Core Faculty > Rebecca Campbell

Principal Investigator. Funded by the National Institute of Justice. 2006-2007.
My current work is funded by the National Institute of Justice to study the effectiveness of Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) programs. SANEs have tremendous potential for creating systemic changes and increasing prosecution rates for adult sexual assault crimes. Our current project examines the circumstances and contexts under which SANE programs increase prosecution, and seeks to identify the mediating mechanisms that explain how and why SANE programs affect case outcomes. Using a systems change theoretical perspective, this project has five objectives: First, we will compare prosecution charging rates and court outcomes for cases examined in a SANE program (intervention group) to a sample of adult sexual assault cases examined using standard hospital protocols in the same community prior to the implementation of the SANE program (comparison group). The second objective is to identify victim (e.g., race, age), case (e.g., victim-offender relationship), and forensic medical evidence (e.g., injury, DNA) characteristics that predict prosecutors' charging decisions. The third objective examines the impact that SANEs have on police as a mediating pathway to increased prosecution rates. The investigational practices for police officers who have completed a SANE criminal justice training program (intervention group) will be compared to those who have not gone through training (comparison group) to determine if there have been substantive changes in police reports since the emergence of the SANE program. The fourth objective in this project is to explore how the emotional support provided to victims/survivors by the SANE program and victim advocates increased their participation during investigation and prosecution. The final objective is to create a practitioner-oriented program evaluation toolkit that can be used by other communities to assess post-SANE systems change.