By Alex Hunn
Assistant District Attorney in Brown & Mills Counties
In 2021, the legislature enacted a statute requiring every county in the state to have or participate in a Sexual Assault Response Team, or SART, to improve the community response to sexual violence.[1] The statute occupies just 1,500 words of the Government Code and includes several specific mandates for Texas counties. For the larger counties like Travis, multi-agency sexual assault task forces were already in place. For smaller counties like mine, the SART was an unexpected challenge with rapidly approaching deadlines.
One year ago, I was given the opportunity to assemble the Brown County Sexual Assault Response Team. In doing so, I was faced with two challenges: first, meeting the basic statutory requirements, and second, making the most of the opportunity to improve outcomes in sexual assault cases in the community. In this article, I will outline the basic requirements required by law for a SART, the unique challenges of building a SART in a rural county, and the ways our SART has taken advantage of the process to improve how we handle adult sexual assault cases in Brown and Mills Counties.
The basic requirements
Every county in Texas must establish its own Sexual Assault Response Team, with one exception: Two or more contiguous counties, each with population of 250,000 or less, may share a team.[2] This exception applies to more than 90 percent of Texas counties, including my own, Brown County.[3] The team must, at minimum, include a representative from a local sexual assault program, a prosecutor, a representative of the county’s largest police department, the sheriff or his designee, a forensic nurse examiner, and a behavioral health representative, all initially designated by the county commissioners.[4]
The act provides no funding and does not designate who should take the initiative on assembling a SART. While the commissioners court could take the lead, I found from asking around that in almost every county, the district attorney’s office led the initiative. Once the initial membership has been identified, however, the commissioner’s court must actually sign off on the creation of the new SART.
Once assembled, a SART has only a few enumerated responsibilities. The team must create a protocol for coordinating responses to adult sexual assault in the county, and it must provide four hours of cross-agency training for team members.[5] And on December 1 of each odd-numbered year, the team must provide the county commissioners court with a list of members, a copy of the written protocols, and a summary detailing all sexual assault reports received by law enforcements with the final resolution of those cases.[6]
Challenges of operating a small-county SART
The first challenge of operating a SART in a small county is getting the organization off the ground to begin with. Here in Brown County, there are no specialists on the topic of sexual assault—none of our law enforcement agencies are large enough to have a sexual assault division, our District Attorney’s Office has a total of five prosecutors with general felony dockets, and our SANE nurses are based 78 miles away in Abilene. Being from a small county has its advantages, though: The best people for your team are almost certainly people you already know!
Ultimately I was tasked with representing the District Attorney’s Office, and each law enforcement agency in our jurisdiction had one crimes-against-persons investigator willing to join the SART. We had another windfall in the incredible dedication of our SANE nurse representative, Susie Striegler, who commutes from Abilene to be available for exams and for every SART meeting. She is also on the Taylor County SART and has relayed all their progress to our own SART—no rule prohibits someone from serving on more than one team, and anyone dedicated enough to sit on two will be an exceptional resource for both.
The next challenge is data collection. Every organization tracks cases a little differently and for different purposes. Prior to the SART, none of our local law enforcement agencies collected aggregate data on the numbers of sexual assault reports received, SANE exams conducted, and cases sent to our office for intake. At the outset, we prioritized collecting updated numbers from law enforcement every six months. For 2023, we’ll be trying to collect this information every month. To make this happen, several people will have to do some unpaid work; law enforcement representatives will have to gather data, and someone on the SART will then have to process all this data into a single document.
Beyond the difficulties in collecting the data, another unique small-county difficulty has been a low number of cases overall. In a large agency, the number of sexual assault reports could be in the hundreds or even thousands for a year. In our county, none of our agencies have broken double digits in 2022. Due to the size of the data set, it has been more difficult to identify patterns and trends on which we can rely to troubleshoot issues with the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault. After the first round of data is gathered in 2023, I hope to compare notes with similarly situated counties.
The last challenge involves protocols. Large agencies often have specific protocols for specific offenses, including sexual assault, which can be used as a framework for the county-wide sexual assault protocols every SART must adopt. Prior to the enactment of the 2021 statute, all the pre-existing SARTs were in the most populous Texas counties. We can be thankful that many of these resources are available from TAASA, the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, on its website.[7] TAASA provides guidelines on what to include in protocols along with several other helpful resources for operating a SART.
Going beyond the basic requirements
There are basic statutory requirements for every SART which we are all now scrambling to complete, but these belie the single most positive impact of the law: to bring together every organization in a county with a stake in the crime of sexual assault. The SART is an opportunity to build relationships with the people and organizations that are critical to understanding each sexual assault case that reaches our desks.
While there are certain people who must attend SART meetings by statute, there is no limit on the number of attendees. Even if you are not your organization’s representative, the SART meeting is a good opportunity to ask questions about SANE exams or to find out what resources your local domestic violence shelter can provide to victims in these cases.
The required trainings are also an opportunity to improve your knowledge of the process. This year, my SART had one session dedicated entirely to SANE exams; our SANE representative gave a full, step-by-step explanation of how the exams are conducted, something that neither I nor any of our law enforcement members had known. Another session was spent outlining all the resources available to victims through MHMR and our local domestic violence shelter.
Finally, the data gathering. Even a small number of data points will give you an idea of how many sexual assault reports are made, what portion of those result in a SANE, and how many make it to your intake box. In another year or two, we will also have data on how many are ultimately indicted and how many result in a conviction. This data may result in some difficult but important conversations about how sexual assault reports are being handled in your county.
Conclusion
When the legislature determined that every county in Texas would have a SART, it left a lot of us scrambling. Scrambling to fulfill the requirements, sure, but also to make it an asset for our communities and not just another item on our agendas. I hope this article has provided a little guidance on achieving both.
Endnotes
[1] Tex. Gov. Code §§351.251–351.258.
[2] Tex. Gov. Code §351.252.
[3] 2020 United States Census, www.census.gov.
[4] Tex. Gov. Code §351.252.
[5] Tex. Gov. Code §351.256.
[6] Tex. Gov. Code §351.257.
[7] https://taasa.org/resources/sexual-assault-response-teams.