Alliance: About our Web Site
About our Web Site
About the Alliance Web Site
The Alliance Web site is located at http://nycagainstrape.org. It is five years old, and in that time it has grown enormously. The site contains over 850 pages of information, and receives hundreds of visitors every day. We maintain six mailing lists, with over 1500 subscribers. Every week we post new features, events, or announcements. This document will describe some of the features which can be found on our site, and some which we are planning to launch soon.
Read more, or [1] 
download the PowerPoint presentation (2.24MB)
The Home Page
The centerpiece of the Alliance home page is a collage of pictures of New York City allies against sexual violence. The collage changes regularly, with a new individual featured each week. We've been as inclusive as possible in creating these collages, including small business owners, peer educators, legislative advocates, social workers, and others.
Also on the home page, we list new announcements posted in the past month; check regularly for announcements, or subscribe to our mailing lists. Each month we also feature a new article from The Torch, our quarterly newsletter.
Services
One of our objectives is to support organizations working to end sexual violence. To this end, we provide several free Web-based services.
Organizations listed in our resource guide, in addition to being included in the print publication, are also provided with a "microsite" page. This page includes contact information, a map, and a description of the services offered. Currently our resource guide lists hospital- and community-based programs, child and adolescent programs, criminal justice programs, and sex offender treatment programs.
Whether or not a program is in our resource guide, it can avail itself of our listing service. We regularly post job listings, volunteer opportunities, and program and other announcements. Each is listed on our site and delivered by email to subscribers. If the organization is in our resource guide, their listing or event also appears on their "microsite" page.
Sometimes organizations produce materials that they want to distribute as widely as possible. In this case, we will often include these materials directly on our site. For example, the NYCLU recently asked us to list their legal Frequently Asked Questions about treatment of minors; we included it as part of the "Survivors and Friends" section.
Education
One of the purposes of our site is education. Our first section, "Survivors and Friends", includes numerous informational resources. We have information about hotlines, myths and facts, a list of terms, and answers to frequently asked questions. We're particularly proud of original legal guides that we have created. These explain in lay terms the laws relating to sexual assault in New York, and provide important information for survivors whether or not they choose to press charges.
For professionals in the anti-sexual violence community, our Forensic Healthcare Program section includes the original publications, "Creating an Environment of Care" and "Comprehensive Sexual Assault Treatment Programs: A Hospital-Based Approach", which can be downloaded free of charge. Other resources for professionals are also included in the FHP section, as well as announcements and registration information for Sexual Assault Examiner trainings and Advanced Leadership Seminars. We have also created a link to the New York State Department of Health Guidelines to the Care of the Adult Rape Victim that were released in the fall of 2002.
| To Whom It May Concern: I am the Community Education Coordinator for the Sexual Assault Crisis Service in New Britain Connecticut. In researching sexual assault on the net I found your site, and wanted to let you know that it is the most comprehensive and best-organized site I have found. Thank you for putting so much time and effort into your web site. Sincerely, Marc T. Housley |
In the "About Us" section, we post our quarterly newsletter, "The Torch", with regularly updated articles and information. Newsletter articles can be searched by date, by author, or by full-text word or phrase search.
Advocacy
Our site serves as a platform to support our advocacy efforts. We have developed a facility for creating "action alerts", timely announcements about upcoming legislation for which action is needed. These alerts are immediately listed throughout our site, and are also distributed to our mailing list. They include tools to help visitors send letters or faxes to the appropriate representatives.
In addition, we encourage visitors to our site to get involved in various ways: by volunteering, by attending quarterly meetings, joining the Policy, Communications, or Fundraising Committees, by applying to be on the Board of Directors, or by making a financial contribution.
Research
The "Research" section of our site includes original reports from our research department. In particular, the Police Interaction Research Report is available for download free of charge. We also publish an original review of services to adolescents, as well as a statistics about sexual assault nationally and in New York City.
To support researchers, we also maintain an online version of our library catalog, searchable by title, subject, author, or by full-text word or phrase search.
Other Web Features
We endeavor to make our site as easy-to-use as possible. We maintain a printer-friendly version of every page on the site. Every page includes a search box allowing full-text search by word or phrase. If visitors don't find what they're searching for, they can subscribe to receive an alert when we do publish a document matching the search. We provide easy tools to allow users to send pages by email. Links to a "what's new" page, the site map, and to email the Web Manager are included on every page. Since there are over 450 pages in the site, we've also created "related links" throughout the site, to help find relevant materials in other sections.
A link to our privacy policy can be found on every page, and the site and policy have been reviewed and certified by TRUSTe. Our site has also received CAST certification, indicating that it is friendly to people with disabilities.
Listen
[2] 
The hardest thing about fighting rape is the aura of shame which many survivors feel. We mean to break that shame, by reminding everybody: sexual assault is pervasive, devastating, and, above all, not the victim's fault.
Lsat year we launched a web and email awareness campaign. We called it "Listen" because it has an important meaning for everybody we hope to reach.
For survivors, the most important thing that can help them recover is supportive people who will listen, be they friends, parents, relatives, therapists, or law enforcement professionals.
For friends and relatives of survivors, the best way to help a survivor is to listen.
And for policymakers, we have a simple request: listen to us. Sexual assault is a crisis which can no longer be ignored.
[1]: http://www.nycagainstrape.org/media/about_web/about_web.ppt
[2]: http://listen.nycagainstrape.org
Copyright © 2000-2008 by The New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault