State sexual assault response team.
HB 1415 establishes a statewide sexual assault response team within the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute. The team would be made up of 14 members representing law enforcement, prosecution, defense, courts, victim advocacy, medical professionals, disability advocacy, and forensic expertise. It would be chaired by the executive director of the Criminal Justice Institute or a designee and would meet at least quarterly from July 1, 2025, through July 1, 2027.
The bill directs the team to study how sexual assault cases are handled across Indiana. Its duties include identifying county and local sexual assault response teams, surveying their best practices, contacting law enforcement agencies about investigation protocols, evaluating academy and annual training for sexual assault investigations, compiling best practices, and reporting findings and legislative recommendations by November 1, 2027. The team must also develop the victim-rights documents required under existing sexual assault victim-rights statutes and collect qualitative feedback from survivors about their experiences reporting sexual assault to law enforcement.
HB 1415 would add a new section to the Indiana Code creating a statewide coordination body and would amend several sexual assault victim-rights provisions to reference that body. It affects IC 5-2-6-28.5, IC 35-31.5-2-312.5, and IC 35-40.5, and it requires providers and law enforcement to use team-developed rights documents when interacting with victims. The bill also requires those documents to be available in accessible formats and in English, Spanish, and German, and it reinforces that victims do not have to undergo a medical evidentiary exam to retain their rights.
Based on the bill text and the absence of recorded committee testimony or votes in the provided materials, the measure appears to be framed as a public-safety and victim-services improvement bill rather than a controversial policy shift. Its structure suggests broad institutional support for standardizing sexual assault response practices, improving training, and strengthening victim information and access to advocates. No recorded opposition or vote history is provided here, so there is no clear evidence of partisan or procedural conflict in the available context.
The main points of potential contention are likely to be the bill’s administrative scope and its mandates on law enforcement and providers. Some stakeholders could question whether a new statewide team duplicates existing local efforts, whether the reporting and survey requirements create additional workload, and whether the team’s recommendations could lead to future policy changes affecting investigation practices or training standards. The inclusion of representatives from prosecution, defense, law enforcement, victim advocacy, disability advocacy, and medical fields suggests an effort to balance perspectives, but it also indicates that implementation details and the content of best-practice recommendations could be debated.