The New York State Department of Health

Description:
As many of you know, last year the Department of Health (DOH) established the Sexual Violence Primary Prevention Committee (SVPPC).  The committee has spent the last year doing a needs and resource assessment of sexual violence in New York State (NYS), including looking at existing sources of data. DOH is asking for your help, in the next step of our needs assessment. As part of our needs and resource assessment, DOH is conducting an environmental scan to examine community and societal level risk and protective factors associated with sexual violence that may be present in New York State. A media and advertising assessment is the main component of the environmental scan. The media and advertising assessment will examine messages that are portrayed by the media that promote or protect against sexual violence. All forms of media will be assessed, such as newspapers, magazines, television, billboards, signage and other advertisements.

As many of you know, the media and print advertisements have a very powerful impact on forming values, attitudes, perception, belief and behaviors. Daily, we are exposed to media and advertisements, whether it's a newspaper or magazine you read, an ad you pass by at the bus stop, a billboard or sign you drive by or a television commercial you watch.

The media can play an important role in creating healthy communities in part by portraying healthy, constructive images. But is this what we usually see in our daily lives, or is it more of a focus on negative aspects of communities. Are there story lines, images, characters, programs, and products that promote healthy attitudes toward women, masculinity, relationships, and sexuality or is the focus on unhealthy attitudes towards women, masculinity, relationships and sexuality. What are some examples you see in your everyday life?

The SVPPC is collecting these images from across the state and we need your help. Please look around your community for examples of risk or protective factors associated with sexual violence and tell us about them.

Attached to this note is a one page form that should be used when responding. It is important that you complete this one page form because we want your opinion of what the risk or protective factors in your community are. Images and other media that are returned without the form will not be used when compiling our assessment.

This is your chance to have you opinion count. We have set up the following special email account where you can send the media assessment form (attached here) and any images or other media (rcpma@health.state.ny.us). An image can be from a newspaper, magazine or other print ad. If your image is a billboard or sign try and take a picture of the image and include that as an attachment. We will be accepting the media assessment form and images until April 30, 2008 after that the email account will be shut down, so please get your images in by then.

Thank you for your participation and we look forward to sharing the results with you.

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