0:00:00.9 Sally Laskey: Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center on understanding, responding to, and preventing sexual abuse and assault. I'm Sally Laskey, NSVRC's Evaluation Coordinator. This is part two of a three-part series on what an intersectional approach to data collection, analysis, and use can look like. If you missed part one, we recommend you pause this episode and listen to that first. In this episode, we continue our conversation with Cory Cole, Barb McMorris, Marissa Raguet, and Nic Rider about their collaborative work to build intersectionality into their sexual violence prevention data in Minnesota and jump into their results and what they mean for prevention work.

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0:01:06.1 SL: So glad to have you here. Could you each share a little bit about yourselves for our listeners? Cory, could you get us started? 

0:01:17.8 Cory Cole: Yeah. My name is Cory Cole. I use she, her, and I'm an Applied Violence Epidemiologist at the Minnesota Department of Health in the Injury and Violence Prevention section and my job is to figure out how do we collect all the data that we can get about sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and all of the things upstream that affect sexual violence, and then how do we translate that data so that it's usable for the prevention and advocacy work that's happening around the state.

0:01:50.1 Barb McMorris: Hi, I'm Barb McMorris. My pronouns are she, her, and hers. I'm a sociologist who has found a home as a faculty member in a school of nursing at the University of Minnesota that values interprofessional teams. My research focuses on adolescent and young adult health. I'll pass to Nic.

0:02:12.4 Nic Rider: Hi, everyone. I'm Nic Rider, and my pronouns are they, them, or just my name. I'm a faculty member at the Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, and I'm the Director of the National Center for Gender Health, and both of those are housed within the University of Minnesota Medical School. My research focuses on contextualizing health inequities and examining social and structural factors that affect various aspects of well-being for marginalized communities.

0:02:44.4 Marissa Raguet: And good morning. Hi, everyone. My name is Marissa Raguet. My pronouns are she and her. I work at the Minnesota Department of Health in the Sexual Violence Prevention Program. This is the program at the Minnesota Department of Health that receives the rape prevention and education funding from CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I am the evaluator for the program. I've been a part of the program for over 10 years now, and preventing sexual violence is my passion area and really what drives me. I got into public health work in order to focus on this upstream primary prevention work.

0:03:18.4 CC: What this study did allow us to appreciate that wasn't necessarily so visible before was just kind of the direction that these forces shaped the population that we work with and kind of the contours of intersectionality and how the specific paths along which systems that operate in youth life kind of place them differentially at more risk than other youths. And this is, again, not reflective of anything that the students have done or is anything that is inherent to their identities, but just how society kind of differentially puts some youth more in harm's way than others. And we kind of got to see that working and more importantly, we got to see that from a data perspective, which for a lot of people, that really is the way that they prefer to determine what's true and what's real and what's going to drive policy. There is a huge hunger for data-driven policy decisions, which isn't always easy when the truths that we are trying to express through data are more complex than basic statistical science.

0:04:40.2 CC: What this did is help us express what we're seeing and what we know to be true in the language of power, that is data science. And I think the main thing that I think the data was useful for illustrating to my colleagues in epidemiology was the degree of diversity within the categories that we make when we do traditional disparity and equity analyses. For instance, someone looking at the sexual violence data in a large survey, they might divide students by sex assigned at birth, which we know is not anyone's first pick of how to define gender, but it is often what is available in these administrative data sets. Most people would usually just start there, maybe even end there when they are looking to describe inequities and sexual violence victimization. They might find, okay, there is a fourfold difference in prevalence between these two groups.

0:05:53.0 CC: What we found is that you can further divide one of these categories, say, for example, of the students assigned male at birth. If you break that down by students who are identifying themselves as heterosexual on the survey versus any other sexual orientation, we find there's another three-and-a-half fold of difference in risk and prevalence. And after all that, we still haven't created a monolith because if you look specifically at the students who said on the survey that they were lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, pansexual questioning, and you divide them by gender modality, we find another twofold difference in prevalence. And amongst those students who are assigned male at birth, not heterosexual, trans, non-binary, genderqueer, other gender nonconforming, or unsure of their gender identity, within that already very specific group of students, there is still a more than threefold disparity between students who meet all those criteria and are White and students who meet all those criteria and are Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Asian American.

0:07:08.6 CC: And so the more you keep digging, the more complexity you find. And the complexity is not complexity for complexity's sake. The complexity is usable. It teaches us how, for example, race operates in the context of transphobia or transmisogyny. It teaches us how homophobia might operate specifically among students assigned male at birth, that it doesn't necessarily operate the same way among students assigned female at birth. And it teaches us that if we are going to have services for LGBT students, those services necessarily need to be responsive to cultures and students who are not White because that is a very, very relevant intersection within that level. Yeah, I'm going to pass it.

0:08:03.0 BM: Yeah, thanks, Cory. Briefly, I'll just echo what you're saying. I think one of the things that I realized the analysis revealed for researchers and for folks at academic institutions is that real need for us to better contextualize those quantitative findings, and especially not just report prevalence estimates as like typical differences in risk for sexual violence by demographic characteristics that really attribute that risk to individuals instead of the systems and structures and laws that oppress them. Like, get out of that attribution of risk to the individual and get back to the structures. And I would just emphasize that I learned especially about more about what it takes to decolonize my methods. And there's a huge need for researchers to come up with better ways to capture identities and experiences of young people on surveys. So we need to decolonize our survey methods too. And one way that I'm thinking about doing this is by advocating for and using myself and for my projects mixed method studies. So, not just focusing on the data, but also getting young people's voices involved to help interpret it, not relying on me to interpret it. Let's get young people to interpret it as well.

0:09:26.7 SL: Absolutely. I was actually thinking about that as you all were sharing how you were learning and listening from youth just about the survey questions, just thinking about, well, what do they think about the results, knowing that they've had this input along the way? But Marissa and Nic, how do you think these results can be used to support and enhance sexual violence prevention initiatives in Minnesota? 

0:10:01.1 MR: Thanks, Sally. So, to kind of tie into what folks have been speaking to so far, Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw points us to those causes of intersectional disparities being these forms of systemic oppression. So, if we're seeing these disparities in our state today for youth, we know that we need to go upstream and look at the forms of systemic oppression as the cause of those disparities. So, that takes the lens off of those youth, which is kind of at the societal level, I think, fairly common that we tend to do what's called victim blaming, where we say, what did this person do that led to this experience? But we, I'm preaching to the choir here, but folks in sexual violence prevention know that victims are never the cause of their own victimization. And from Professor Crenshaw's work, we really have the strength of understanding around how and in which ways are forms of systemic oppression interacting multiplicatively, impacting each other to create these disparities.

0:10:55.9 MR: And so, that forces us upstream to primary prevention and systemic oppression shows up in, of course, the individual and collective beliefs and actions and treatments of others that people experience. And I think that's often a way that discrimination is understood. But Professor Crenshaw, and even in our kind of work within the Rape Prevention and Education Program for those doing that work, we talk about community and societal level causes and structures. So, it drives us to that level to look at those formal and even informal. I think the more we do this sort of community level prevention work, we see so often there's a lot of informal things that are happening, but they're a practice. Even if there's a strong policy in place, we might see actually that's not what's being implemented in the practice of the day-to-day in a setting. So, we go upstream, we look at those formal, informal practices, policies, procedures resource decisions, environments, and across all systems that are operating in our society, not just in one system, like the education system, but all the way into the criminal legal system where there's been so much focus to how these disparities get carried into how people are ending up incarcerated, and especially for young people of color who are queer.

0:12:12.2 MR: So, I think anyone doing sexual violence prevention-related work can use data like this on intersectional disparities to understand who is most likely to be experiencing increased rates of sexual violence victimization and therefore then work to increase the ability of our different prevention strategies and efforts to target the causes of those disparities in those different spaces. So, we obviously know prevention funding is so limited for sexual violence work, but we know more funding and resources need to be driven to those communities who know best, like what prevention work looks like and means for the community and the lived reality of how sexual violence is occurring to them in different spaces like today not 10 years ago, but what's going on today in those spaces. And I think things like COVID-19 really drove that home, that prevention had to shift and look different.

0:13:03.8 MR: It had to be really responsive to people's needs, and no one knows better than that than those experiencing those forms of oppression and the victimization. And also all prevention efforts should be targeting intersectional disparities and taking every opportunity to like uproot. We talk a lot about uprooting in our work, like taking that opportunity to uproot the forms of oppression and create equity internally and externally. And I think that's kind of a big thing to say, and I see a lot of folks in the work and at the field and like we just learned from all of our grantees and partners 'cause they do this so beautifully. They're often not talking about sexual violence in their prevention work. They're often talking about the root causes and uprooting those systematically and collectively in partnership with their communities.

0:13:48.5 MR: We see that so beautiful and that just ties in so well to what our study and findings suggest. Also, just wanting to point to, I think one thing that I often think very readily about in connection to our quantitative study is just how much we have so many kind of qualitative community-specific, community-centered studies in our state. I don't know if other states have that, but we in our state have like, because we have so much brilliant leadership in our state, communities have produced literally studies talking about the context of sexual violence in their community that explains what's going on and why and how are the root causes operating in their community and in their experience. So, I think like our work just really points to the need to delve into those more, to live those out and the recommendations that are made in those reports to listen to those and actualize those collectively across our states.

0:14:40.1 MR: I think this qualitative data is so important because it tells us the specifics about how intersectional root causes are creating disparities in sexual violence and related forms of violence so that we're not kind of guessing or filling that in. And then also, I think it's like, again, that quick challenge to the victim-blaming that I know a lot of us in our field have to constantly navigate in different spaces to veer away from victim-blaming prevention approaches to approaches that are actually centering root causes and those actually living those experiences to drive change. And again, kind of moving from there to address recommendations that have been made from those communities to transform those forms of oppression in different spaces. I'm going to pass it to Nic.

0:15:24.5 NR: Yeah, I really love a lot of what you said, Marissa. And so, I think like what I'll just add on is that our results essentially became our call to action for others in the sexual violence prevention spaces, but also adjacent groups and programs similar to some of the groups that Marissa talked about. Again, this work is rooted in social justice and the goal is to be action oriented. And so, not just talk about change, but actually do it, even if it seems like a small step, moving beyond just the talking and processing about it. And so, with these results, it really encourages that, again, call to action, like let's do something. And that's to everyone who can be involved, right? So, practitioners, resource providers, care systems, other relevant parties, and to create that change, but not just change in general, but change that meaningfully improves inequities and disparities in the lives of the adolescents that are represented in our survey and what that kind of means broadly.

0:16:39.6 NR: These results and future projects also can dispel myths and stereotypes about sexual violence, again, that are rooted in those legacies of oppression and stereotypes that we often hear and know and see get sort of played out in resource allocations at times. And it highlights the importance of amplifying the voices of those that are most impacted by sexual violence in order to be proactive and preventive, and versus reactive, right? So, yeah, I think Marissa spoke to a lot of that. And so, it's just kind of amplifying some of the pieces that she already talked about.

0:17:18.8 SL: Thank you so much, Nic and Marissa. It's so energizing to, on the occasions where we can move out of that reactive space into this action-oriented and proactive space. We obviously thought that your work and your approach was going to be important information for us to be sharing with other partners around the country, but we'd love to hear how you think this research and approach can support and inform the work that's happening to prevent sexual assault, abuse, and harassment more broadly.

0:18:07.5 NR: Yeah, I think for me, I think this work highlights the importance of using an intersectionality lens in all of the work that people are doing in the sexual violence prevention spaces. And this can mean in trainings and research within the care systems, like I mentioned before. I mean, it can really be across any of the work that is being done. And it also highlights that supporting young people with lived experiences of sexual violence means seeing them as their holistic self, including their histories and all of what represents who they are. And this can also include intergenerational experiences and ancestral knowledge. And I think these are pieces of individuals that don't often get acknowledged and can also be a part of...

0:18:51.0 NR: When we think about intersectionality, it also goes into the strengths that people hold. And so I wanna make sure that we don't only talk about some of the disparities, or like the more like challenges and struggles, but also like intersectionality also includes their strengths and wisdom and the beautiful pieces that are that bring them to their humanness. And so I think support services basically just need to engage in some reimagining of what healing center practices and engagement can mean and not shy away from acknowledging and addressing the impact of oppression and structures of power, while also uplifting some of those beautiful pieces such as pleasure, joy and hope, as well as connection to who young people define as their communities.

0:19:37.3 BM: I love that Nic, thank you for that. I would just share for the field that I think that we could all benefit from a lot more silo breaking and just being more collaborative in our partnership. So figuring out who our allies are in the academic institutions, who the practitioners are, who the resource providers are, and work to sort of inform prevention efforts together and elevate youth voice in addition. And I feel like we've set up a good model of that here with our group. And if anybody wants to talk to us about how we did that, let us know.

0:20:16.1 SL: Thanks for offering that.

0:20:19.4 MR: I can just share that... Excuse me. One of our goals and you know, and my goal as the evaluator for the rape prevention education program funding from our CDC partners in our state was again, thinking data to action, data to action, you know, health equity data to action, and we're really focused on health equity. When we have been through this funding from CDC for a long time, is that we really wanted to use the findings to point to the understanding that intersectionality can provide for us in order to strengthen sexual violence prevention work. And for me, as I've thought about this, for whatever reason, you know, some of the biggest implications that I have sort of seen for sexual violence prevention work.

0:21:00.4 MR: And if I'm being honest, I've really learned from our grantees and partners on the ground doing the work 'cause this is just so how they do their work, is the importance... Is a strong implication. It's, I think the more that prevention strategies can make it just a daily practice to very deeply center and value individuals as experts in their own lives, you know, the better, especially for children and youth who get so marginalized. And, you know, in this in the most kind of joyful and celebratory and collective ways as Nic spoke to, and this really can extend to challenging the settings, you know, in prevention work we often talk about, you know, implementation settings, like where is this being implemented, you know, challenging those settings and the structure of those settings and the leadership in which that prevention strategy is being implemented to not just kind of focus on educating kids about safety. I think education is so powerful and important. We talk a lot about that and it's foundational. But as we can see from these findings, like that's not gonna drive primary prevention in an upstream way. And what we need, we really need to transform our settings.

0:22:01.0 MR: So using these findings to challenge those settings, we're implementing prevention strategies, you know, be it a school, a workplace, a faith institution, even a family, the home to do the same and really centering and celebrating the voices and equally valuing the voices of folks as experts in their own lives and really listening to them and believing them, believing their truths. And this centering and valuing in my mind really needs to strongly center and include equalizing power differentials, 'cause this is all about unequal power differentials and how that leads to differences and experiences of violence and marginalization and exposure to conditions that are where there's a lot of possibility for like being targeted for violence.

0:22:47.1 MR: So, you know, really thinking about how is power operating in this space and how can we really equalize it? And like, I think this is already going on, but in my mind, it's just like a deepening over and over again of that practice and that just has to really include each individual's right to bodily autonomy and body sovereignty broadly. But I know in sexual violence, we talk about that a lot. Like those are concepts that get heavily talked about in our work and I think is really, to me, a big learning and implication, you know, across the country, outside of even our work for, but also directly related to sexual violence prevention. So those would be kind of my key, I guess, things that I think about when I think about the work more broadly. I'll pass it to Cory.

0:23:30.6 CC: Yeah, I think when it comes to sharing the, what we learned from this work with others, I think about a lot of my colleagues who don't necessarily work in violence prevention, but do work as epidemiologists or data scientists for other public health topics. And I think their first question a lot of the time is how can we recreate this methodology if we don't have a gigantic sample size? And I say, you misunderstand me. The intersectionality does not live in the [0:24:00.0] ____ ECHE methodology. The intersectionality lives in, like Nic was saying, the critical thinking, about the choices you make and the way you choose to center the voices of the people and the personhood of the people that you are talking about.

0:24:20.7 CC: And, you know, I think it was that slowing down and making these decisions together that really gave us the meat of what we can share with our colleagues in not just violence prevention, but in public health data more broadly. And I think that's really valuable. I also think that beyond what we've talked about today, the violence prevention movement has a very strong ethic of not victim blaming that has really changed our methodology as far as this project, and I think could be a very helpful framing for other public health topics as well. And I think there's just so much potential for changing the way we think about data analysis and measuring not only inequity, but strength. You know, differences can be good. Differences shouldn't necessarily be statistically controlled. Differences can be learned from and leveraged to make, a strong holistic societal strategy to prevent violence.

0:25:30.7 SL: Wow. I see that on a really big bumper sticker. That captures so much. And I think, I don't know if folks in our field are always given the credit for the amount of critical thinking that is required in this field and how that's applied. And especially as we're talking about evaluation and the use of data, just looking at evaluative thinking and not doing this work in isolation and bringing folks together to think through it and learn together. I know our listeners are gonna wanna learn more 'cause that's the kind of listeners that they are. If we could maybe do some closing thoughts on where you would direct people to learn more.

0:26:30.6 CC: Yeah. So I know I would be so lost in this work if it weren't for the critical scholarship of primarily women of color who are really building the framework of intersectionality and expanding it every day. So this is foundational authors like Patricia Hill Collins, Combahee River Collective, Kimberlé Crenshaw, people who were writing years and years before them like Sojourner Truth, and people writing contemporarily about intersectionality like Lisa Bowleg, Greta Bauer. Also, you know, this is not unrelated. There are many resources about data equity. Heather Krause with We All Count, I believe, has been on the podcast before. And that is just a wonderful resource for thinking critically about your data.

0:27:24.2 NR: Yeah, going off of what Cory said, like, all those scholars are very foundational to me too. They're, I don't know, I'm, my like, like intellectual crushes are all of those people. And who I think some additional people, well, I should back up and say I feel very fortunate because one of my mentors, but also the director of the institute where I work is actually Greta Bauer. And I've been very fortunate and very, I feel very honored to be able to have some of the discussions that I do with her.

0:28:04.5 NR: And so like I do, as Cory said, like I do encourage people to look up all of the names that have already been mentioned, but some additional people in like intersectionality scholarship that I would sort of point people to are Grace Lee Boggs and Gloria Anzaldúa. And then some resources that just came to mind as I was, as I'm thinking about where people can learn more, just access information are a lot of resource centers and organizations like the Minnesota India, Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center, the Indian Law Resource Center, and also MINCASA, which stands for the Minnesota Coalition Against Sexual Assault. And again, those are Minnesota specific, but they do really great work.

0:28:49.0 BM: Yeah, they sure do, Nic. And I'm just gonna admit right now, I have an intellectual crush on you. And I would say, you know, check out anything Nic has written, seriously, just Google Nic Rider, I would say is a huge resource in this area. And check out, yeah, we're being Minnesota focused. Sorry, folks. Check out our Minnesota Youth Sex Trading Collaborative, MYST, just search for MYST and the University of Minnesota. And check us out and how we do business with our community partners.

0:29:21.8 MR: And I would just add, like, please email us and be in touch. We love to connect with people and talk about this more. And it's been one of like the big joys of this project is the number of people who have specific questions, they wanna talk about what does this mean for my work? How can we do this? And so that's exciting, would make us happy if anyone listening who was interested would reach out to any of us. Also check out our Minnesota Department of Health Sexual Violence Prevention Program website. We're gonna be posting links to summaries about this work and related resources in the coming weeks. So we're excited to share those with people.

0:29:55.5 SL: Well, you all have made me extremely happy today. Thank you for being guests. And this is a, you know, call to action to folks out there. I hope you're inspired. Present your ideas at conferences, open up conversations with people. If you're not connected with researchers, send them an email, call them and get connected. And for researchers that wanna get more involved in supporting sexual violence prevention work, please reach out to the NSVRC. We are regularly connecting people to folks in their areas to do collaborative work. There is going to be just an amazing list of articles and resources that have been mentioned in the show notes. So we'd invite people to take a look at those and definitely reach out if you all have any questions. And sincere thanks to our guests today.

0:30:51.9 SL: Thank you for listening to this episode of Resource on the Go. Watch for part three in October, 2024. For more resources and information about preventing sexual assault, visit our website at nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources at nsvrc-respecttogether.org.

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