GUPD expands their Sexual Assault Response Team two years after launch

The Georgetown University Police Department is having its second annual Sexual Assault Response Team inculcation. Training GUPD officers to work with cases of sexual assault on campus, this program will be modified and expanded over spring break.

What is prideful and specific about Georgetown University —and the establishment of SART—is that it works to handle cases of sexual assault with privacy and diligence. Maddy Moore (SFS’17) said: “Over the last few years, policy reform at Georgetown around sexual assault has been more about how we center the survivor in all of these situations and how do we honor that the survivor is coming from a very different experience. I think the SART team fits really well into the survivor-centered model that we’re trying to implement at Georgetown.”

In fact, and according to GUPD Deputy Chief Joseph Smith, SART training is offered as a voluntary opportunity for officers who care to participate.

It has been confirmed by GUPD that this modification will function as a more comforting and private response to reports of sexual assault. According to SART co-coordinator Sergeant Sarah Halpren-Ruder, the SART team aims to ensure the survivors’ emotional and physical welfare and comfort. In a recent interview with The Hoya, she said: “When I respond, my initial reaction is making sure that our survivor is physically and emotionally OK, and that’s my primary goal coupled with having somebody respond with me so that we can make sure that the subject or the alleged perpetrator is not out there and a threat to our community, our campus. We have that, then we have delicately getting to whether or not the survivor does want to pursue criminal charges and call MPD.”

She added: “Students who have been victimized in any way were often scared to come report to us because they didn’t necessarily want to go through that whole channel of MPD and potentially criminal court and all that stuff. With that changing, I’ve been trying to push that out to the students so that they know that they’re less limited in terms of their options.”

Contrasting previous protocol, this expansion will make certain that all fourteen members of the SART team have the capability to respond to rape victims on a professional level. There will be absolutely no need for the victim to publicly report the assault to members of the GUPD—a daunting process that typically requires getting sexual assault reports transferred to the Metropolitan Police Department.

“No two cases, no two situations are the same, so there’s no typical recovery process. Everybody handles every situation very differently,” Halpren-Ruder said. “So it’s being there for the students, or the non-students, it depends who comes to us, and kind of being their guide to try to help them navigate life after, because you don’t ever get over it, you just have learn to live differently.”

On another note, GUSA executive Deputy Chief of Staff Olivia Hinerfeld claims that the foundation of SART has annihilated the stereotypical claims of law enforcement regarding ways in which GUPD handle cases of sexual assault. “Around law enforcement in general, there’s been anecdotally concerns raised for many years that people in law enforcement don’t always have the training to respond to survivors of sexual violence in the most sensitive way,” she said.

“Having people in the unit that are trained to talk to survivors and know what kinds of questions are appropriate is going to be really important for this campus in making sure that people feel comfortable coming forward if they want to report and initiate that formal investigation process.”

Through the establishment of such a professional and necessary team, Georgetown University hopes to support, comfort and make peaceful the lives of victims of sexual assault.