Evaluating Statewide Rape Prevention and Education Programs: A Case Study from California
Publication Date
11-13-2018
Document Type
Presentation
Publication Title
Annual Public Health Association (APHA) 2018 Annual Meeting & Expo
Conference Location
San Diego, CA
Abstract
California has 63 rape crisis centers (RCCs), 33 of which are funded by the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) to implement sexual violence (SV) primary prevention strategies through federal funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s(CDC) Rape Prevention and Education (RPE) Program. Reflective of California's diverse population, the state's RPE programs vary greatly in their approaches to SV prevention, as well as their approaches to evaluating the impact of their programs. CDPH is working to develop a strategy to assess both the local and state-wide impact of RPE efforts to demonstrate the effectiveness of this work throughout the state. Given the diversity of the population and the RPE approaches in California, this effort to develop a cohesive evaluation strategy is particularly challenging, yet essential to strengthening the evidence base for prevention of SV. As part of California’s state-wide Rape Prevention Education (RPE) evaluation efforts, CDPH is developing an outcome evaluation toolkit for local RPE programs in order to empower them to collect and share their own evaluation results, to utilize publicly-available data sources on sexual violence, and to assess local outcomes. In this roundtable session, CDPH will share its framework and process for developing the statewide evaluation plan and toolkit as well as preliminary findings from pilot tests of the evaluation tools among selected RPE programs throughout the state. We hope to elicit feedback from participants on ways to strengthen this approach, and provide opportunities to adapt this process and toolkit to other geographic contexts.
Keywords
Violence & Injury Prevention, Sexual Assault
Department
Social Work
Recommended Citation
Mina White, Ruvani Fonseka, Sabrina Boyce, Ricardo Vera-Monroy, Jay Silverman, and Francisco Michel. "Evaluating Statewide Rape Prevention and Education Programs: A Case Study from California" Annual Public Health Association (APHA) 2018 Annual Meeting & Expo (2018).
