Greenness and the Potential Resilience to Sexual Violence: “Your Neighborhood Is Being Neglected Because People Don’t Care. People With Power Don’t Care”

Abstract

There is increasing evidence that green space in communities reduces the risk of aggression and violence, and increases wellbeing. Positive associations between green space and resilience have been found among children, older adults and university students in the United States, China and Bulgaria. Little is known about these associations among predominately Black communities with structural disadvantage. This study explored the potential community resilience in predominately Black neighborhoods with elevated violent crime and different amounts of green space. This embedded mixed-methods study started with quantitative analysis of women who self-identified as “Black and/or African American.” We found inequality in environments, including the amount of green space, traffic density, vacant property, and violent crime. This led to 10 indepth interviews representing communities with elevated crime and different amounts of green space. Emergent coding of the first 3 interviews, a subset of the 98 in the quantitative analysis, led to a priori coding of barriers and facilitators to potential green space supported community resilience applied to the final 7 interview data. Barriers were a combination of the physical and social environment, including traffic patterns, vacant property, and crime. Facilitators included subjective qualities of green space. Green spaces drew people in through community building and promoting feelings of calmness. The transformation of vacant lots into green spaces by community members affords space for people to come together and build community. Green spaces, a modifiable factor, may serve to increase community resilience and decrease the risk of violence.

The Effect of Adverse Mental Health and Resilience on Perceived Stress by Sexual Violence History

“…Promisingly, resilience-the process of successfully adapting to adversity, trauma, or significant stressors [47]-may mitigate the relationship between psychological trauma, adverse mental health, and stress [18,48], but few studies have examined these associations [49,50]. Fewer still have examined this relationship among survivors of sexual violence, despite the high co-occurring prevalence of adverse mental health and traumarelated stress [18,51,52]. One study among Black women in Baltimore, Maryland, USA found that among survivors of sexual violence, resilience partially attenuated (mediated) the association between perceived stress and severe depression [18].…”

Residential Greenness Positively Associated with the Cortisol to DHEA Ratio among Urban-Dwelling African American Women at Risk for HIV

“…Violence, in vulnerable communities, exacerbates wellestablished patterns of inequity in minority health and environments, both social and built, especially in regard to access and quality of green space (greenness) resulting in reduced potential for physiological resilience [1]. Globally, 35% of women report physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner (IPV) [2].…”

“…Rates of childhood sexual violence (under age 18) by African American women have been reported as high as 65%, compared with the overall childhood sexual abuse rate of 43% in the US [5]. Additional stressors for African American women come from social and built environmental inequality (i.e., structural racism, income inequality, crime exposure, noise pollution, neighborhood disorder, lack of greenness) that disproportionately impact health via the stress response [1,6,7]. In this era, termed by some theorists as the Anthropocene, changes in climate are also predicted to increase violent crime, including sexual assault and IPV, in the USS by 3% (95% CI [1•5, 5•4]) by the end of the century, based on a median carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions trajectory [8].…”