1.3 How This Volume Is Organized

The remainder of this volume is organized by the key activities necessary to build a sexual violence case performance management system, in roughly chronological order. It may not be feasible or necessary to undertake all of these activities, particularly in small jurisdictions or in jurisdictions with limited staff resources. Scaled-down versions of most of these activities may yield less, but still useful, information. Suggestions for both full and modified versions of these activities will be discussed throughout.

Activity 1: Develop an outcome-oriented mission statement and select the outcome measures that will be tracked over time to identify progress toward the outcome mission. (Chapter 2).

Activity 2: Develop procedures to track (i.e., follow the case through the system) sexual violence crimes that have not gone through a criminal adjudication process (case attrition), including cases in which victims did not report to law enforcement, cases closed by law enforcement without being referred to prosecution, and cases in which prosecutors decline to bring charges. (Chapter 3).

Activity 3: Select victim subgroup characteristics by which outcome measures will be examined to explore issues of equal access to justice. (Chapter 4).

Activity 4: Develop a system to measure case complexity, which will enable us to more fairly and accurately assess case outcomes. (Chapter 5).

Activity 5: Identify and track the scope of possible case resolutions and examine case outcomes by level of complexity. (Chapter 6).

Activity 6: Develop holistic definitions for case success (i.e., justice) and the process for making these assessments. (Chapter 7).

Activity 7: Identify a software tool for data collection and case processing, or manually enter data into an easy-to-use spreadsheet if automated data systems are unavailable. (Chapter 8).

Activity 8: Develop and test a victim survey process that captures victims’ assessment of the quality of their experiences. (Chapter 9).

Activity 9: Conduct data analysis and report findings internally, to allied partners, and to the public. (Chapter 10).

Activity 10: Using data analysis as the basis for examining prosecution policies and practices, amend existing ones and adopt new ones where necessary. (Chapter 11)


 

EXHIBIT 1-1
Mapping the RSVP Model

“I want to implement promising practices and performance management, what does that look like?”