Prevent Together Blog!

• Describe two key findings of the study.
• Describe two implications of the study for prevention practice.
• Apply study findings to your prevention work.

Excerpt: If your children have access to a device with Internet access -- and it's a good bet that they do -- it's an equally good bet that they've been exposed to pornographic images. Sexually explicit images and erotic art have had a place in almost every culture, so observing a sexual image is not necessarily harmful. But it's all about context. Pornographic images are often reflections of sex that have nothing to do with real life and young people lack the context to know that. The very fact that such a private act is being shared with the world obliterates the concept of intimacy, and intimacy is an important aspect of sexual health and safety.

A recently published study entitled The Prevalence Rates of Male and Female Sexual Violence Perpetrators in a National Sample of Adolescents (Ybarra & Mitchell, 2013) has generated quite a response from both professionals and the mainstream media.  This response is not surprising as the article is one of the first investigations into the prevalence of sexual violence among adolescents who are not involved in the criminal justice system.

This research is invaluable and we applaud the researchers for investigating such a difficult topic and providing some important baseline information about national rates of sexual violence in adolescence. However, the conclusions made from the data and even the title selected for this article have been problematic and, in many ways, represent a lost important opportunity for deeper discussion about this issue.

The language used by the authors significantly impacted the message they provided and/or how it was perceived by others.  If our intent is to prevent sexual violence, then our words need to be framed in a way that allows people to begin a conversation about the behaviors we are trying to stop.  In our writing and our publications we need to begin to describe the behaviors that children and teens may engage in, rather than label these youth as “perpetrators.” 

Research published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics found about 10 percent of those 21 years old and younger said they committed an act of coercive sexual contact, including kissing or touching someone against the other person’s will, persuading someone to have sex with them when the person didn’t want to, attempted rape and completed rape.

Monday’s study is one of the first to provide national estimates of young perpetrators of sexual violence. Researchers analyzed data from 1,058 people ages 14 to 21 who took part in the Growing Up With Media study from 2006 to 2012. 

Perpetrators had more exposure to television, music, games and Internet sites that depict sexual and violent situations than those who didn’t commit the crimes, the authors found. About 40 percent of those who committed sexual violence did so for the first time by age 16, the paper said. Boys started younger but by ages 18 and 19, the number of male and female perpetrators were about equal. Females tended to have older victims, while males had younger victims, the researchers said.

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