SMART FY 15 Campus Focused Sexual Assault Perpetration Prevention and Education Program | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The SMART FY 15 Campus Focused Sexual Assault Perpetration Prevention and Education Program was a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) grant opportunity administered by the SMART Office (Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking). It was built around a widely cited problem in campus safety: sexual assault is common in college settings, most assaults are committed by someone the victim knows, many incidents involve incapacitation, and formal reporting to law enforcement is extremely low (the announcement cites an average of about 12 percent reporting). The solicitation stresses that while many campuses have strengthened victim services over time, they often lack comparable capacity to prevent perpetration, to respond effectively to students found responsible for sexual assault, or to address students who may be at risk of engaging in abusive behavior. The program frames sexual violence as a serious, potentially lifelong trauma for victims and argues that prevention strategies need to go beyond awareness campaigns to reduce perpetration at the population level.

A major theme of the opportunity is a shift away from “single dose” prevention approaches, like brief one-time educational sessions designed mainly to increase knowledge or change attitudes. The solicitation notes that rigorous evaluations have often shown limited impact from these short-term psychoeducational models. Instead, it encourages applicants to design and implement more robust, multi-session and community-oriented strategies, building on emerging evidence from programs that show measurable effects on behavior. It references several promising models such as Safe Dates (a multi-session curriculum for younger students that has shown reductions in later victimization and perpetration) and bystander-focused programs used in high school and college contexts (e.g., Bringing in the Bystander, Coaching Boys into Men, and Green Dot). At the same time, it argues that curriculum-only approaches may not be enough if they do not address the broader campus environment and the situational conditions that enable offending.

The core intervention approach emphasized in this solicitation is “situational prevention,” a criminological framework that looks at how specific conditions, locations, routines, policies, enforcement practices, and environmental factors can increase or decrease the likelihood of crime in particular settings. Applied to campuses, this means designing prevention strategies that change the context in which sexual violence occurs, not just the beliefs of individual students. The announcement highlights an example from earlier research, Shifting Boundaries, which combined a curriculum with building-level policy and safety changes in middle schools and reportedly produced sizable reductions in peer sexual violence in the months after implementation. The SMART Office uses this kind of evidence to justify the idea that structural and policy-driven interventions, when paired with education and integrated into campus operations, can potentially produce meaningful reductions in perpetration.

The stated goal of the grant is to promote evidence-based knowledge that prevents and reduces sexual assault on college and university campuses by developing and implementing situationally based prevention programs. Applicants were expected to name the campus or campuses where implementation would occur and to gather baseline and contextual information about those settings. That information includes sexual assault statistics (with attention to both victimization and perpetration where possible), existing adjudication processes and available sanctions, and an inventory of other prevention programs already operating on the campus. The application was expected to clearly show how the proposed project would create a comprehensive strategy that includes both targeted and universal prevention efforts, addresses community-level risk and protective factors, and is embedded in existing campus practices so that environmental, policy, or procedural changes become part of day-to-day operations rather than a standalone initiative.

The solicitation also sets several program expectations that shape what “good” implementation looks like. Prevention strategies were expected to be culturally relevant and attentive to diverse campus communities. Victim safety was treated as a non-negotiable priority: the program design should include supportive services and advocacy and should avoid approaches that could retraumatize victims or shift blame onto them. Applicants were encouraged to leverage existing evidence-based educational curricula and to pair those curricula with safety policies and environmental changes that strengthen situational prevention. Beyond implementation, the program emphasized building the knowledge base for perpetration prevention so that the field can better understand what works on campuses and replicate effective models elsewhere. Grantees were expected to collaborate closely with the SMART Office and to be prepared to participate in external research or evaluation efforts if additional funding became available later.

A monitoring and evaluation plan was required as part of the application, with an emphasis on collecting and analyzing data that can demonstrate progress and inform improvements. The solicitation lists outcomes and measures applicants were encouraged to track, including changes in student knowledge of consent standards, relevant state and federal laws, campus policies, and available resources; reductions in rape myths; improved prevention skills such as bystander intervention capabilities; and shifts in attitudes about the acceptability of abusive, harassing, or violent behavior. It also encouraged documenting strategies used to reach underserved populations, explicitly naming groups such as LGBT students, students with disabilities, and racial and ethnic groups that may be underserved or overlooked (including African American, Tribal, Hispanic, Asian Pacific Islander, and international students). Additional suggested measures include behavioral intentions (both intentions to avoid committing harmful behaviors and intentions to intervene as a bystander), as well as self-reported experiences related to dating violence, sexual violence, or sexual harassment, and participant background factors like prior attendance in related training and prior dating/dating-violence history.

The final deliverable for the project was a comprehensive report. That report was expected to present the final situational prevention strategies and/or perpetration-focused curriculum that was developed, explain the theoretical and evidence base behind the approach, and document the implementation process in detail. It also needed to include descriptive reach data (how many people were served or engaged), campus profiles (demographics, climate survey information if available, adjudication and sanctioning information, and descriptions of related prevention programming), an ongoing monitoring and evaluation plan, and any outcome findings available from the tracked measures. In other words, the report was meant to serve as both an accountability product and a practical resource that other campuses could learn from.

Administratively, this was a discretionary funding opportunity using a cooperative agreement, meaning the SMART Office anticipated active involvement during the project rather than a purely hands-off grant. The funding opportunity number was SMART-2015-4157, with an estimated total funding amount of $1,000,000 and an award ceiling of $1,000,000 (with an award floor listed as $10,000). The solicitation anticipated making 1 award. There was no cost sharing or matching requirement. Eligible applicants included public and private institutions of higher education, Tribal institutions of higher education, nonprofits with 501(c)(3) status, and certain for-profit entities including small businesses. The program fell under CFDA 16.203 (Promoting Evidence Integration in Sex Offender Management Discretionary Grant Program). Key dates included a posted date of April 15, 2015 and a closing date of May 28, 2015, with the opportunity later archived on June 27, 2015. The listed contact for access issues was Faith Baker, Associate Director, at the SMART Office.

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