Tuesday, May 13, 2025
5/13/2025
Rape Prevention and Education: Using The Best Available Evidence for Sexual Violence Prevention - In the State of Maine, one in five Mainers will experience sexual assault at some point in their lifetime. Each year, 14,000 Mainers will experience sexual violence. This violence is a serious public health issue that results in extensive costs to individuals and communities across Maine. In order to address this issue, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Violence Prevention, will use the NOFO, CE #19-1902 Rape Prevention Education Program to apply the public health model to the prevention of sexual violence in Maine. The central part of our work during the first project period will be to meet the outcomes required of the NOFO: 1. Increased capacity to access and use data, as a result of increased partnerships; 2. Increased alignment of state level goals and state and local prevention strategies; 3. Increased use of data to inform prevention program and subrecipient selection; 4. Increased evaluation activities, including process and outcome evaluation and tracking state level sexual violence indicators; and 5. Increased use of community-level and society-level prevention strategies. In order to meet our increased use of community-level prevention strategies, Maine has selected two specific programs: 1. Child sexual abuse prevention (for children and adults working with children grades pre-K through 5) through the implementation of the Children’s Safety Partnership, a collaborative effort of Maine DHHS, Maine Department of Education, and MECASA; and 2. Prevention of gender-based harassment and sexual violence through teaching skills related to gender norms, bystander engagement, and healthy sexuality with middle- and high-school age students. These initiatives will be led by two work groups: a statewide RPE advisory group, which will support the creation of a statewide action plan, logic model, and evaluation plan, and ensure that our work is connected to and informed by statewide data and programming. Additionally, we will convene a provider work group, who will support strategy implementation and share feedback from lessons learned in the field. These efforts will also be supported by our long-standing partnership with the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault (MECASA). The Maine Department of Health and Human Services relies on MECASA to provide training, technical assistance, and programmatic support to Maine’s prevention sub-recipients, and our long partnership has supported many exciting programs and will continue to do so throughout this funding cycle to come.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).