One Path, Two Purposes: Where Suicide Prevention and Sexual Violence Prevention Meet
Across communities, suicide prevention and sexual violence prevention are often treated as separate efforts with different programs, funding streams, and conversations. While prevention efforts may often be structured in silos, people’s experiences are not. The best available evidence continues to highlight that many forms of violence are deeply connected and shaped by many of the same experiences, environments, and opportunities for change.
This blog explores the connections between suicide and sexual violence and invites practitioners to consider what these connections mean for their own work.
What we know
Both suicide prevention and sexual violence prevention have strong foundations in public health. Each field has developed its own research base, strategies, and tools to guide action.
Two key resources from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) help illustrate this:
While these resources focus on different outcomes, they share a common approach. They aim to prevent harm before it happens by addressing the conditions that shape people’s lives.
Data can help illustrate what many practitioners are already seeing in their work. Experiences of violence and mental health outcomes can be closely connected.
The CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey
(NISVS) provides a national picture of sexual violence and its impacts. The recently released 2023/2024 data briefs show that sexual violence remains widespread in the United States and continues to affect people across their lifetimes.
These briefs also highlight the range of impacts associated with violence, including fear, concern for safety, and disruptions to daily life. For many survivors, these impacts are not isolated and instead shape mental health, relationships, and overall well-being over time.
Other research has consistently found that people who experience sexual violence are at increased risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors. This association may not be due to a single cause, but about how experiences like trauma, isolation, and lack of support can build and interact over time.
The most recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), including the NCHS Data Brief on suicide mortality, show that suicide rates in the United States increased over time, declined briefly around 2019–2020, and have risen again in recent years. These trends reflect the complex and changing conditions that shape suicide risk, including relationship stress, economic strain, and mental health challenges that may also intersect with experiences of violence.
Taken together, these data reinforce that the conditions that increase risk for violence can be the same conditions that increase risk for suicide. And the conditions that support safety, connection, and well-being may help prevent both.
Shared risk and protective factors
One of the clearest connections between suicide prevention and sexual violence prevention is the overlap in risk and protective factors.
Experiences like trauma, violence, social isolation, and economic stress can increase the likelihood of both suicidal behavior and sexual violence. Protective factors such as strong relationships, connected communities, and supportive environments can reduce risk across both areas.
Tools like VetoViolence’s Connections Selector help make these connections visible. The tool highlights how shared risk factors across the social ecology, such as relationship conflict, economic stress, and exposure to violence, can influence multiple forms of harm including both suicide and sexual violence. It also emphasizes how protective factors like connectedness, social support, and community cohesion can reduce risk across outcomes.
This means that prevention efforts are often working toward the same goals, even if they are described differently.
For example this can include:
- Creating spaces where people feel a sense of belonging, which can reduce isolation and increase safety
- Supporting youth with coping and problem-solving skills, which can help prevent both harm to self and harm to others
- Strengthening economic supports to reduce stressors linked to multiple forms of violence as well as suicide
Prevention efforts are often organized in silos and shaped by funding streams, program areas, and systems. But the conditions that influence violence do not follow those same boundaries. Because of shared root causes and protective factors, prevention is already happening in connected ways, even when our structures suggest otherwise.
The role of trauma and harm
Experiences of sexual violence are linked to increased risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors. At the same time, suicide risk can be shaped by experiences of trauma, isolation, and unmet support needs.
When harm is not addressed, it does not stay contained. It can influence mental health, relationships, and overall well-being over time.
This highlights the importance of prevention efforts that reduce exposure to violence and trauma, support healing and connection, and create environments where people feel seen, supported, and safe.
Moving from parallel work to shared effort
Despite these connections, suicide prevention and sexual violence prevention are often implemented separately.
This can create missed opportunities and allow for strategies to be duplicated rather than coordinated. Partnerships may remain limited to one area of focus rather than expanding to see the connections. Shared risk and protective factors may not be fully leveraged for the greatest impact.
At the same time, there is growing interest in collaboration particularly in settings where these efforts are housed within the same systems, such as public health departments.
Working across these areas does not require starting from scratch. It can begin by:
- Identifying shared goals and strategies
- Building partnerships across programs
- Using existing frameworks, like the CDC Resources for Action, to guide alignment
This creates an opportunity to design prevention strategies that intentionally address multiple forms of harm at once, rather than approaching them separately.
Looking ahead
Prevention is most effective when it reflects the complexity of people’s lives and community realities. Experiences like violence, isolation, and stress do not exist in isolation and neither should prevention efforts.
By recognizing the connections between suicide prevention and sexual violence prevention, there is an opportunity to strengthen both fields. Not by merging them into one, but by building intentional alignment where it matters most.
Prevention is already happening in these shared spaces. The opportunity now is to support it, strengthen it, and make those connections more visible moving forward.