Adolescent Sexual Assault Victims’ Experiences with Sane-Sarts and the Criminal Justice System

This project had two main objectives. First, qualitative interviews with adolescent sexual assault victims were conducted regarding their initial post-assault disclosures and their pathways to seeking help from the medical and legal systems. It is important to understand how and why teen survivors decide to seek help from these programs in the first place. Although SANE-SART interventions have the potential to be useful resources to teen victims, they are only useful insofar as they are utilized by survivors. The second objective was to conduct a quantitative analysis to determine what factors predict successful prosecution of adolescent sexual assault cases. Once teen victims are \“in the system\” what factors determine whether a case will be prosecuted? Criminal justice prosecution is a multi-step process, from reporting to referral, arrest, prosecution (which itself has many steps), and final case outcome. Rather than focusing at any one stage, we assessed progress through this system as an ordinal variable in order to capture incremental change. We examined how differences between the two SANE-SART models-and the evolution of these models over time-predicted prosecution outcomes relative to the predictive utility of victim characteristics, assault characteristics, and medical forensic evidence findings.