Sexual assault services in the pandemic: Lessons learned
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic created many risks for sexual assault and intimate partner violence, also termed the “shadow pandemic”. At the same time, it created challenges for sexual assault healthcare teams, counsellors and clients needing to access acute services. The purpose of this descriptive qualitative study was to identify those challenges for sexual assault service providers, the impact of these challenges on services, clients and team members, and identify lessons learned for future pandemics. The participants were professionals from across Canada who provided either counselling or healthcare services to clients after they experienced recent sexual assaults. Semi-structured interviews were used and then content analysis was conducted to identify themes and compare experiences. Common themes from both counselling and healthcare were identified, most notably that the initial lockdown messaging created risks for clients. Messaging stated to only come to Emergency if in urgent need and they minimized the importance of their assaults. Visit volume thus dropped for the first few months but resumed and even became higher than pre-pandemic in some communities. Healthcare staff struggled to be seen as an essential service initially, but those affiliated with Emergency departments were able to continue in-person examinations and treatment. The nurses noted that the clients who did come had more serious and life-threatening injuries such as strangulation attempts, more mental health issues, and more often were in the context of intimate partner violence.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".