story by Homma Rafi
Director of Communications, School of Public Health
Researchers in the School of Public Health have recently established the National Center for Sexual Violence Prevention (NCSVP) in the Mark Chaffin Center for Healthy Development (MCCHD) at Georgia State University.
The NCSVP was established after Dr. Amanda Gilmore, assistant professor and associate chair in the Department of Health Policy & Behavioral Sciences, and Dr. Shannon Self-Brown, professor and chair of the Department of Health Policy & Behavioral Sciences, received a second year of federal funding from the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO), a division of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Through the NCSVP, they will continue to build on the work of the research team’s initial award to establish a proof of concept for training and credentialing a prevention workforce within the military. The combined award totals $668,677 and was provided by an Intergovernmental Personnel Act agreement.
“The NCSVP will continue to support sexual violence prevention research at Georgia State to reduce violence in high-risk populations like military, college students and adolescents,” said Dr. Gilmore. “This can have long-lasting impacts by reducing the mental health consequences of sexual assault including substance use, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide.”
Public health research focused on sexual violence prevention is a national priority. In 2018, sexual assault prevalence increased by 44 percent among women and more than 20,000 Service members were the victims of sexual assault, including 13,000 women and 7,500 men.
The commitment of SAPRO is to oversee the DoD’s sexual assault policy by taking a prevention-focused approach — guided by five critical focus areas, including victim assistance, investigation, accountability and assessment — to combatting the crimes and eliminate it from the military.
The work of the NCSVP is mission critical to the MCCHD, one of the eight University Research Centers (URC) at Georgia State. The Center’s public health researchers develop evidence-based interventions to prevent abuse, including sexual abuse, and study real-world implementation and effectiveness of accessible interventions and their scaling to maximize public health benefit. To learn more about the work of the MCCHD, visit healthy.gsu.edu.
Featured Researcher
Dr. Amanda Gilmore
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Policy & Behavioral Sciences
Dr. Amanda Gilmore’s research interests primarily focus on the development and testing of (1) integrated prevention programs for alcohol and drug use, sexual assault, and sexual risk behaviors among high-risk groups including adolescents, college students, and service members, (2) innovative technology-based interventions to improve the rate of treatment access and decrease treatment drop-out among underserved populations; and (3) secondary prevention programs for individuals who experienced recent sexual assault.