Martha R. Burt

Dimensions of Recovery from Rape Focus on Growth Outcomes

To date, all research on rape recovery has focused on patterns of reduction in negative symptoms—primarily fear, anxiety, depression, and sexual dysfunction. This article reports the first systematic attempt to conceptualize and measure how women grow and change in constructive ways as a consequence of having to cope with a rape and its aftermath. Factor analysis of instruments developed for this research and completed by 113 rape victims yield six dimensions of self-concept, five dimensions of coping techniques, and three dimensions of self-ascribed change. Reliability and validity data for these factors are presented, and the results are discussed in terms of the relations among negative symptomatology, growth outcomes, and self-rating of recovery.

Reasons To Invest in Adolescents

PURPOSE To discuss the frequent failure of the United States (and other countries) to make the types of investment in youth that would increase the future prospects of youth from high-risk backgrounds. I argue that these investments are worth making, and describe the types of research and knowledge dissemination that will be necessary to promote such investments. APPROACH I begin with a framework for thinking about and working with adolescents. I review theories of youth development, the developmental tasks of adolescence, risk and resilience, and the strong tendency of current approaches to address single problems and symptoms rather than underlying conditions. A conceptual framework is presented that combines known elements of risk and protective factors, such as antecedents, system markers of current or potential difficulties, risk behaviors, and outcomes. I briefly review what we know about youth risk behavior and outcomes in various domains, including combined prevalence and patterning. I then examine what we know about the payoffs that we can expect from investing in activities that promote adolescent health. I end with a set of recommendations for researchers and practitioners, and discuss the information that they need to put these recommendations into practice.

Predicting Women's Perceptions of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Agency Helpfulness What Matters to Program Clients?

Study goals were to assess if community agency interactions, the characteristics of services provided by staff, and the combinations of services received can predict womens perceptions of victim service helpfulness around domestic violence and sexual assault. Data were collected from agency representatives in 26 communities, and both women who used services and others living in the community (n = 1,509 women). Women found nonprofit victim services more helpful based on staff behavior in those agencies and the extent to which women felt control when working with staff; helpfulness of services was enhanced when agencies interacted with the legal system and other community agencies.

Assisting Women Victims of Violence Who Experience Multiple Barriers to Services

This study examines the extent to which programs for domestic violence and sexual assault gear services toward women facing multiple barriers (i.e., substance abuse disorders, mental health problems or learning disabilities, incarceration, and prostitution) and the unique problems such women encounter when accessing services. As part of a national evaluation, the authors interviewed staff from 20 programs focusing their service efforts on multibarriered women. Problems encountered by such women include lack of services dealing with multiple barriers, uneducated service providers, and batterers using womens barriers to further control or victimize them. This article describes the strategies programs use to meet these womens distinct needs.

Building supportive communities for at-risk adolescents: It takes more than services.

The History of Comprehensive Service Integration Defining Adolescence and Risk A New Conceptual Framework for Understanding Risk Integrated Services - Initiatives Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Miami Teen Connectors The Belafonte-Talcolcy Centre, Inc. Oasis Centre Chins Up Youth and Family Services Houston Communities in Schools I Have a Future Garfield Youth Services Centre for Family Life Service Integration and Other Cross-Cutting Issues Evaluating Programmes Offering Integrated Services and Actitivies to Youth Financing Integrated Services Programmes Summary and Conclusions.

Community-Wide Strategies for Preventing Homelessness: Recent Evidence

This article summarizes the findings of a study of community-wide strategies for preventing homelessness among families and single adults with serious mental illness, conducted for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The study involved six communities, of which this article focuses on five. A major finding of this study was that it was difficult to identify sites with community-wide strategies, and even harder to find any that maintained data capable of documenting prevention success. However, the five communities selected for this study presented key elements of successful strategies including mechanisms for accurate targeting, a high level of jurisdictional commitment, significant mainstream agency involvement, and mechanisms for continuous system improvement.

Apprehension and fear: Learning a sense of sexual vulnerability

Feminist theory and the sociological thinking of Gagnon and Simon (1973) complement each other in predicting the causes of a sense of sexual vulnerability in adult women. Using these theoretical perspectives, the authors predicted that females rather than males would be the targets of active efforts to instill a sense of sexual vulnerability, and that the effects of these efforts would be revealed most strongly in adult females rather than in children. An interview was used to collect data on the frequency and content of warnings received by men and women as children and as adults, the source of the warnings, and how concerned respondents felt as a result of the warnings. Results indicate that as children, neither female nor male respondents recall receiving many warnings of sexual danger, nor do they recall feeling much concern during childhood about potential sexual assault or harassment. Males continue to report low levels of warnings and fear as adults. However, adult women report much higher levels of both warnings and fear of sexual assault than either their adult male counterparts reported, or than they themselves felt as children. These results support other findings which suggest that gender differences in sexual socialization occur largely in adolescence, rather than in early childhood.

Homeless families, singles, and others: Findings from the 1996 national survey of homeless assistance providers and clients

Abstract The first question people typically ask about homelessness is, “How many people are homeless?” After that, questions usually turn to characteristics: “What are they like?” Basic demographic characteristics such as sex, age, family status, and race have always been of interest, in part because the homeless population appears to be very different from the general public and even from most poor people who are housed with respect to these characteristics. Often, because these differences are so dramatic, demographic characteristics are overinterpreted as representing the reasons for homelessness. But as various studies have documented, most demographic factors quickly disappear as proximate causes when other factors representing personal vulnerabilities are available for examination. The underlying causes of homelessness, the structural conditions of housing and labor markets that turn vulnerabilities into loss of housing, do not lie within individuals at all and are thus difficult to include in analyses based on individual data.

Coping strategies and recovery from rape

A substantial body of research has developed in recent years documenting the immediate and short-term (up to one year) symptomatic reactions to a rape experience.’.’ Much less work has been done on long-term patterns of response, and even less research has directly addressed the coping strategies women use as they struggle to come to terms with the rape experience over the years after acute symptoms wane, or the relationship between coping efforts and the recovery process. Burgess and Holmstrom’s work”‘ is a rare exception; Meyer and Taylor’ have recently published results of a new study that adds to our understanding of coping patterns following rape. In this paper we present a set of coping scales derived from our research data on the coping patterns found in 113 women who are 1 to 14 years postrape; initial reports of these data have previously been presented. The selection of items for our questionnaire, as well as our interpretation of results, are informed by previous theoretical and empirical research, some of which we will review. Our primary interest lies in systematically documenting the real patterns that are observed in women as they cope with rape over time, and specifically as their recovery progresses. Doing so should enable us to identify the most adaptive coping approaches and to utilize this information in counseling rape victims. In addition, this information will add to our understanding of the dynamics of the recovery process. In studying coping efforts, it is important to define what we are talking about. We view “coping” as comprising efforts made in response to stimuli experienced as threatening or stressful-efforts aimed both at reducing the anxiety that those stimuli create and at reducing the interference of the stimuli with one’s capacity to function. Lazarus and Folkman’ divide coping strategies into two large domains-problemfocused and emotion-focused coping. Problem-focused coping is directed at helping the person manage or solve the problem, and can involve strategies directed at the environment (e.g., altering environmental pressures, barriers, resources, procedures) and also strategies directed inward (e.g., learning new skills, developing new standards of behavior, or changing one’s level of aspiration). Women who have been raped may have used problem-focused coping strategies during the rape itself, and may also define the process of recovery in such a way that the future represents a series of tasks to get through or accomplish. Cast in the light of problem-focused coping, recovery is seen largely as a performance to be achieved. Emotion-focused coping strategies are directed at helping the individual accept or

Causes of the growth of homelessness during the 1980s

Abstract This article presents an analysis of the factors that predicted 1989 homelessness rates in large U.S. cities. Data were collected to describe homelessness rates in the 182 cities with populations over 100,000. In addition, variables were assembled to represent many factors that have been hypothesized to cause homelessness, including each citys housing and income conditions, household resources, employment conditions, employment structure, available public benefits, and cost of living. The researcher used regression analysis to assess the impact of each hypothesized causal factor on between‐city differences in 1989 homelessness rates for the 147 primary cities in the data set (excluding suburbs) and for subgroup breakouts based on level of manufacturing employment and population growth from 1980 to 1986. The article ends with a discussion of policy implications of the patterns discovered.