$950,000 federal grant to fund SANE nurse documenting evidence in the sexual assault cases of the Idaho panhandle

A $950,000 federal grant will go toward ensuring sexual assaults in rural North Idaho receive a forensic evaluation.

The evidence collected in these cases can be critical in pursuing prosecutions against perpetrators of sexual assault and domestic violence. The three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women will provide such evaluations across the 10 northern counties of the Idaho Panhandle.

Grant funds will go toward Kootenai Health’s Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner program and specifically support Safe Passage’s Children’s Advocacy Center, which conducts forensic exams of children who may have experienced sexual abuse and later can testify at trial about their findings.

Children who face such abuse in rural Idaho may not have access to an exam conducted by a registered nurse with SANE training, said Safe Passage executive director Amanda Krier.

“We don’t really have anybody right now that does this work full time,” she said.

Safe Passage currently relies on nurses with SANE training who work as a nurse elsewhere in the community. Having a nurse dedicated to this work fully will greatly increase the number of exams that can be accomplished.

“This will be a dedicated person dealing with all of the children that they see at Kootenai Community Health, as well as the kids that we see in our advocacy center; it just is going to help with ongoing accountability,” she said. “They’ll be specifically trained to be able to cue in on those child abuse-like issues that they see when maybe a kiddo comes in and they have different forms of trauma on their bodies, and sometimes they might not if a provider without the specialized training, we might not catch child abuse.”

Kootenai Health forensic nurse examiner Jennifer Bailey said conducting these exams is about giving victims their autonomy back.

“As a Forensic Nurse Examiner, I’ve seen firsthand how trauma-informed care empowers survivors to begin healing while ensuring their voices are heard in both medical and legal settings. The more we can train other nurses on this topic, the stronger our community will be,” Bailey said in a statement.

Kootenai Health Foundation President Cara Nielsen said funding of the SANE program will be especially important in the Panhandle outside of Coeur d’Alene, where care can be hard to find .

“Survivors in rural communities often face significant barriers to care. With this renewed support, we’re able to build on our progress and further expand access to vital community services – regardless of the time of day or where someone lives,” Nielsen said in a statement.

According to Krier, documented cases of sexual assault have been rising in the region. To her, that does not mean the number of sexual assaults has increased; it means people are being heard in ways they were not before.