Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. The RPE program works to prevent sexual violence by providing funding to state and territorial health departments in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U. Virgin Islands, and state, territorial, and tribal sexual assault coalitions. The RPE program recipients work collaboratively with diverse stakeholders including educational institutions, rape crisis centers, community organizations, and other state agency partners to guide the implementation and evaluation of their state sexual violence prevention efforts.
CDC supports this work by providing tools, training, and technical assistance to RPE programs to promote the implementation and evaluation of programs, practices, and policies based on the best available evidence to prevent sexual violence.
Primary preventionβstopping sexual violence before it beginsβis the focus of the RPE program. Program activities are guided by a set of principles that include:. The RPE program encourages the development of comprehensive prevention strategies using as guiding frameworks, the public health approach, and the social-ecological model.
These frameworks guide the recipients to implement a range of activities to address the ways individual, relationship, community, and societal factors impact sexual violence. This approach is more likely to prevent sexual violence across a lifetime than any single intervention and is also more likely to benefit the largest number of people and reduce sexual violence.
These projects require RPE program recipients to collaborate with state health departments and other applicable federal, state, tribal, and local entities engaged in sexual violence prevention to address social and structural determinants of health at the community and societal levels of the social-ecological model to plan, implement, and evaluate sexual violence prevention strategies in alignment with the the Sexual Violence Prevention Resource for Action , formerly known as a technical package.
