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National Judicial Education Program's First Regional Team Meeting a Success

Legal Momentum’s National Judicial Education Program recently held its first Regional Team Meeting in Alexandria, Virginia. With participants from jurisdictions across the Mid-Atlantic Region – Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington DC – the Meeting was a resounding success.

NJEP educates judges and justice system professionals about the ways gender bias can be a factor across all areas of the law and how to prevent it. A particular focus of NJEP’s work is adult victim sexual assault, cases often beset with deeply held stereotypes and misconceptions that can undermine the judicial process. Because of the challenging nature of these cases, NJEP seeks to integrate and sustain judicial, probation, and community education about adult victim sexual assault cases in jurisdictions throughout the country over the long term.

Each jurisdiction at the Regional Team Meeting sent two judges, a state judicial educator, a representative from probation, and a sexual assault coalition representative. The teams learned about NJEP’s curricula and resources regarding adult victim sexual assault cases and developed plans to integrate and sustain education about these challenging cases in their own jurisdictions.

NJEP created a variety of new educational resources in preparation for the Regional Team Meeting, including in-person curricula based on its web course/resource, Intimate Partner Sexual Abuse: Adjudicating this Hidden Dimension of Domestic Violence Cases and materials for new judges to introduce them to the issues they may face when they hear adult victim sexual assault cases. NJEP also developed topic modules regarding numerous aspects of sexual assault that can be integrated into existing judicial education programs, including programs on drug courts, interpreters, juries and jury selection, elder abuse, and more.

Learn more about the National Judicial Education Program.

Learn more about the National Judicial Education Program’s sexual assault resources.