Empowerment evaluation: building prevention science and organizational capacity to prevent sexual violence.

The articles in this special issue all result from the employment of empowerment evaluation with the intention of furthering the field of sexual violence prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's goals were to build the science toward evidence-based programming and to build evaluation capacity among leaders in the sexual violence field. Other undefined benefits also resulted, including the facilitation of implementation of program improvements and the development of capacities that can be generalized across other aspects of the participants' work. These benefits are attributed to empowerment evaluation's intentional designation of evaluation activities to the same people responsible for program delivery. Empowerment evaluation's potential to make future contributions to the field of sexual violence prevention is discussed.