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