0:00:00.1 Mo Lewis: Welcome to NSVRC's Resource on the Go. My name is Mo Lewis, and I am the prevention specialist at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. Today, I'm talking with Maddy LaCure from the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault, and Patè Mahoney from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, about the prevention tool they developed to provide a framework for practitioners, advocates, and college administrators who are interested in bringing environmental and situational prevention strategies to their campuses. [music] 0:00:48.5 ML: Thanks so much for joining me today. 0:00:50.0 Maddy LaCure: Glad to be here. 0:00:51.8 Patè Mahoney: Hi, glad to be here. Thank you so much for having us. 0:00:55.1 ML: I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what environmental and situational prevention is all about. 0:01:01.9 ML: Absolutely. So environmental and situational prevention is about understanding how the design and use of spaces can make certain behaviors more or less likely. In our work, we're referring to three concepts related to space; the physical environment, the social environment, and the situational context, and we'll be using ESP for short throughout as our shorthand. So up first, the physical environment is made up of physical things in a geographic space. So this can include natural features of trees and fields or manufactured objects and materials like paved roads and lampposts. The social environment is the rules, social norms and dynamics regarding how people can or should act in a physical space. These rules are made known to people through a mix of both implicit and explicit means. 0:01:49.7 ML: The social environment is built upon and reflective of the physical environment. That is the social rules and expectations are going to be different depending on the physical space. For example, think if you were in a field versus the middle of a busy intersection or the inside of a department store, where would it be acceptable to play soccer? Where would it be acceptable to drive a car? These are what changes about the social environments we're in. Lastly, we have the situational context. This combines a variety of dynamic features, including the time, the social setting, natural events, your goals, and any other circumstances or factors that could influence the nature of social interaction in the space. So the situational context is described by the answer to the questions, what are you doing right now? Or what is happening right now? 0:02:35.6 ML: The situational context can influence the physical space as well as behaviors that are possible and acceptable. A classic example is a school cafeteria that is also being used as an auditorium. In one context, the physical environment is made up of lunch tables and is appropriate for everyone to be eating. But in another context, the physical environment has rows of chairs and eating is not typically allowed. When we use environmental and situational prevention to address a public health concern like sexual violence, we are using an approach in which we think about factors in the physical or social environment that can be changed in order to reduce the likelihood that someone will commit sexual violence. 0:03:13.7 PM: This approach has not been widely used for the prevention of sexual violence, so to get us in the right mindset I'm gonna give an example from traffic control. We all know that speeding is a leading cause of accidents, and so we can and do teach people why they shouldn't speed, and it's a very valuable starting point, and it's very influential in helping many people develop safe driving habits. Now, in addition to teaching people not to speed, we have speed limits. When we add this rule to the social environment, people are less likely to speed even if they think they could do so safely, because they wanna avoid getting a speeding ticket. There are also changes that are made to physical environments in order to reduce speeding; speed bumps, road narrowing, traffic circles. 0:04:07.0 PM: And now when you change the physical environment in this way, whether or not someone believes that they personally need to reduce their speed and whether or not they care about getting a speeding ticket, they're forced to slow down by the features of the road. But of course, sexual violence prevention is very different from traffic control in many, many ways. But I think this is a good example to start with to explain the difference between individual education as a prevention strategy and environmental and situational prevention. And to address a complex social problem like sexual violence, using multiple prevention approaches is needed to really make an impact. 0:04:49.6 ML: Thanks for that explanation and the examples. It really is so helpful to understand what you're talking about with environmental and situational prevention. I'd love to hear more about what brought you two together to create this resource and a little bit about your process in creating it. 0:05:07.4 PM: Sure. I'll start out. I think that most of our listeners know that historically, the sexual violence prevention space started as one that was almost entirely individually oriented. Then it expanded out with the bystander approach for the broader social environment, and now, as of around 2016, we're seeing a new focus on protective environments. And this focus was due in part to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's guidance provided in the STOP SV technical package. That document summarized prevention strategies with research evidence of impact in reducing sexual violence or sexual violence risk factors. They highlighted five promising strategies, and one of which it was creating protective environments. So in that section, they reviewed a sexual violence prevention program called Shifting Boundaries. That program led to reductions in sexual violence in middle schools through an intervention that included modifying the physical and social environment. 0:06:12.0 PM: So, while there's been a growing interest in this approach, there actually are few examples available for practitioners to draw upon in developing approaches for different settings, including the setting of college campuses. So through a grant from the CDC, we were tasked with doing formative work with college campus partners so we could better understand, what constitutes an environmental and situational approach to sexual violence prevention? And what we mean by that is in terms of how we gather and analyze data to inform an intervention, how do we identify environmental and situational interventions appropriate to sexual violence prevention on a college campus and beyond? How do we measure program impact? So I have to say we've been thrilled to undertake this work in close partnership with MCASA, the Maryland Department of Health and a host of college practitioners. 0:07:12.6 ML: Yeah, and I will just add that the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault has a long history of doing prevention work in Maryland, and over the past three years, we've been working on this project that focuses on this environmental approach. We started our work in March 2020 as one of our RPE funded prevention strategies, and we were thrilled to be able to collaborate with Johns Hopkins and the Maryland Department of Health along with our campus partners through their cooperative grants. And our goals were to create a comprehensive tool kit for practitioners to implement ESP strategies on their campus, and we're also available to provide ongoing training and technical assistance to Maryland schools. So we'll talk about that a bit more later. Since this area of sexual assault prevention is relatively new, as Patè mentioned, we're also really building and learning as we go. 0:08:00.4 ML: I love hearing about the partnerships and how you've been able to do this work together. You described this guide as a living document, and there's so much that's in it. It's so great. Tell us about what people can expect to find when they go to the website and download the guide. 0:08:18.1 ML: Yeah, absolutely. So the framework described in the guide is designed to take preventionist from the early stages of considering whether or not environmental and situational approaches are useful addition to your prevention portfolio. And we do this by taking folks through an evidence review to examine and summarize your relevant data and develop an environmental or situational intervention that's really tailored specifically to your campus. And our goal is to ensure that these ESP interventions are grounded in the best available evidence and really avoiding the tendency to revert back to individual level interventions that we're all so familiar with. So there are five steps in our framework. For each step, we provide key questions and tools to support the work. 0:09:00.8 ML: The first step is to identify stakeholders and core team members. We provide ideas for relevant partners and skills you may need on your team and encourage you to consider partners both on and off campus. On-campus, this will likely include folks from student affairs, administration, Title 9, diversity, equity, and inclusion, facilities, and various student groups and organizations, and many, many more. Off-campus, we hope schools will engage with their local rape crisis center and other community providers to get their valuable input on the work as well. 0:09:32.0 ML: Step two is called gap analysis, where we are encouraging campuses to do a deep dive into their existing data on sexual violence incidents. The three main data sources we discussed that most campuses will have access to are Campus Climate Surveys, Title 9 reports, and Clery or other annual security reports. What surprises a lot of people is that we actually now have a fairly robust evidence base on college campuses, thanks to the Climate Surveys that track prevalence. In the past, schools only had the crime reports to go on, and we all know this is a severe underestimate, given that sexual violence is one of the most under-reported crimes. 0:10:09.1 ML: Though moving through the evidence, we explain how to give the data a critical look and identify what it can tell us about the environmental and situational factors. Perhaps you'll find that you don't have as much relevant data as you feel you need. Could you reach out to other departments or data holders to ask for additional data? Could you partner with them to collect additional data moving forward? The tool we have provided for this step is called the Data Triangulation Table because the process of comparing data across various sources is called data triangulation. We hope our tools will be helpful for folks doing this type of work for the first time. And this table is designed to simplify the process while making the most out of the data college campuses have. 0:10:50.4 ML: Step three is gathering data, if needed, to fill in the gaps you've identified in step two. We emphasize, if needed, because it is very possible you will find an area of focus in your current data sources for intervention. However, if you need to collect more data, we go through common methods and their strengths and weaknesses. 0:11:08.8 ML: Step four is determine priorities where we encourage campuses to take a step back and revisit their programmatic goals. How does the data on hand mesh with your overarching goals? We encourage campuses to get very specific about what type of sexual violence you hope to reduce, among which particular populations of students, and in which particular situation. It is through this specificity that your intervention will be tailored to a specific problem that you've identified in your data. 0:11:34.9 ML: Finally, step five is generating solutions where campuses will brainstorm potential solutions, evaluate their strengths and limitations, and ultimately identify an intervention that they will implement on their campus. We highlight an important activity in this step called assumption testing, which involves creating a series of very simple statements to explain the relationship between every activity being implemented and the assumed outcomes of each activity. We really emphasize this to make sure that the planed solution really addresses the underlying problem. 0:12:05.9 ML: We look forward to hearing from folks who have read or used any part of our framework or guide so that we can improve our tools and approach for what is working in practice. We hope to share lessons learned in tested interventions as more and more schools explore ESP on their campuses. In addition to the guide on our website, you'll find our tools as well as implementation resources and further reading. You'll also find our launch webinar from last August, which goes into a deeper dive into the five steps of our framework. 0:12:35.8 ML: Thanks for sharing this. The framework sounds so great in terms of really helping walk someone through the process of what you need to know and do to make this happen. That's just really cool. What are some key concepts that are important for practitioners to think about as they consider using this approach for sexual violence prevention? 0:13:00.4 PM: Thanks for asking. Yeah, there are indeed some key concepts that we found ourselves revisiting regularly as we put this guide together. I'd say the first one is to be very clear about the goals of any activities that you undertake as part of this work. One of the activities that many people associate with this work has been referred to as hotspot mapping, although we've chosen to refer to this activity as map-marking. We think that's a better descriptor, and we explain a little bit more in the guide about why we think that. So map-marking was used in Shifting Boundaries, which I referred to earlier, to identify risk zones in middle school buildings where additional staff were placed between classes to increase monitoring. 0:13:42.0 PM: Now, that strategy of map-marking grew out of safety audits, that's another strategy that we review and describe in the guide. And safety audits have been used internationally to address the issues of safety with an environmental lens, and it is a very promising idea that you could identify areas of high risk by gathering data directly from community members. However, a lot of thought has to go into how and why you might do that activity. And if you jump ahead and you say like, "Okay, let's hand out maps and we'll just have people fill them in and they'll tell us where they feel at risk," you need to step back and ask, "How is that going to be part of this process in which reducing sexual violence is the outcome?" 0:14:31.8 PM: We found that a lot of people aren't necessarily thinking about what comes after they get all those maps back. Implementing the activity alone is not gonna cause a reduction in sexual violence. What are you gonna do with the maps? How do you interpret what's on all those pieces of paper? And how many people... How many maps are enough maps? How many people are enough people to do this with? So there are a lot of details to iron out before jumping into an activity like this. And actually that leads me to think about another key concept that is important for map-marking, but also is also for other forms of data collection. This is something to keep top of mind all throughout the process is whether your data represents risk perception or actual risk. 0:15:24.6 PM: So most map-marking activities that we've seen so far measure risk perception, same thing with safety audit questions. It's like, where do people feel like there is risk? We don't tend to see those activities used to ask people to indicate, where have you actually experienced sexual violence on this map? And there could be very good reasons for that. However, we need to keep in mind, research comparing sexual violence risk perception with actual incidents have actually found little overlap between the two, because risk perception is highly influenced by dominant cultural narratives. We still will have a greater fear about a stranger who we pass on, maybe, a dark pathway more than we fear, maybe, a classmate who invited us out to a bar to hang out. But we all know that known perpetrators are more common than strangers. 0:16:24.6 PM: So because risk perception may not accurately reflect the environments in which sexual violence is occurring, interventions that are based solely on risk perception may not effectively reduce sexual violence and may instead just serve to perpetuate harmful biases and stereotypes that don't map well onto actual experiences of sexual violence. To talk a little bit more about this type of example, many people think, when they think about, "Well, what would environmental intervention look like on a college campus?" You might think about adding call boxes or making sure we had really good lighting, but those approaches are actually not gonna address the majority of sexual assault incidents that happen on a college campus. Now, this is not to say that there are not dark spots on campus that could use some lighting, but is providing lighting your program goal? 0:17:25.0 PM: Let's say that you reach out to students with a focus group and they identify a dark, creepy corner of campus and everybody is just creeped out by that area, and everyone thinks like, "That feels risky for sexual assault," but you haven't heard of any sexual assault actually happening there. So you could go and add lighting or security personnel to that corner of campus and it may make people feel better, but it's not gonna reduce actual sexual assault. So again, you could argue, "Well, it could hypothetically prevent future assaults," but why would you spend your time and your resources preventing hypothetical assaults that we don't even know if they're ever gonna happen. We all have limited resources, and we all want our limited resources to actually reduce sexual assault. So our interventions should be based on what we know is driving actual sexual assaults on campuses. 0:18:18.9 PM: Another thing we'd like people to keep in mind is to really be aware of sexual violence sub-types, whether it's a sub-type by behavior, that it's unwanted touching that happens, it's digital harassment that happens, it's forced penetration that happens. Maybe sub-type by tactic, it happens through emotional pressure or it happens through a person being intoxicated or through someone applying physical force. Other way to look at sub-types is by perpetrator type, stranger, acquaintance, partner or by context. I'm at an after party at the drama club, I'm walking home from a night club, I'm on a date, these different types, these subtypes of sexual violence, they would all require different solutions for reduction. So keep in mind, one solution's not gonna address them all equally, and so keep top of mind, " Well, which one am I going for at the moment?" That's gonna be helpful in creating an effective intervention. 0:19:16.7 PM: And that brings me to another point, which is that to also keep in mind that environmental solutions are not gonna be equally appropriate for all types of sexual violence that could happen on a college campus. There might be some types that are responsive to changes in the physical layout of spaces or responsive to policy changes or social norms interventions, and some that may not be responsive to either of those approaches. And finally, we'd like people to be aware of who's experience they're addressing. Whose experience they are not addressing. So if the data that you're using comes in from a Climate Survey, get familiar with who participates in the Climate Survey. Are there sub-groups of students on campus whose experiences may not be captured, whose needs might not be being met? 0:20:08.0 PM: For example, students of color on a predominantly White campus, or LGBTQ students, students with disabilities, or student veterans, because it's possible that the interventions that are designed without specific attention to the experience of those sub-groups would actually not reduce sexual violence within those sub-groups. 0:20:27.5 ML: Do you have any stories about how people are using this guide to change or expand their prevention efforts? 0:20:37.4 PM: Well, not yet. Not how they use the guide, because the guide is very new. We're actually excited, we're on our way to working with two of our campus partners this summer to do a walk-through of the guide and learn from them about their experiences of doing it, and we may update our website based on those experiences. But I would like to give a couple of examples of environmental and situational prevention approaches that we have heard about while doing this work, again, just to help people get an idea of what it could look like, because, again, there are not very many examples to work from. So I'm just gonna briefly describe a couple of examples. One was from a school where they became aware of female students saying that they were not comfortable going to the gym. 0:21:24.4 PM: And the reason that they weren't comfortable going to the gym is that they had heard through the grapevine that while they were on the exercise machines, there were certain places that people could stand where it wouldn't be obvious to the person using the machine, but that someone could be standing and just kind of watching their bodies use the machine or even photographing their bodies, and so that did not make people feel safe about their bodies. That ended up being a clear opportunity for environmental intervention. They re-designed the layout of the gym with that specific focus in mind. So they eliminated that possibility. Another that I'll mention is a suggestion that came from the book, Sexual Citizens, we highly recommend that everyone read that book. 0:22:12.4 PM: And one of the themes that came up... This was a book that was based on interviews with over 150 students about sexual violence. And one of the things that came up repeatedly was a lack of spaces on campus for students to socialize late into the evening. Meaning that if someone wanted to be social at that time, and social might mean I'm studying with that person, or we just wanna hang out and talk. One of the few places that they could do that was just in their private dorm room, even if that wasn't really a place where a student would have preferred to go, they weren't really intending to be like, "Oh, I wanna be in my bedroom with that person," they just wanted a place to hang out. So it's possible that the lack of social spaces to hang out could be a contributor to sexual violence in dorm rooms by acquaintances. 0:23:02.6 PM: So there's a question there. What could we do to disrupt the pathway to a private bedroom for a person who doesn't really want to be in a private bedroom with someone else, but just wants to hang out? So a potential environmental solution in that case would be to provide spaces for students to socialize outside of dorm rooms and keep them open late. And that kind of solution would not require building a new space, it might just require keeping an existing space open later. So those are just a couple of different ways that people have approached using environmental and situational approaches to sexual violence reduction. 0:23:42.2 ML: Those are great examples and really, they're making me think a lot about the possibilities, which, it's just so exciting. I'm wondering, who are you really hoping will use this guide and what kind of assistance are you offering to help people? 0:23:57.0 ML: Yeah, absolutely. So we've designed the guide for colleges and universities. Although its designed for college practitioners, we expect the steps and the tools will still be useful for non-college communities as well, and we totally welcome outreach to us from non-college preventionists and other folks in the community that are just interested in learning more about this. And we would love to hear about their experiences and their questions. Our team at MCASA and Johns Hopkins are also happy to meet with folks who are interested in this approach and want to learn more about the guide and their process. MCASA is also available to provide ongoing technical assistance and training as folks are working through the guide, and this could include responding to individualized questions about how to reach your community at any step in the framework. 0:24:45.6 ML: We can provide content expertise during data collection tool development, which could include language selection for survey questions, support in reaching students and community members on your campus and more. We can also support the development of culture-specific engagement tools and outreach methods to reach under certain populations on your campus, and that can include connecting folks with other community organizations that work with and for these populations to make sure we're really meeting the needs of a diverse group of students and folks on campus. We can also support data interpretation to select ESP interventions for your campus. So once you walk through these steps and have all this data, we can help you analyze that data and figure out what might be the most effective intervention to select moving forward. 0:25:33.6 ML: Thank you so much. This just sounds like such an amazing resource, the framework that you offer, the examples, the technical assistance and training that you're providing and support, it just is really exciting. I'm wondering if you could let us know where people can go to get more information about this. 0:25:56.0 ML: Absolutely. So our website is housed on the MCASA page, so we'll make sure everyone has the link as who's listening to the recording. And again, I just wanna highlight on there, we have a launch webinar posted on YouTube where you can check that out and also hear some more about each of the five steps of the framework. We also have an interest form located on our webpage where you can fill that out and connect with us, and we'll schedule an introductory meeting to learn more about your campus or community and share more about our work on the project and how we can support you. 0:26:28.9 ML: Thank you so much, Maddie and Patè. I'm gonna make sure we have all of this information in the show notes because I know people are gonna be really interested in diving deeper into this. Thanks for being here and talking with me today. 0:26:43.4 PM: Thanks so much, Mo, for your interest. 0:26:45.7 ML: Yes, thank you, Mo, for having us. And thank you everyone who are listening. 0:26:49.8 Speaker 4: Thank you for listening to this episode of Resource on the Go. For more resources and information about preventing sexual assault visit our website at nsvrc.org. To learn more about our evaluation work, including NSVRC's evaluation toolkit, visit the episode resources at nsvrc.org/podcasts. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@nsvrc.org. [music]