Kelly Cue Davis

Kelly Cue Davis is an assistant dean, professor, and research faculty member at Arizona State University in the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, best known for her work in "the role of alcohol in sexual assault perpetration and victimization." During her undergraduate studies, Davis volunteered at a rape crisis center as a rape prevention educator. Through this experience, Davis became interested in studying alcohol's involvement in sexual assault, ultimately resulting in the topic being her research focus in graduate school. She completed her doctoral clinical internship at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Portland, Oregon.

Career

Davis first began working in academia at the University of Washington, holding several positions in their Psychology Department and School of Social Work.

Davis has published research regarding how bartenders can be better prepared for handling situations where they may need to intervene. Her publication titled "Safer Bars: A cluster-randomized effectiveness evaluation of alcohol-related sexual violence prevention through bar staff bystander training" aimed to assess Safer Bars, a program that trains bartenders on the warning signs of sexual assault perpetration. Davis and colleagues found that Safer Bars was an effective program for educating bartenders. In addition to this, her research has been specifically funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity, the Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. This finding has helped the public become more aware of non-consensual condom removal as a form of sexual assault, with Davis stating "as people read about ['stealthing'] more and more in the media, people said 'that happened to me, that happened to me, I never knew what to call it'". Several state legislatures have recently moved towards laws regarding stealthing because of experts' recommendations, including Massachusetts, New Jersey, and California.

Davis' research has been used in an effort to pass legislation to include non-consensual condom removal in sexual assault laws. Her research titled "The Intersection of Men's Sexual Violence Perpetration and Sexual Risk Behavior: A Literature Review" has been an argument for passing stealthing laws, stating that in alcohol-related sexual encounters, 42% of "young, male, moderate non-problem drinkers" engaged in coercive tactics regarding condom use, with 10% of that sample reporting non-consensual condom removal. Davis' work regarding the relation of sexual assault and alcohol gained interest when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the United States Supreme Court. Her goal for this research was to "advance our understanding of the role of alcohol in sexual risk behaviors by investigating the mechanisms underlying alcohol-involved sexual risk in both consensual and nonconsensual sexual situations." With this award, she will work in collaboration with faculty at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom to research "ways to reduce sexual assaults involving alcohol through education and perpetrator prevention efforts" and to challenge previously adopted stereotypes that often been adopted into law. She is also a part of the International Society for Research on Aggression, the Research Society on Alcoholism, the International Academy for Sex Research, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality.

Throughout her career, Davis has been invited to speak at several conferences.