Posttraumatic Growth and Resilience on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence: A Set of Systematic Reviews of Literature

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors, 

I would like to congratulate you for the valuable research you have carried out. This study is of interest and contribute to have a more clear and systematic comprehension of the impact of sexual violence in contexts of sociopolitical conflicts in terms of positive development.

As main strengths of the investigation I highlight:

The type of investigation conducted - systematic review of literature.

The subject of analysis and it’s timeliness consider we have currently many active conflicts in different parts of the world.

However, I suggest the following changes to improve the overall quality of the manuscript:

Introduction: A more up-to-date and accurate definition of sexual violence should be provided as the one presented by the authors is from 1997 (World Association for Sexual Health, 1997). 

I also suggest that more recent studies should be referred, because the ones how are referenced have many years (e.g., Finkel, 1975, Celia & Tross, 1986; Tennen & Affleck, 1980, cited by Calhaum and Tedesschi, 2014). Consider review the type of citation (citation of a secondary sources) (p. 2). 

Discussion: Could be improved because although the posttraumatic growth is discussed, no mention to the resilience variable is done.

A paragraph should be dedicated to discuss the limitations of the study.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your good comments on our paper. Your suggestions also helped us to improve our article. We have made a new English language check as your recommended.

Reviewer 3 Report

The article is extremely pertinent and very interesting. Overall, it is well written and the ideas are presented very clearly, allowing for a fluid reading. Some changes may be made to the English language writing. Below are some suggestions for improvement:

- On page 1, line 30, the reference is not well done, according to APA rules;

- On page 1, line 33, I suggest replacing "leaves (...) effects" with "leaves (...) marks";

- On page 2, throughout the first paragraph, "sexual violence" is frequently repeated, describing a series of important attributes that could be better linked together, so as not to give the feeling of being disconnected facts in the same paragraph;

- On page 2, line 89, I believe there should be a period and not a comma after "review of literature";

- On page 3, line 113, I think it is confusing to mention that one of the categories would be the type of violence, with the focus being sexual violence. In this sense, I suggest replacing the expression "type of violence" with another one (e.g. type of aggression);

- On page 3, line 121, a fifth filter is mentioned when it seems to me that it is only possible to identify two previous filters. Even the previous sentence is confused. Additionally, after having described some filtering and exclusion processes after collecting the articles, line 122 returns to talking about the removal of articles from the databases. I advise that this paragraph be reformulated (and that the description of the procedure follows a temporal logic).

- The data in Figure 1 and 2, in the version of the article I received, are cropped. It will be necessary to correct this aspect;

- On page 6, line 262, the sentence beginning with "As such" is confused due to the insertion of the quote, so I propose that it be restructured;

- On page 9, the paragraph starting on line 288 is organized in a confusing way, when presenting the protection factors. I think that reorganizing the information to simply list what those factors are would make it clearer to read;

- I would rather see, for example, "Mustillo and colleagues" then "Mustillo et al". ;

- On page 9, line 324, I think it should say "victim/survivor" and not "victim-/survivor".

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx