People Suffering Intimate Partner Violence Need Better Help

More than one in three women and more than one in four men experience violence, stalking or rape by a partner during their lifetimes. Despite such prevalence and evidence that victims suffer accompanying mental and physical health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder, health professionals have yet to nail down the best way to address intimate partner violence. The roots of research on such violence extend back to the mid-1970s, when public awareness of the problem started to rise. Several decades of work by health professionals, behavioral and mental health researchers, and advocacy groups have attempted to define the problem and map its scope. Effective ways to help victims are still being hashed out, however, in part because there have been only a few clinical trials to assess whether one form of treatment works better than another. Addressing and preventing such violence is complicated. For example, numbers such as those cited above rely on self-reporting in surveys, and as a result, abuse prevalence is likely higher. Even defining the abuse itself can be tricky. The term intimate partner violence encompasses not only physical abuse but also sexual or psychological harm by a current or former partner or spouse. Further clouding the issue is what exactly constitutes successful treatment. Children, finances and other factors complicate individuals? situations?for some people who are suffering intimate partner violence, the end of an abusive relationship is not victory. Women experience such violence more frequently than men, but it is a mistake to treat the issue as a women?s problem. Intimate partner violence stains relationships between heterosexual and same-sex partners alike as well as partners who are not sexually intimate. Victims come from all backgrounds?affluent and educated communities included, says Allison Bressler, a co-founder of A Partnership for Change, a nonprofit dedicated to ending family abuse and intimate partner violence. Too often, doctors with affluent patients will not suspect abuse. Furthermore, victims who are not being physically assaulted often do not define their relationship as abusive, she says, but any fear of one?s partner should not be acceptable. Typically, people talk to their family doctors about intimate partner violence first?if they talk at all. Leaflets and pamphlets are often available in doctor?s waiting rooms but that passive offer of help may not be enough. Some studies do recommend screening for intimate partner violence in health care settings, but very few health care providers have the tools or expertise to detect the problem in their patients. A 2012 review found that the most common barriers to screening included the doctors? personal discomfort and lack of knowledge and time. A recent study by researchers based in Australia demonstrates exactly how challenging it is to design a program addressing intimate partner violence. The team was led by Kelsey Hegarty, an associate professor in the General Practice and Primary Health Care Academic Center at the University of Melbourne. Hegarty and her colleagues designed a screening and counseling program to identify and help women with signs of intimate partner violence. ?Our aim was to see if screening delivered by doctors can make a difference,? she says. The researchers recruited 52 practicing clinicians and mailed all their female patients from the past year a lifestyle questionnaire. Of the women who completed and returned the survey, 272 gave responses that showed fear of their partners. The doctors and their patients were assigned randomly to either a control group (the women received a list of resources and normal physicians? care if needed; the doctors a basic education packet on intimate partner violence) or an experimental group. The doctors in the latter group took a short training course on how to help women who showed fear of a partner. The training included six hours of instruction and two one-hour role-play sessions. The women in the experimental group were offered between one and six free counseling sessions, depending on their need. After the counseling, participants were asked to complete a survey that assessed their quality of life. The survey included questions that asked whether the women felt healthy, whether they enjoyed their lives, how safe they felt, how satisfied they were in their personal relationships and how often they had felt depressed or anxious in the past four weeks. The team compared responses with a survey given at the beginning of the study. The intervention group did not have marked improvement when compared with the control group for most of the questions. The counseling, however, did decrease feelings of depression for the women. Additionally, doctors in the experimental group also inquired after the health of women and children more often. The results were published online in April in The Lancet. Hegarty explains that the study does not support the use of a mailed invitation to partake in counseling. It doesn?t even show that screening within the context of health care is effective. She says the results do show that training doctors can make a difference, however. An accompanying commentary in the same journal agrees that it may be wise for doctors to ask about intimate partner violence under certain circumstances?for example, if the patient has mental health issues. Also, screening for perpetrators may be worthwhile. A longer training program may show more striking results, Hegarty says. A big question is why many of the women who showed fear of their partners in the initial screen did not accept the offer for counseling. ?This [loss] is typical of a lot of studies in this area,? says Heidi Nelson, a research professor in medical informatics, clinical epidemiology and medicine at Oregon Health & Science University who was not involved in the study. The study was well done, she says, but teasing out effective treatments for social and medical problems is different from conducting a drug trial. ?There is definitely a role for physicians to be aware of this problem,? she adds. Different health care systems and cultures further complicate finding a good program to identify intimate partner violence. A successful program should empower victims and doctors alike. It will likely involve multiple opportunities for people suffering abuse to seek help and offer places where such services are clearly available, Nelson says. The physician?s office is one place to expose violence that all too often goes on behind closed doors, but until more effective treatment programs are designed, many men and women will still live in fear. Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
? 2013 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/people-suffering-intimate-partner-violence-better-help-110000295.html

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AP sources: US close to OK on arming Syrian rebels

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Moved by the Assad regime's rapid advance, the Obama administration could decide this week to approve lethal aid for the beleaguered Syrian rebels and will weigh the merits of a less likely move to send in U.S. airpower to enforce a no-fly zone over the civil war-wracked nation, officials said Sunday.

White House meetings are planned over the coming days, as Syrian President Bashar Assad's government forces are apparently poised for an attack on the key city of Homs, which could cut off Syria's armed opposition from the south of the country. As many as 5,000 Hezbollah fighters are now in Syria, officials believe, helping the regime press on with its campaign after capturing the town of Qusair near the Lebanese border last week.

Opposition leaders have warned Washington that their rebellion could face devastating and irreversible losses without greater support, and the warnings are prompting the United States to consider drastic action.

Secretary of State John Kerry postponed a planned trip Monday to Israel and three other Mideast countries to participate in White House discussions, said officials who weren't authorized to speak publicly on the matter and demanded anonymity.

While nothing has been concretely decided, U.S. officials said President Barack Obama was leaning closer toward signing off on sending weapons to vetted, moderate rebel units. The U.S. has spoken of possibly arming the opposition in recent months but has been hesitant because it doesn't want al-Qaida-linked and other extremists fighting alongside the anti-Assad militias to end up with the weapons.

Obama already has ruled out any intervention that would require U.S. military boots on the ground. Other options such as deploying American air power to ground the regime's jets, gunships and other aerial assets are now being more seriously debated, the officials said, while cautioning that a no-fly zone or any other action involving U.S. military deployments in Syria were far less likely right now.

The president also has declared chemical weapons use by the Assad regime a "red line" for more forceful U.S. action. American allies including France and Britain have say they've determined with near certitude that Syrian forces have used low levels of sarin in several attacks, but the administration is still studying the evidence. The U.S. officials said responses that will be mulled over in this week's meetings concern the deteriorating situation on the ground in Syria, independent of final confirmation of possible chemical weapons use.

White House spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said Obama's advisers were considering all options to hasten a transition in Syria.

"The United States will continue to look for ways to strengthen the capabilities of the Syrian opposition," she said.

Any intervention could have wide-reaching ramifications for the United States and the region. It would bring the U.S. closer to a conflict that has killed almost 80,000 people since Assad cracked down on protesters inspired by the Arab Spring in March 2011 and sparked a war that has since been increasingly defined by sectarian clashes between the Sunni-led rebellion and Assad's Alawite-dominated regime.

And it would essentially pit the United States alongside regional allies Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar in a proxy war against Iran, which is providing much of the materiel to the Syrian government's counterinsurgency and, through Hezbollah, more and more of the manpower.

Syria's precarious position in the heart of the Middle East makes the conflict extremely unpredictable. Lebanon, across the western border, suffered its own brutal civil war in the 1970s and the 1980s and is already experiencing increased interethnic tensions. Iraq, to Syria's east, is mired in worsening violence. And Israel to the southwest has seen shots fired across the contested Golan Heights and has been forced to strike what it claimed were advanced weapons convoys heading to Hezbollah, with whom it went to war with in 2006.

Iran could wreak havoc in the region through its support of Shiite militant groups, and U.S. officials fear Iran may seek to retaliate for any stepped-up American involvement by targeting Israel or U.S. interests in the region. It's also unclear what American action would mean for relations with Russia, which has provided Assad with military and diplomatic support even as it claims that it working with the United States to try to organize a Syrian peace conference.

At the same time, it's unclear how Washington could fundamentally change the trajectory of a conflict that has increasingly tilted toward Assad in recent months without providing weapons to the opposition forces or getting involved itself.

The administration has been studying for months how to rebalance Syria's war so that moderate, pro-democracy rebels defeat the regime or make life so difficult for Assad and his supporters that the government decides it must join a peace process that entails a transition away from the Assad family's four-decade dictatorship.

But Assad's military successes appear to have rendered peace efforts largely meaningless in the short term. While Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov have been trying to rally support for the planned conference in Geneva ? first envisioned for May and since postponed until July at the earliest ? even America's allies in the Syrian opposition leadership have questioned the wisdom of sitting down for talks while they are ceding territory all over the country to Assad's forces.

Beyond weapons support for the rebels, administration officials harbor deep reservations about other options.

They note that a no-fly zone, championed by hawks in Congress such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., would require the U.S. to first neutralize Syrian air defense systems that have been reinforced with Russian technology and are far stronger than those that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi had before the U.S. and its Arab and European allies helped rebels overthrow him in 2011. And unlike with Libya, Washington has no clear international mandate for authorizing any strikes inside Syria, a point the Obama administration has harped on since late 2011 to explain its reticence about more forceful action.

Homs has one of the biggest Alawite communities in Syria and is widely seen as pro-Assad. The rebels control the city center, however, with regime forces besieging them on the outskirts.

Many towns north of Homs also are rebel-controlled, while to the south Hezbollah-backed government forces have been clearing rebels from villages and towns. Fierce fighting there over the past three weeks has killed dozens of rebels, troops and Hezbollah fighters and wounded hundreds.

Seizing control of Homs would clear a path for the regime from Damascus to the Mediterranean coast, and firm up its grip on much of the country.

___

AP White House Correspondent Julie Pace contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ap-sources-us-close-ok-arming-syrian-rebels-225528415.html

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Ben Scott Defends Introducing Son, Making Enemies on The Bachelorette

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Twitch Updates SDK To Boost Engagement, Get Its Streams Embedded In More Video Games

Streaming service provider Twitch is updating its software development kit to help its developer partners increase engagement with players and viewers that are tuning in to their games. The new online toolkit will be especially useful for community portals, providing more social features, as well as tools to improve content discovery.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/YSsyOLeiDiw/

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The App Store Gold Rush Has Only Just Begun

The app ecosystem is showing no signs of slowing down. That’s what Apple essentially announced today, revealing that there are now 900,000 iOS applications?available for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Though the app stores are getting filled up and shifting more of the revenue to top publishers, the market itself is not decreasing as a result. The company added 250,000 more iOS applications to its App Store from 2012 to 2013, in between its annual WWDC announcements. The year before, it had added 225,000 applications (between 2011 and 2012), and before that, some 200,000 new apps?came on board. That’s incredible growth, actually, because you would almost think that App Store growth would have been the other way around – that there would have been an initial gold rush as developers filled its virtual shelves with new apps, then growth would have slowed over the years as all the “good ideas” were taken, so to speak. Even now, it’s harder than ever for indie developers to really make it on the App Store, but that doesn’t seem to be impacting the number of new apps available. And while it’s true that some are just now starting to shift their focus to Android and Google Play (which is starting to see a few success stories of its own), it appears that shift has not come at the expense of Apple’s iOS. App Growth Over The Years: 900,000-650,000 = 250,000 new apps between 2012-2013 650,000-425,000 = 225,000 new apps between 2011-2012 425,000-225,000 = 200,000 new apps between 2010-2011 The App Store gold rush is clearly still in its early days yet.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/dS7F1gNLEhY/

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Jay Leno for President? (Powerlineblog)

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