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- SEXUAL ASSAULT AWARNESS MONTH
Sexual assault response teams (SARTs) are multidisciplinary, interagency teams that promote collaboration to support victims of sexual assault and hold offenders accountable. SARTs began forming in the United States more than 30 years ago and continue to form across the country as needed.
By nature, SARTs are unique to their local circumstances but share three core goals: supporting victims, holding offenders accountable, and increasing community safety. Over time, most SARTs face challenges and identify gaps in services that require working to change systems. The most successful SARTs work to improve systems toward these three common goals.
The SART Toolkit is designed to support SARTs in all aspects of their work, including practical tips for effective teamwork, ideas for expansion, tools for identifying what is most important in each community, best practices, and connections to technical assistance providers to guide development and improvement.
The SART Toolkit is a collaborative effort, written and reviewed by survivors, current or past SART members, subject matter experts and organizations that provide technical assistance and training to SARTs, and individuals and organizations that research SARTs. Examples and resources are shared throughout to help you deepen your knowledge and skill in the practice of SART work.
SART development does not follow a straightforward path. You and your team are welcome to start using the SART Toolkit in any place that makes the most sense and, using the links provided, move freely throughout the SART Toolkit. The SART Toolkit includes the most common aspects of SART development, ongoing SART work, and examples of thriving SARTs, including information on critical issues that will likely apply to your SART at some stage of its work. You will find some duplication of resources as they are appropriate for multiple topics.
As you use the SART Toolkit, keep in mind that your SART is a unique reflection of your community norms and values. Collaboratively, your SART will make decisions that fit your community and reflect the combined resources, commitments, and strengths of your victims and members.
The anti-sexual violence field is always growing, with more research and evidence-based practices yielding new information. As such, the toolkit will be updated periodically to include new studies and resources. Please submit suggested resources to resources@nsvrc.org.
The SART Toolkit uses the term “SART” broadly to include multidisciplinary teams (MDTs), coordinated community response (CCR) teams, joint domestic and sexual violence response teams, domestic abuse response teams (DARTs), or teams by any other name focused on improving the immediate systems response to reports of sexual assault and community-wide response to sexual assault.
These terms, often used interchangeably, have distinct and overlapping definitions, as illustrated in Sexual Assault Response Teams (SART): A Model Protocol for Virginia.
In 2004, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC) received funding from the Office on Victims of Crime (OVC) to help service providers work together to promote quality responses to sexual assault. The funding supported the development of the original SART Toolkit, which celebrated the groundbreaking work of service providers.
To guide the original development, NSVRC —
In 2008, the SART Toolkit received a small update to convert the distribution of the SART Toolkit from CD to online.
In 2015, NSVRC received funding from OVC to work with stakeholders in the field to update and expand the SART Toolkit. This version includes information on new developments, current research, and best practices in the anti-sexual assault movement.
The SART Toolkit aims to inspire and help SARTs work toward providing victim-centered, trauma-informed, culturally relevant, and community-specific services through meaningful systems change. The toolkit provides foundational knowledge of topics affecting collaborative response to sexual assault.
To guide the most recent updates, NSVRC —
The SART Toolkit is a resource for individuals, agencies, and SART leaders dedicated to responding to and ending sexual violence in their communities. SARTs at all stages of development can find support, information, and resources as they develop and meet victim-centered, culturally relevant, trauma-informed, community-specific goals to support victims and hold offenders accountable.
The SART Toolkit promotes building relationships to create open communication and have difficult conversations about problems and inconsistencies in order to improve individual, agency, and systems response to victims.
The SART Toolkit provides SARTs with access to information, resources, and technical assistance providers as they constantly seek to improve their services.
SARTs — informed by victims, community needs assessments, service providers, resources, etc. — determine their own priorities. Through the act of setting priorities and areas of focus, SARTs yield tremendous power over the way systems may evolve to serve the needs of vicitms.
SARTs that truly enage in listening to their communities, including seeking alternative viewpoints, will see the biggest impact in the way they provide healing to victims and the way the community responds to the SART. SARTs are encouraged to use the SART Toolkit to identify opportunities to connect with vicitms and their community to make the most meaningful improvements.
SARTs can use the SART Toolkit —
The SART Toolkit is a representation of multicultural, multidisciplinary collaboration. The National Sexual Violence Research Center (NSVRC) leadership provided a platform for subject matter experts and end users to contribute, edit, review, and share resources for each section.
NSVRC is grateful to all the survivors, service providers, agencies, and organizations who walked with us throughout this process to share their time, experiences, challenges, expertise, successes, and hopes. We are exceedingly grateful for everyone who supported this project, especially those individuals that engaged in difficult conversations and held us accountable for sharing multiple truths from multiple perspectives. We are grateful for your honesty, and we believe the SART Toolkit will be more useful because of your willingness to share and engage with us.
We acknowledge this information is not fully representative of the experiences of every victim, service provider, or community. Learning to be culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and victim-centered is an active commitment to constantly seek to incorporate new voices, uplifting those that are often not included, and acting to improve our individual response and the systems response based on that feedback.
We feel strongly that sharing the voices and experiences of some is part of an active commitment and better prepares us — as individuals, service providers, agencies, and systems — to listen to and honor all voices, especially the most vulnerable victims. As part of our commitment to listen and deliver on those conversations, we will continue to actively seek opportunities to honor all voices and experiences in updates to the SART Toolkit.
To those who supported this project and those of you we have not yet connected with — we thank you for the work you do every day to support victims, expand existing services to all victims, hold offenders accountable, and keep communities safe.
The SART Toolkit team sends sincere appreciation to the following agencies, organizations, and individual practitioners for their great outpouring of support to ensure the information provided in the SART Toolkit is accurate, relevant, and useful.
The SART Toolkit project team extends its appreciation to the dedicated individuals and organizations that contributed their passion, experience, and expertise to the videos created for the SART Toolkit.
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