Prevention Corner: Environmental and Situational Prevention for Practitioners Guide Launch

By Maddy LaCure, Policy Advocate for Prevention & Education

With grant funding from the Maryland Department of Health (MDH) Rape and Sexual Assault Prevention Program (RSAPP), MCASA has expanded our prevention efforts in Maryland to advance our community and societal level strategies to create protective environments in Maryland colleges and universities. Our goal is to advance the field of environmental prevention through the creation and distribution of comprehensive tools for practitioners. We started our work in March 2020, and were thrilled to begin collaborating with Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and the Maryland Department of Health (MDH), and our campus partners, Bowie State University and St. Mary’s College of Maryland, in the Fall of 2021.

Resulting from this collaborative work, MCASA is excited to announce the release of our newest prevention tool this coming August: Environmental and Situational Strategies for Sexual Violence Prevention for Practitioners: Leveraging Evidence for Impact on College Campuses This guide is designed to provide a framework for practitioners, advocates, and college administrators interested in exploring and bringing environmental and situational prevention (ESP) strategies to their campuses. Through research and collaboration with campus partners, JHU created an ESP logic model that practitioners can follow to:

• Gather existing sexual violence (SV) data on their campus;
• Identify gaps in the data;
• Conduct data collection as needed;
• Determine SV focus areas to address; and
• Select ESP intervention(s).

The guide also includes various customizable tools that campus teams can utilize to support their work. This guide is a living document and our team is excited to work with practitioners in the field to learn from your projects and make improvements to this guide. MCASA is also available to provide ongoing training and technical assistance for Maryland practitioners utilizing this tool on their campuses and in their communities.

Join us for our guide launch on Tuesday August 9th at 2:00 pm at our Practitioner Webinar with JHU! More details and registration information is available here. We will also be presenting on the logic model and research foundations behind the project at NSVRC’s National Sexual Assault Conference virtually on August 19th from 1:00pm - 2:30pm. For more information on the project or upcoming events, please contact us at [email protected].