Rebecca Campbell (educator)

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Rebecca Campbell (born 1969) is a professor of psychology at Michigan State University. She is known for her research pertaining to sexual assault and violence against women and children and the effects of treatment by law enforcement and medical staff on victims' psychological and physiological well-being. [1] Campbell has been involved in criminal justice research on the investigation of Detroit's untested rape kits, wherein DNA evidence obtained in thousands of rape kits was left in storage and not analyzed. [2] [3] She has received numerous awards for her work including the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Louise Kidder Early Career Award (2000), the American Psychological Association (APA) Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest (2008), [4] the APA Division 27 Council on Educational Program's Excellent Educator Award (2015), [5] and the U.S. Department of Justice Vision 21 Crime Victims Research Award (2015). [6]

Contents

Biography

Campbell received her B.S. degree in psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1991. She then went on to graduate school at Michigan State University, where she obtained her M.A. in ecological community psychology in 1993 and her Ph.D. in ecological community psychology in 1996. After graduating, she joined the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University. [7]

Campbell received funding for "The Sexual Assault Kit Initiative" from the Bureau of Justice. She has received other grants from the National Institute of Justice, National Institute of Mental Health, American Evaluation Association, and Michigan Department of Community Health. [8] Campbell co-created the Rape Prevention and Education Model that provides social workers with guidelines on how to address factors that increase risk of sexual assault. [9] [10] She is the author of Emotionally Involved: The Impact of Researching Rape (2002), a book about the emotional effects of conducting research involving victims of traumatic events. [11]

Along with teaching and research, Campbell has engaged in police department training in cities such as Houston, Texas, Detroit, Michigan, and Washington, D.C. She has also been involved in training initiatives of the International Association of Forensic Nurses. [1]

Research

Campbell has examined how mistreatment of sex crime victims by law enforcement and medical staff leads to secondary victimization. In "The Neurobiology of Sexual Assault", she discussed an incident where a woman tried to report a sex crime, but was discouraged by a detective who did not believe her story. [12] Campbell's research team tracked sexual assault cases in six different communities over twelve years and found that 86% of the victims did not go through with prosecution. Their findings indicated that victims of sex crimes are often shunned by law enforcement. Overall, 90% of sexual assault victims experienced some aspect of secondary victimization, which left them feeling hopeless and with varying degrees of depression and anxiety. In 70% of cases, victims reported that law enforcement officers asked them what they had been wearing. In such cases, law enforcement officers may have had a preconceived idea that the victim provoked the attack. This tendency to blame the victim for the sexual assault may lead the victim to relive the experience of being traumatized. Campbell and colleagues also reported that 69% of the victims were discouraged from continuing with litigation, with 51% of the victims stating that law enforcement told them that the assault was not serious enough to pursue.

Campbell found that law enforcement officers tend to ask questions such as "Why didn't you fight back?", "Why didn't you scream?", or "Why didn't you call for help?". Her research found that many sexual assault victims went into tonic immobility, a neurobiological condition where the victim is in paralysis. Campbell refers to this as "fight, flight, or freeze". When in a traumatic situation, a person will usually fight or try to escape; however, in many cases the person may become immobilized and not know what to do. [13] During a sexual assault, opiates are released in the body, which may lead the victim to feel emotionless and limp, as if their body were shutting down. These reactions may be misinterpreted by law enforcement; the victim may appear to not care and not be taking the situation seriously, which might lead detectives to close the case. In Campbell's research, law enforcement officials were reported to say things like "I know she's lying" or "her story doesn't add up." Campbell found that during a sexual assault the hormone cortisol is released, which affects the part of the brain responsible for memory and may explain why victims have a hard time recollecting what happened. In conducting research on the effects of stress on memory, she found that processes of memory consolidation helped victims to recall the events. That is, victims were better able to recall details after taking time to relax and reflect back on the events than when they were subjected to intense interrogation. [12]

Representative publications

Related Research Articles

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Sexual assault is an act in which one intentionally sexually touches another person without that person's consent, or coerces or physically forces a person to engage in a sexual act against their will. It is a form of sexual violence that includes child sexual abuse, groping, rape, drug facilitated sexual assault, and the torture of the person in a sexual manner.

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Sexual violence is any harmful or unwanted sexual act or attempt to obtain a sexual act by violence or coercion, act to traffic a person, regardless of the relationship to the victim. This includes forced engagement in sexual acts, attempted or completed acts and occur without the consent of the victim. It occurs in times of peace and armed conflict situations, is widespread, and is considered to be one of the most traumatic, pervasive, and most common human rights violations.

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A rape kit or rape test kit is a package of items used by medical personnel for gathering and preserving physical evidence following an allegation of sexual assault. The evidence collected from the victim can aid the criminal rape investigation and the prosecution of a suspected assailant. DNA evidence can have tremendous utility for sexual assault investigations and prosecution by identifying offenders, revealing serial offenders through DNA matches across cases, and exonerating those who have been wrongly accused.

Prison rape commonly refers to the rape of inmates in prison by other inmates or prison staff. In 2001, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 4.3 million inmates had been raped while incarcerated in the United States. A United States Department of Justice report, Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, states that "In 2011–12, an estimated 4.0% of state and federal prison inmates and 3.2% of jail inmates reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another inmate or facility staff in the past 12 months or since admission to the facility, if less than 12 months." However, advocates dispute the accuracy of the numbers, saying they seem to under-report the real numbers of sexual assaults in prison, especially among juveniles.

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References

  1. 1 2 adamsadr (2014-01-02). "Rebecca Campbell, Ph.D." progeval.msu.edu. Retrieved 2017-10-15.
  2. ↑ University, Michigan State. "Detroit solves problem of untested rape kits, MSU report finds". MSUToday. Retrieved 2017-11-16.
  3. ↑ "Campbell, Rebecca, Ph.D." Research Consortium on Gender-Based violence. Retrieved 2017-10-15.
  4. ↑ "APA'S Annual Convention--Awards: Honor psychology's stars". American Psychological Association. Retrieved 2017-11-18.
  5. ↑ "APA honors psychology's stars". American Psychological Association. Retrieved 2017-11-18.
  6. ↑ "Justice Department Honors 12 Individuals and Teams for Advancing Rights and Services for Crime Victims". www.justice.gov. 2015-04-21. Retrieved 2017-11-18.
  7. ↑ "MSU Psychology". psychology.msu.edu. Retrieved 2017-10-15.
  8. ↑ "Campbell, Rebecca, Ph.D." Research Consortium on Gender-Based violence.
  9. ↑ Cox, Pamela J.; Lang, Karen S.; Townsend, Stephanie M.; Campbell, Rebecca (2010). "The Rape Prevention and Education (RPE) Theory Model of Community Change: Connecting Individual and Social Change". Journal of Family Social Work. 13 (4): 297–312. doi:10.1080/10522158.2010.492494. S2CID   144317868.
  10. ↑ "Creating Safer Communities: The Underlying Theory of the Rape Prevention and Education Model of Social Change" (PDF).
  11. ↑ Campbell, Rebecca (2002). Emotionally involved : the impact of researching rape. New York: Routledge. ISBN   978-0415925914. OCLC   852159239.
  12. 1 2 "Transcript "The Neurobiology of Sexual Assault"". www.nij.gov. December 2012. Retrieved 2017-10-15.
  13. ↑ Abrams, Murray P.; Carleton, R. Nicholas; Taylor, Steven; Asmundson, Gordon J. G. (2009). "Human tonic immobility: measurement and correlates". Depression and Anxiety. 26 (6): 550–556. doi:10.1002/da.20462. ISSN   1520-6394. PMID   19170102. S2CID   44914994.
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