In the wake of the #MeToo movement, there are a lot of academics starting to study sexual violence for the first time. (Welcome!) I've been doing a lot of peer reviews and I see the same mistakes that mark you as a newcomer. Here's a checklist to avoid the obvious ones:

(1) Know your definitions. The most common mistakes I see are on the differences between sexual assault, rape, nonconsensual sex, unwanted sex, sexual coercion, and what exactly intimate partner violence is.

The big one is nonconsensual sex and unwanted sex. Your college consent training might have told you they're the same, but they aren't. Someone can consent to sex they feel ambivalent about. Someone can want sex that could never be consensual (e.g., child sex abuse).

And on that note, no one can consent to sex that was coerced. I have seen this mistake in at least half of the manuscripts I have reviewed in the past year.

(2) Recognize that there have been some amazing feminist scholars doing this work for decades. Do NOT start your paper with, "Since the #MeToo movement..." Don't erase the contributions of the smart people who came before you.

(3) Context matters. Sexual assault victims don't exist in a vacuum. Don't interrogate their behaviors without looking around at what makes women be submissive in the face of violence.

This goes for perpetration, too. Perpetrators aren't inherently evil people--they're usually responding to social pressures. Take those into account when you write about perpetration.

(4) Know the limits of a cross-sectional dataset. For example, sexual assault victims drink more than other women, but is that the cause of the assault or a coping mechanism adopted after the fact?

(5) Know the difficulties in measuring sexual victimization. There are A LOT of politics involved in who identifies as a survivor and why. Understand them. Adopt your methodologies to make sense of them. Read up on the Sexual Experiences Survey as a starting point.

(6) If you're working with perpetrators, understand that they might be good as manipulating you as they are at manipulating their victims. Remember to center survivors and the violence they experience in your work with perpetrators. Read up on DARVO.

(7) Don't victim blame. To avoid this, I can't recommend doing a 40-hour crisis counselor training strongly enough. It's two weeks to get a primer on what we already know about sexual violence. Check out your state CASA, DV shelter, or campus resources to sign up.

(8) Most of all, focus on power. Sexual violence is at its core a crime of power inequities. You can't get it right if you treat victims and perpetrators like they're on a level playing field.

I invite any other sexual violence scholars to add onto this list. I'm so excited to see so many new voices chiming in to our academic discussions. Let's help them through the growing pains and prepare them to succeed in this field!