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Citation
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Hollander JA, Edwards KM, McCaughey M, Cermele J, Ullman SE, Senn CY, Beaujolais B, Orchowski LM, Peitzmeier SM. J. Adolesc. Health 2024; 74(1): 208-209. |
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Abstract
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As sexual violence prevention researchers with expertise in empowerment self-defense approaches, we believe that Kettrey et al.’s [[1]] 2023 article, Effects of Campus Sexual Assault Prevention Programs on Attitudes and Behaviors Among American College Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, contains methodological errors that lead to inaccurate conclusions about the state of the evidence on self-defense for sexual violence prevention.
First, the researchers defined “self-defense” program content as an intervention that included any reference to self-defense. Analyzing interventions that mention self-defense together with comprehensive empowerment self-defense programs (i.e., programs that provide intensive instruction, modeling, and active practice of forceful verbal and physical self-defense strategies while counteracting the societal gender norms that typically inhibit women from using them) results in considerable heterogeneity in the types of programs examined. Indeed, four out of eight studies that the authors categorized as “self-defense” programs, including two studies included in the meta-analysis on victimization, do not include any actual training in active verbal and physical resistance to violence [[2]]. Classifying these programs as having “self-defense” content is a critical methodological error.
Second, the narrow inclusion criteria utilized by Kettrey et al. [[1]] meant that the findings are not representative of the most rigorous evidence in the field. Because the researchers excluded programs outside the US, they excluded a randomized controlled trial of an empowerment self-defense program with college women conducted 5 minutes across the US-Canada border [[3]]. This study was nearly twice as large (n = 893) as the largest self-defense study included in the victimization meta-analysis and showed dramatic reductions in victimization, which would have substantially influenced the meta-analytic conclusions. There was no explicit acknowledgment of this study's exclusion....
Language: en |