Thursday, April 3, 2025
4/3/2025
Rape Prevention and Education - The Florida Department of Health (FDOH) supports prevention to address sexual violence as a public health priority. Additionally, the FDOH Violence and Injury Prevention Section’s Rape Prevention and Education (RPE) Program works toward “connecting the dots” between sexual violence and other forms of violence, particularly those sharing the same risk and protective factors, whenever possible. Within the Florida RPE program, two overarching priorities for effective strategy implementation have emerged from previous efforts. First, prevention is an active partnership, and requires recruitment, engagement, training, empowerment, and capacity building. Second, it is important to identify disproportionately impacted populations in geographic areas through a systematic review of available data. Community members and persons with lived experience must be key decision makers in implementing community level approaches for sustainable changes in reducing perpetration and victimization. The FDOH RPE Program’s data-to-action approach will prioritize geographic regions with high incidents of sexual violence. Using an adapted Cardiff model to map the timing, physical location and type of violence occurring, the FDOH RPE Program Data Specialist, a newly created position within the RPE Program, will develop findings, including maps, to local Sexual Assault Response Teams (SART). Data will also include an analysis of social and economic indicators that impact health and safety. The SARTs, statutorily mandated to review sexual assault cases, include members of the local rape crisis center, law enforcement, state attorney, forensic nurse, hospital, and the county health department. Guided by SART member recommendations, community populations that are disproportionately impacted by violence will be invited to participate in mapping and focus group sessions. Florida’s State Action Plan (SAP) for sexual violence will be documented as an objective under the larger umbrella of the State Health Improvement Plan (SHIP), Injury Safety and Violence Priority Area. The SHIP serves as the state roadmap to create systems change and improved health outcomes for all Floridians. By integrating the SAP into the SHIP, a variety of partners involved in state level efforts, but with community counterparts, will prioritize sexual violence and work on unified strategies. Connections between social and economic conditions that impact safety and health, and considerations of risk factors such as access to alcohol and drugs will play a key role in guiding the work of the SHIP. The RPE Program will continue building relationships and facilitating connections on the national, state and local level and in the continuation of memorandums of agreement between local departments of health and rape crisis centers. The Community Engagement Coordinator will serve as liaison for both community and state level strategies. The RPE Program Evaluator will maintain the evaluation and data management plans and provide technical assistance to SHIP, SARTs, and Community Engagement Teams (CET). Locally, CETs will include SART liaisons, organizations and service providers with connections to the community, risk factors, and affected populations. The Community Engagement Coordinator will work with the CET to identify community members to serve as core peers. The core community peers will be trained on a model (based on Shifting Boundaries} addressing three focus areas: strengthening economic supports, building supportive and protective environments, and promoting community norms against violence. The core peers will conduct a micro-capacity assessment via focus groups. As a team, the CET will prioritize and develop recommendations for interventions and prevention-related strategies including programs and policy.
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).