Making the Case for Prevention

As the Director of Community Education for MOCSA, Kansas City’s comprehensive rape crisis center, I often need to “sell” the subject of rape prevention education to our various teachers, parents, and funders. It can be a frustrating experience on many levels, especially in today’s economy. Funders are more compelled to allocate money to an urgent need. Teachers feel too strapped for time and resources to fit in anything outside of basic requirements. Parents don’t want to believe that their children will ever be the perpetrators or victims of sexual assault. All of those reasons are valid reasons to ignore the issue all together. So why even try?

I tend to think the evidence should speak for itself. Studies suggest that it costs over $5.8 billion annually to address issues related to intimate partner sexual assault, physical assault and stalking. Victims often turn to drug use and alcohol to cope, leading them into a life-long cycle of pain and destruction. Countless lives are ruined by sexual assault and abuse. And even though I know that we can do amazing things to help put perpetrators behind bars and help victims turn their lives around, I also know that we CAN stamp out sexual assault completely.

When people ask me about my professional goals, I usually tell them that I’m trying to put my agency out of business. It’s a lofty goal, I know. But in my heart I must believe that if we do our jobs well enough, we can teach every child what a healthy relationship looks like, and that they all have the right to expect respect from their friends, family, and partners. If I didn’t truly believe these things, I would have to find another line of work, because what we do is not easy. But nothing worth doing ever is.

Julia Westhoff is the Director of Community Education at the Metropolitan Organization to Counter Sexual Assault in Kansas City. Julia has over 10 years of experience as a prevention-focused non-profit administrator.

OnLine Training Institute is being updated!

Staff at EVAWI has been working on updating the content of several of the OnLine Training Institute (OLTI) modules. The OLTI was developed to bring state-of-the art training to anyone who is interested, on the topic of criminal justice response to sexual assault. One of the many benefits of offering training online is that we can continually update and improve the content.

In the OLTI module on Victim Impact, we incorporated diverse survivor perspectives throughout the module. We felt was more effective than developing a single, stand-alone module on "special victim populations," because we can better integrate the examples into our general understanding of the impact of sexual victimization. It is therefore more likely to be helpful in crafting an effective response.

In the OLTI module on Clearance Methods for Sexual Assault Cases, we updated the Uniform Crime Report’s (UCR) new definition of Forcible Rape, after FBI Director Robert Mueller officially approved a new, more comprehensive, definition of Forcible Rape in December 2011.

In the OLTI Module Effective Victim Advocacy in the Criminal Justice System, many of the resources in the original OLTI training module had become outdated and no longer available, updated and currently available in a different location, or moved to another website.  To ensure that these resources remain accurate, this OLTI training module has now been updated to reflect these changes.

If you haven't already registered for the OLTI, we encourage you to do so. And if you have, you will want to make sure you review the recently updated material.