FACTSHEET:
Crime Victims & Corrections
In 1982, the Final Report of the President’s Task Force on Victims of Crime included four key recommendations to improve victim services in the parole process.
|
Newsletter: Summer 2009: Envisioning Communities Without Sexual Violence
The Alliance regards sexual violence as a public health problem as well as a human rights issue, and as our efforts move forward we are taking an approach that goes beyond the usual focus of changing individual behavior. In a groundbreaking and revolutionary practice, we are working to address the environmental factors that shape and mediate behavior that leads to sexual violence and effect change at multiple levels, with communities at the forefront of these efforts. The Alliance's approach to implementing such multi-level change is community mobilization. We are working at a grassroots level within communities to facilitate the skills necessary for community leaders to foster sustainable, health-supporting communities. Community mobilization refers to the organization of communities for the purpose of developing and implementing programs that are tailored to prevent sexual violence and improve public health. The success of this hinges on bringing various segments of communities together to develop their own solutions to sexual violence through collaboration. By working together on a long-term project, community members are developing and activating partnerships to design community-specific sexual violence prevention measures. These communities share a common interest and are invested in ending sexual violence while building a community coalition to oversee the planning and implementation of each community's project. Community mobilization is built around long-term strategies that are owned by the community. "This is something that is sustainable because it is led by members of the community," said Alliance Community Programs Coordinator Chris St. John. "Any mobilization effort needs to be relevant to members of the community and having a solid coalition working together is much better than sporadic, fragmented efforts by outsiders." Around the United States, agencies that have historically dedicated resources to providing much-needed services to survivors of sexual violence are beginning to integrate community mobilization and primary prevention into their core work. Rape Crisis Programs (RCPs) have realized that a holistic sexual violence intervention requires both prevention and response, and that both parts of this equation are necessary for survivors' long-term healing and recovery, as well as their renewal. With limited resources, these RCPs across the country are working in new and different ways to forge partnerships and collaborate with other organizations and communities to prevent sexual violence. The Alliance stands at the forefront of both local and national efforts - we are proud to partner with New York City-based RCPs on multiple levels by training health care providers and educating the public about their many specialized services, as well as working within three distinct NYC neighborhoods to train community members on how to identify behaviors that cause, and create ways to prevent, sexual violence before it happens at the community level. ← previous article | next article → |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
contact | privacy policy | webmanager@svfreenyc.org
Graphic design: Worksight, Programming: Clever Name Here