What Is ICAP?
For over 40 years the International Center for Assault Prevention, known as ICAP, has worked with local people who desire to advocate and protect children by starting a CAP project in their town. Individuals or agencies contact ICAP to arrange project setup trainings.
Since its inception in 1978, ICAP has trained over 10 million children, parents and teachers to prevent peer assault, stranger abduction and known adult assault. CAP seeks to integrate the best resources of a community in an effort to reduce a child or young person’s vulnerability to verbal, physical and sexual assault. CAP projects work closely with the local school districts, parent/teacher associations and home school groups, and other community groups. All CAP curricula have a threefold educational approach to prevention which includes trainings in the following areas: Staff In service, Parent Program and Individual Classroom Workshops for children and teens. Type of CAP Programs.
Our History
The Child Assault Prevention (CAP) Project originated in the late 1970’s, in Columbus, Ohio, as a response to the rape of a young child. Early in 1978, project staff of Women Against Rape (WAR) received a phone call from a teacher whose second grade student had been raped. The students in her class and parents of the school and the entire community were disturbed and frightened. At that time, few people discussed adult rape, let alone a sexual assault against a child. These families wondered how they could protect other children from abuse.
Offering emotional support and empowering prevention information, the staff at WAR responded by developing the original Child Assault Prevention (CAP) curriculum. A year later, funding from a Ms. Foundation Challenge Grant allowed the program to be piloted in schools throughout Columbus. As CAP’s successes caught on beyond the city of Columbus and the state of Ohio, the National Center for Assault Prevention (NCAP) was created as a CAP training center. Sally Cooper, a champion of women’s and children’s rights, became its first Director. Sally, with her dedicated staff, went on to establish CAP in 40 of the 80 counties of Ohio and trained projects throughout the USA and in several other countries, including Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Costa Rica, Grand Bahamas, Israel, and Ireland. In 1991, the NCAP Center in Columbus Ohio closed its doors.
NCAP/ICAP Director 1991-2006
Due to the outstanding record of statewide support that NJCAP had, the National Center for Assault Prevention awarded the copyright of the CAP© Program to NJCAP and asked that it be the new site of the International CAP Center. Pat Stanislaski was asked to be the Director of NCAP/ICAP
The ICAP Center has trained and established projects in many states and countries. In 1994, under a George Soros grant through UNICEF, Pat worked with ten Eastern European countries to setup CAP projects across the region.
In June 2006 Cheryl Mojta and Jeannette Collins assumed the leadership of the ICAP project. Both women have an extensive background with prevention education and had been with CAP for over 20 years working on classroom prevention and empowerment curricula, project protocol, policies and program fidelity among projects.
Selected accomplishments during ICAP’s History include:
- CAP’s Bullying Prevention Program developed including workshops for K through 8th grades
- Training and Project Setup of CAP Japan which has grown to be the largest CAP project in the world with almost 2000 CAP facilitators in Northern and Southern Regional Training Centers.
- First Child Assault Prevention Center in Republic of Korea sponsored by Childfund Korea
- Cyber-Empowerment program developed in collaboration with students from the Education Department of Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ.
- New Adult Workshops on the prevention of sexual harassment, identifying sexualized children, boy’s victimization, trafficking and teens and animal abuse and its relationship to child abuse.
- New CAP Projects in Des Moines, Iowa; Las Vegas, Nevada; Roseau, Dominica; Nantes, France, and Brussels, Belgium
- First International CAP Conference, May 2016, in Atlantic City, NJ.
- First CAP Project in Shenzhen, China, sponsored by Distinct Healthcare Limited.
- August 2020, ICAP incorporated to support the RTC’s worldwide.
Currently, ICAP has trained facilitators in 22 states and 16 countries and is considered to be one of the most innovative and comprehensive community-based child abuse and neglect prevention programs internationally.
