Sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking are serious problems on college and university campuses.

Addressing these crimes on campuses raises unique issues and challenges that Congress sought to address by creating the Grants to Reduce Sexual Assault, Domestic Violence,

credit: Team In Focus

How's Your Community Doing?
Check Out it's
Community Vital Signs

Dating Violence, and Stalking on Campus Program (hereinafter referred to as the Campus Program).

The Campus Program was authorized under the Higher Education Amendments of 1998 and reauthorized in the Violence Against Women Act of 2000 and the Reauthorization Act of 2005 (VAWA 2005).

The first Campus Program grants were awarded in 199 9. The Campus Program encourages a coordinated community approach that enhances victim safety and assistance, and supports efforts to hold offenders accountable.

The Campus Program provides seed funding to support activities that develop and strengthen victim services in cases involving sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking on campuses.

The Campus Program also aims to strengthen security and investigative strategies to prevent and prosecute these crimes on campuses.

Campuses are addressing these crimes by developing campus-based coordinated responses involving campus victim services, law enforcement, health providers, housing officials, administrators, student leaders, faith-based organizations, student organizations, and disciplinary boards.

To be effective, campus responses must be linked to local criminal justice agencies and service providers, including local law enforcement agencies, prosecutors’ offices, courts, and nonprofit, nongovernmental victim advocacy and victim services agencies.

Campuses are encouraged to create or revitalize a large-scale impact by adopting policies and protocols that treat violence against women crimes as serious offenses, and by developing victim services and programs that prioritize victim safety, offender accountability, and prevention.

Through targeted policies, protocols and actions, colleges and universities can demonstrate to every student that violence against women in any form will not be tolerated and that sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking are crimes with serious consequences.For additional information on the Campus Program, including what past Campus Program grantees have accomplished with their grant funds and to view the Campus Program performance measures, see http://muskie.usm.maine.edu/vawamei/campusgraphs.htm.

***** The SAM.gov site is currently experiencing an outage of the Entity Management component of the website.

For users that are unable to register a new entity or update an entity record, OVW will be accepting applications for this solicitation through the DOJ Grants Management System (GMS) as well as Grants.gov.

To submit an application through GMS, please go to https://grants.ojp.usdoj.gov/gmsexternal/.

The closing date will remain the same.