Defining Our Forensic Nursing Destiny Together

In the late 1990s, I provided forensic nursing care to an 82-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted while she was walking her dog. She passed away 12 years later. In 2014, a detective working on cold cases got a hit that matched the DNA I had collected nearly 20 years prior. I subsequently testified in a preliminary hearing to determine if the deceased's statements were shared with me for the purposes of “medical treatment or litigation.” After the judge's finding that my medical record documenting what the deceased had told me about her assault was not Crawford barred (Crawford v. Washington, 2004) and therefore could be offered in a trial, the case was resolved with the defendant pleading guilty to criminal sexual conduct in the first degree and receiving the guideline sentence of 117 months. Today, I continue to provide forensic nursing care in my sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) role at a SANE program based at Regions Hospital, a Level 1 trauma center in St. Paul, Minnesota, and serving three additional hospitals. While our practice and the science supporting what we do have advanced tremendously since the 1990s, forensic nurses always have delivered and will continue to deliver the highest level of care to those who have experienced violence: individuals, families, communities, systems, and nations. And we do so in close partnership with our health system team members and colleagues in the legal system, law enforcement, social and safety services, and advocacy. I am humbled and delighted to be our third Journal of Forensic Nursing (JFN) Editor in Chief, preceded by our Editors in Chief Louanne Lawson and Cindy Peternelj-Taylor. The JFN launched in 2005; we have celebrated 20 years of information sharing about forensic nursing science, practice, and policies and, specifically, the “healthcare issues that transcend health and legal systems” (JFN, n.d.). We are the professional journal for the International Association of Forensic Nurses (IAFN, n.d.), which was established in 1992. The founding nurses, mostly SANEs, envisioned an organization committed to supporting those who experience and perpetrate crime and violence; they had the foresight to know we would be a motley crew of nurses including “death investigators, correctional nurse specialists, forensic psychiatric nurses, legal nurse consultants, forensic geriatric specialists, nurse attorneys, forensic clinical nurse specialists, forensic gynecology nurses, and those who work in other settings as forensic practice evolves” (IAFN, n.d.). If you browse JFN articles, you will see how beautifully our members and colleagues have advanced our science; evolved our evidence-based practice; and refined global, national, local, and institutional policies. This first issue of 2025 shows our intentional commitment to reaching every nurse working along our diverse forensic nursing practice continuum. There are articles addressing intimate partner violence and strangulation (see Gbadebo et al., IAFN statement), which are persisting, pervasive, and timely challenges. I recently saw a young adult woman who had requested a SANE exam after a drug-facilitated sexual assault; during the exam, she told me that he had squeezed her neck with his hand during the incident. When I asked about the pressure using a typical standardized scale, she gave me a score to the pressure but then independently clarified to me that if it had happened during a consenting sexual encounter, she would have been just fine with it, but as part of this assault, it had been very frightening. Like many of you, I have observed an upward trend of reported strangulation. There are plausible explanations for this trend. We could be more consistently and routinely asking about and assessing for strangulation. There could be more strangulation occurring, in part because of greater sociocultural acceptability or normalization of strangulation in sexual encounters. Understanding the underlying and contributing factors to violence is vital to shaping our practice and the approach we take to mitigating threats to health. In the case of strangulation, whether consensual or not, as forensic nurses, we are very aware of the potential short- and long-term threats to health that exist when the neck and throat are injured or when ability to breathe is restricted. JFN is well positioned to support tripartite advances (i.e., research, practice, policy), discourse, and dialogue that can contribute to safe sexual expressions and to reduced threats to health that can result from events such as strangulation. In this issue, the authors address violence affecting communities and populations including college students (see Kennedy et al.; Orchowski et al.; Vallée-Ouimet), older adults (see Nascimentol de Araju-Monteiro et al.), and those in inpatient psychiatric settings (see Gang & Gwak). JFN readers are working at the proverbial bedside of every population experiencing violence; rather than slicing our science into fragmented populations, we must continue to fuel connections and creative insights that lead to desperately needed system change. It is wonderful to see this issue feature authors based in Brazil (see Nascimentol de Araju-Monteiro et al.), Canada (see Coporiccio et al.; Kennedy et al.; Vallée-Ouimet et al.), South Korea (see Gang & Gwak), the United Kingdom (see Jones et al.), and the United States (see Gbadebo; McDowell). Global exchange of information will continue to be a priority for JFN while I am Editor in Chief. Experiences of crime and violence are not constrained by borders, and neither should the science and best practices that support what forensic nurses do everywhere. Consider the global attention toward 72-year-old French woman Gisèle Pelicot, who demanded an open public trial of the 50+ French men, including her ex-husband, who had raped and drugged her for nearly a decade (Leicester et al., 2024). Remember also the global grief experienced when Ugandan Olympic marathon runner Rebecca Cheptegei was set on fire by her ex-partner and subsequently died (Soy & Zane, 2024). Regardless of where violence occurs on this planet, there should be forensic nurses well equipped to prevent violence and to mitigate its effects by providing the highest quality evidence-based forensic nursing. And, finally, in this issue, we see our values lived out in science about how the work we do impacts us (see Gillespie et al.; Coporiccio et al.); attention to this body of knowledge is critical to sustaining a healthy forensic nursing workforce. Vicarious and secondary trauma as well as solutions to reducing when and how these show up in forensic nurses, and the broader nursing workforce, must be shared, and JFN will lead in doing so. Let me conclude with a little information about me and the vision I bring to JFN. I am a forensic nurse with lived experience as a SANE, a correctional nurse, an occupational health nurse, and a public health nurse. I am a nurse scientist and professor, and I've spent most of my academic career involved in collaborative community-based and partnered research, advancing what we know about adolescents' and young adults' mental health, sexual violence prevention and response, interprofessional and global work and clinical education, and workforce health and well-being. I bring to this Editor-in-Chief role my unique personal and nursing experiences and, with those, an appreciation for the multidimensional and complex environments in which we exist, connect, and thrive, first as humans and second as forensic nurses. I am acutely aware of the limited time we have and how we choose to spend that time—where, with whom, and engaged in which activities. I am intentionally choosing to spend time serving our forensic nursing community as our next JFN Editor in Chief. I am hopeful you will choose to offer some of your time sharing your wisdom, lived experiences, clinical solutions, and scientific discoveries, including your affirming or dissenting perspectives. My vision for JFN in support of forensic nursing is simple: to build on our successful foundation and to bring to every forensic nurse advances in science, practice, and policy that directly and positively impact our work and well-being today and that inspire questions, ideas, and solutions for our tomorrow. I look forward to getting to know many of you and, together, making up our collective mind to define our own forensic nursing destiny, as encouraged by Ms. Lauryn Hill (1998) in her song The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill: “And deep in my heart, the answer, it was in me, And I made up my mind to define my own destiny.”

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