harm and promote justice in higher education curriculum.

Reflecting and rejuvenating our work, together: One team's consideration of AJCP publications on gender-based violence.

Community psychology has long valued reflexive praxis as a critical part advancing our research and action. In this Virtual Special Issue (VSI), we, a group of community psychologists and gender-based violence (GBV) researchers at many different points in our careers, reflected on GBV publications that have appeared in AJCP. We examine the ways in which community psychology broadly and articles in AJCP more specifically have conceptualized GBV as a sociocultural issue, how GBV intersects with other oppressions and forms of violence, the tension when systems that aspire to support survivors are inequitable and focused on ameliorative change, and the importance of interventions being locally informed and locally driven. By highlighting selected GBV-focused articles published in AJCP, this VSI discusses (a) understanding and transforming culture via robust research and local partnerships, (b) targeting effective interventions for survivors, (c) invoking systems and targeting change in institutional environments, and (d) making connections between local efforts and broader social movements. To continue to move forward, we conclude we must reflect, embrace methodological plurality, partner, and push for structural change. Reflective questions regarding research and action are offered, to address gender-based violence.

Youth Response to Rape: Rape Myths and Social Support.

Adolescents and young adults face the highest incidence of sexual assault, yet only limited research focuses on the experience of adolescent survivors, adolescent rape myth acceptance, or the ways youth respond to rape. Survivors tend to disclose to at least one person, typically peers, and the response, whether positive or negative, can impact well-being and help-seeking behaviors. Focus groups across Oregon, a leader in state-level comprehensive sexuality education policy, solicited high school-student reactions to an alcohol-involved rape scenario. These rich-case participants had taken comprehensive sexuality education classes and were affiliated with health and sexuality organizations. These youth were anticipated to showcase best possible outcomes resulting from current sexuality education practices. After hearing a hypothetical scenario involving a friend's experience with alcohol-involved sexual assault, participants were asked how they would respond. Participants spontaneously discussed whether the actions described constituted rape, often relying on victim-blaming rape myths as evidence. Alcohol use was a critical factor in interpretations. Female use increased her perceived culpability and male use decreased his. After assessing blame and whether the incident constituted rape, youth described three types of support (informational, instrumental or practical, and emotional support) they would offer as well as barriers when responding to the victim and intentions to hold victims accountable. These responses paint a concerning portrait of the ways youth make sense of sexual violence and consider responding to a friend's disclosure. Sexuality education policy mandates and intervention programs must target the problematic links between alcohol, rape, and rape myths while reinforcing non-victim-blaming support.

Pursuing an Ethical, Socially Just Classroom: Searching for Community Psychology Pedagogy.

Discussions of community psychology (CP) ethics often examine how we might best uphold CP values in community-based practice. However, for many community psychologists in faculty positions, our main domain of practice is the undergraduate classroom. Teaching is essential to the growth and sustainability of our field as prospective students tend to discover CP during their undergraduate studies. University-based work is also a key site of CP practice. Universities are contested spaces where interlocking forms of oppression manifest in many ways, including teaching (e.g., what is taught, how, by whom, to whom). CP values compel us to treat our classrooms as more than just information transmission spaces; just as there is no value-neutral research, there is no value-neutral course content or classroom practice. This first-person narrative explores ethical issues that arise when we put CP values, specifically social justice, respect for diversity, participation, and wellness, in conversation with pedagogical best practices and course content in higher education. It presents interrelated ethical dilemmas and the authors' conflicted responses. We conclude with a four-part call to the field for dedicated scholarly spaces and supports focused on the development and study of undergraduate CP pedagogy.

Photovoice as a pedagogical tool in the community psychology classroom.

Constructivist perspectives contend that individuals actively extract and make meaning from the world around them. In the classroom this means that students are not passive recipients or repositories for our theories and empirical findings; instead, they actively redefine and relate to (or not) the concepts presented. To simultaneously stimulate and build on this process, I adopted Photovoice as a pedagogical tool to situate students as observers of their own community and create space for them to engage in participatory, community-focused meaning making activities. By employing strategically crafted framing questions, students generated Photovoice data that served as a powerful jumping off point for discussing key community psychology concepts. In addition, the Photovoice process provided students the opportunity to directly experience a participatory research process as well as engage in basic qualitative data analysis. This article presents the general process my class undertook as well as qualitative feedback from students.

The impact of school-based health centers on the health outcomes of middle school and high school students.

OBJECTIVES: We studied the direct and indirect effects of school-based health centers (SBHCs) on the health and health behaviors of middle and high school students. METHODS: We used a prospective cohort design to measure health outcomes annually over 2 consecutive years by student self-report. Cohorts of middle school and high school students were recruited from matched schools with and without SBHCs. Data were obtained from 744 students in both year 1 and year 2 of the study. We used 2-level hierarchical linear models to estimate the effects of the presence of SBHCs at the school level and of SBHC use at the student level. RESULTS: At year 2, users of SBHCs experienced greater satisfaction with their health, more physical activity, and greater consumption of healthy food than did nonusers of SBHCs. CONCLUSIONS: Students who used SBHCs were more satisfied with their health and engaged in a greater number of health-promoting behaviors than did students who did not use SBHCs. These findings indicate that SBHCs are achieving their goal of promoting children's health.

Youth ReACT for Social Change: a method for youth participatory action research.

Although participatory action research has become an increasingly popular method with youth, involving them in problem identification, analysis, intervention, and/or feedback, few PAR projects tend to involve youth in all of these phases-particularly the data analysis phase. Yet involvement in the data analysis phase of a research effort can help to promote critical awareness of the targeted issues, potentially increasing the effectiveness of subsequent PAR stages. In addition, although many YPAR projects aim to promote the critical consciousness of their youth participants, some projects struggle to promote this awareness, often because the methods used are not well matched to the developmental needs of their participants. In this paper we present the ReACT Method, a PAR approach specifically designed to promote local knowledge production and critical consciousness by engaging youth in the problem identification, data analysis, and feedback stages of research. Given the lack of attention in the literature to the methods used for engaging youth in these processes, we provide detailed descriptions of the methods we developed to engage youth in problem identification and qualitative data analysis.

Developing a university-wide institutional response to sexual assault and relationship violence.

This article presents a process case study for developing a university-wide response to sexual assault and relationship violence. Following Kelly's (1988) approach to prevention work in community-settings, we began our work with in-depth ecological reconnaissance to understand our local context. Our case study described the processes used to develop an inclusive task force, conduct an environmental scan, and carry out a quantitative-qualitative needs assessment. Our processes for developing an institutional response for both direct services interventions and prevention are discussed in the context of Kelly's (1966, 1968, 2006) ecological principles of interdependence and cycling of resources.

Sexual harassment policies in K-12 schools: examining accessibility to students and content.

BACKGROUND: Peer sexual harassment is a significant social problem with consequences for both students and schools. Four out of 5 students report experiencing sexual harassment. These experiences have been linked to poor psychological health and academic withdrawal. Recognizing the seriousness of sexual harassment in schools, Supreme Court rulings have established school liability for known instances of sexual harassment under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Federal guidelines established by the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education mandate schools to develop sexual harassment policies; however, the implementation of these guidelines has not been examined. Therefore, this study assessed the degree to which sexual harassment policies in primary and secondary schools adhered to said guidelines. METHODS: This study evaluated 784 primary and secondary school sexual harassment policies across 4 states on 3 key factors: accessibility to students (ie, via the Internet), consistency with federal guidelines regarding their content and the inclusion of 10 key components, and consistency of content across educational levels. RESULTS: Only 14% of sexual harassment policies were available online; the majority of policies incorporated only 5 of the 10 critical components, and elementary school policies contained significantly fewer components than all other educational levels. CONCLUSIONS: The Internet is an underused resource for disseminating school sexual harassment policies to students. When policies are available, they rarely incorporate the key elements specified in the federal guidelines. Particularly troubling are the inaccessibility and incompleteness of elementary school policies. Greater attention to policy accessibility and comprehensiveness is needed.

Gynecological health impact of sexual assault.

We examined the relationship between sexual assault and gynecological health symptoms (e.g., pelvic pain, painful intercourse) in a sample of predominately African American female veterans. Those who had been sexually victimized experienced significantly more frequent gynecological health symptoms than those who had not been assaulted. Multiple forced penetrations, assault by an intimate partner, having weapons used, physical injury, belief that the victim's life was in danger during the assault, and serving in the military at the time of assault increased the likelihood of reporting particular gynecological health symptoms. Screening women in health care settings for a history of violence can link women to resources and treatment for assault-related health symptoms.

The effectiveness of sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) programs: a review of psychological, medical, legal, and community outcomes.

In sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) programs, specially trained forensic nurses provide 24-hour-a-day, first-response medical care and crisis intervention to rape survivors in either hospitals or clinic settings. This article reviews the empirical literature regarding the effectiveness of SANE programs in five domains:(a) promoting the psychological recovery of survivors, (b) providing comprehensive and consistent post-rape medical care (e.g., emergency contraception, sexually transmitted disease [STD] prophylaxis), (c) documenting the forensic evidence of the crime completely and accurately, (d) improving the prosecution of sexual assault cases by providing better forensics and expert testimony, and (e) creating community change by bringing multiple service providers together to provide comprehensive care to rape survivors. Preliminary evidence suggests that SANE programs are effective in all domains, but such conclusions are tentative because most published studies have not included adequate methodological controls to rigorously test the effectiveness of SANE programs. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.