Week 5 Assignment 2 Revictimization

Stephanie Otto

7/30/2015

Week 5 Assignment 2 Blog Post

                This assignment was very interesting to me once I found my article. I knew all victims would cope differently but I never really thought of the effect that PTSD would have on someone and the maladaptive behaviors they could experience after a sexual assault and how that can revictimize them. I am not reconsidering my initial research topic but this did give me a great deal of insight! I didn’t focus on other authors or sources very much during my research because I did get very involved with the one I found. I feel as if my research skills are developing well. I’m really learning to navigate the different databases and also learning to analyze the article quickly to determine if it’s something I want to spend my time on or not. This week I really learned not to get caught up in the data but just get a general understanding of what it is trying to represent. This helped me in time saving when searching through other articles.

Week 4 Assignment 2

This week I found an article that discusses the effect that a victim advocate can have on a victim in regards to their coping and also their decision whether or not to enter the criminal justice system. Our assignment this week opened up the world of peer reviewed articles to me. I enjoyed these because the particular ones I looked at were one- not funded. This is important to me because someone is not writing while financially influenced. And two- peer reviewed goes through a large process to verify the information because of this I feel it is accurate. The portion of this week’s assignment that was incredibly helpful was when I learned to organize the articles by “Scholarly articles” this helped ensure that I was looking at exactly what I was there to look at. A difficulty that I still need to improve on is reading the article enough to understand it’s purpose but not in it’s entirety. As I continue my research I want to discover ways to be the best victim advocate I can be. I need to understand how victims cope so that I can understand how to approach a victim in the most effective way possible.

Debra Patterson and Brenda Tringali Understanding How Advocates Can Affect Sexual Assault Victim Engagement in the Criminal Justice ProcessJ Interpers Violence July 2015 30: 1987-1997, first published on October 6, 2014 doi:10.1177/0886260514552273

Week 3 Assignment 2

     The book I chose this week in my research was Pritchard, J., Lewis, R., Ryan, B., Hoffman, K., & Nelson, S. (2013). Good Practice in Promoting Recovery and Healing for Abused Adults. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

     One thing I learned through Assignment 1 and having found this book is that there are Safe guarding procedures for adults to prevent them from further harm after a abuse event whether sexual or non-sexual. It takes a lot of its procedures from Child Protection Services and implements them for adult practices. I also learned more about trauma and complex traumas that I feel will help me further understand what a victim in encountering internally when I have an individual that I’m assigned to as a victim advocate.

     A new strategy that I gained from this assignment was learning to use advanced searches to find my relevant titles quicker and easier so I didn’t have to snoop around the library for hours.

    A difficulty that I encountered during the assignment was checking the Authority of the author. Luckily this book had a Contributors section which gave a description of the authors and their credentials.

    During my continued research I hope to gain more understand of what victims are going through emotionally and how I can facilitate them into healing and recovering at a rate that is comfortable for them.

This week I established my research topic of “How do Victims of Sexual Assault Cope after and attack?”.

The first background information that I found was post by a very experience psychologist, Barbra Krahe. Her article discussed factors that facilitate a sexual assault such as lack of socialization and pornography when it comes to the offender. I also enjoy reading what she had to write as far as the victims because she went over how the way authorities and institutions reacted towards a victim. She mentioned that there’s a lot of change that needs to be done when it comes to a response to the victim. This is important because it just scrapes the surface of the “Secondary Victimization” that can occur after just a horrific event. This is important to my research because as a victim advocate I would be working directly with the victims and I need to understand just how sensitive their state of being is.

The second background information I chose was from RAINN, Rape Abuse and Incest National Network. This is a great resource for victims to go to to seek out the proper steps to bringing their offender to justice as well as help lead the victim into the right course for their coping process. They also have very useful data collected from multiple agencies, including the U.S. Dept of justice and U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Administration for Children and Families.

http://www.blackwellreference.com.libproxy.chapman.edu/subscriber/uid=890/tocnode.html?id=g9780631202899_chunk_g978063120289920_ss1-1

https://www.rainn.org/

Week 1 Assignment Two

Welcome to my Blog! This reminds me of live journal when I was in high school! 

      So, I'm Stephanie Otto. I'm going to Brandman University for Criminal Justice with an emphasis in Victim Advocacy. I'm only 6 months into being a student at BU and so far I enjoy it. I'm currently a full time student and a Domestic Engineer. When i served in the Air Force between 09-15 i worked closely with the Sexual assault program and i would like to use my experience with that and my CJ Victim Advocacy degree to help people who are suffering from a crime.

     For my career path i would really like to focus on sexual assault victims and possibly restorative justice when it comes to those kinds of case. I think my heart is so close to those victims because i have myself suffered severe sexual harassment. I also think restorative justice could be a good counterpart to my career because  I feel sometimes victims need to confront their offenders and get their hurt feelings off of their chest so that they can begin to accept and move on.

    When it comes to my research abilities i would like to improve most in the area of learning to write so that i can communicate with the reader exactly what I'm trying to get a crossed. Sometimes i feel as if my thoughts are jumbled, i write them all down, and then i need to learn to organize them. I really enjoyed the quote from A Survivor’s Guide to College Writing for Returning Students by John Freed, Ph.D. when it said " If you want to be a good writer, write." This quote gives me hope that I too can be a decent write one day.

   I also enjoyed reading President Barrak Obama's  “National Information Literacy Awareness Month, 2009: A Proclamation”. I particularly liked the part when he says "we have seen a crisis of authenticity emerge. We now live in a world where anyone can publish an opinion or perspective, whether true or not, and have that opinion amplified within the information marketplace." Because with satire news i'm finding people just believe what they read on the internet and take it to be true! People are only reading what they want to hear and I would like to be better than that. I want to be able to read something, take it for what it is, and know the difference. 

And, I'd like to get better at citing sources.. That seems to be very important in college and i haven't quite grasped the formatting.