Prevention MECASA’s FY 17 prevention efforts focused on two key initiatives: expanding our ability to measure prevention outcomes in a streamlined, statewide way; and expanding the statewide approach to child sexual abuse prevention within the public school setting. For many years, our statewide prevention efforts have aligned with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s initiatives to engage in sexual violence prevention using the public health model. We have a longstanding commitment to supporting statewide outcome evaluation and measuring the impact of our programming. This fall, we updated the prevention evaluation system which has been in the field since 2015. This program supports local prevention educators with measuring the impact of their key content – such as consent, communication, media literacy, sexual harassment, and gender norms – and includes feedback from teachers to report on changes they’ve observed in student language and behaviors as a result of programming. The evaluations continue to connect with the Maine Department of Education Maine Learning Results, which highlight age-appropriate healthy skills and behaviors for all Maine students. While Sexual Assault Awareness Month in April is always a chance to highlight our important anti-sexual violence efforts, in FY 17 we were thrilled to be able to focus the spotlight on prevention. The theme of the month was “Say Yes to Consent,” and we developed a fun campaign to bring the message of consent to all ages. This included temporary tattoos (see insets), stickers, and notebooks, as well as inperson and online conversations about how to promote and negotiate consent in our everyday lives. Finally, this last year we worked with the Maine Dept. of Education to complete a model policy for mandatory child sexual abuse prevention in all Maine public elementary schools. The new model policy will require schools from kindergarten to grade 5 to: provide child sexual abuse prevention education to all students; and provide training on prevention, response, and reporting of sexual abuse within the school setting to all school personnel interacting with these students. Schools will be required to fully implement the policy by the end of the 2017-18 school year. MECASA is currently working to develop a statewide child sexual abuse prevention and policy implementation guide, and will make it publicly available (along with free training for Maine schools) in the winter. 6
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