Background
: Despite knowledge about the extensive and often long-lasting consequences of sexual assault, many survivors remain underserved by formal support systems (e.g. medical, mental health and criminal justice systems). Reasons for underutilizing services are as diverse as the survivors themselves, and little is known about which survivors are most underserved and why they are underserved.
Objective
: To help organize existing findings on this topic, a systematic scoping review was conducted to identify adult survivors of sexual assault, who may be particularly underserved when attempting to obtain services in Western countries.
Method
: Five databases (PsycINFO, Embase, MEDLINE, Scopus and CINAHL) were systematically searched for studies published in English from 2000 onwards using terms such as ‘sexual assault’, ‘help seeking’, ‘formal support’, ‘barriers’ and variations thereof.
Results
: A total of 41 studies were included in the present scoping review, resulting in seven main categories of underserved survivors:
Ethnic and cultural minorities, Disabilities, Financial vulnerability, Sexual and gender minorities, Mental health conditions, Problematic substance use, and Older age
. Barriers encountered by survivors with these characteristics included limited access to formal supports and insufficient training and awareness among service providers about how to best support survivors.
Conclusions
: Recommendations include the need for more survivor-centred, culturally appropriate and trauma-informed services and more attention to survivors belonging to underserved groups in policy, practice and research.
This article presents a review of the literature that pertains to the experiences of therapists who work directly with child sex offenders and/or people with pedophilia. We draw together results from studies that attempted to identify how therapists experience such work and how they were personally impacted by it. Usually, such studies are embedded within one of the following theoretical frameworks: Secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue, vicarious traumatization and burnout. Most literature on the topic has therefore sought to determine to what extent and why, work-related stress responses may occur among these therapists. The aim of this paper is therefore to provide insight into this, arguably, important line of research, while evaluating the current knowledge as well as providing recommendations for future research efforts.
Rape survivors who submit to a medical forensic exam generally expect the resulting rape kit to be tested, but hundreds of thousands of rape kits have been left untested in police storage facilities nationwide. The current study sought to understand what the experience of having an untested rape kit was like for survivors. Using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, this study examined narratives of 15 survivors whose rape kits had been part of the rape kit backlog. Analysis suggested that survivors experience an extreme sense of betrayal and loss of faith in the criminal justice system when their kits are not tested. For these survivors, the rape kit was more than just evidence in a box; it was part of them. Implications are discussed.
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