SANE programs employ specially trained forensic nurses to provide 24-hour-a-day, first-response medical care and crisis intervention for rape survivors in either hospitals or clinic settings. The literature on SANE programs is largely descriptive, with numerous articles describing how SANE programs have been created, the kinds of problems they have encountered, and how they have resolved those issues. There is also a substantial body of work on the technical aspects of forensic evidence collection and the administration of SANE programs. This article aims to advance the literature by focusing on the growing empirical literature regarding the effectiveness of SANE programs in multiple domains. The article first reviews the research on rape survivors' experiences with hospital emergency departments to identify what is problematic about this pre-SANE approach to postassault care and what SANE has sought to change. The authors then provide an overview of SANE programs in terms of their current structure, function, and operations. This is followed by a review of the empirical literature on the effectiveness of SANE programs in the aforementioned five domains. The authors conclude that preliminary evidence indicates that SANE programs are effective in all these domains; however, the conclusions of this review are tentative, because most published studies have not included adequate methodological controls necessary for rigorous testing of the effectiveness of SANE programs. 1 table, 6 notes, and 68 references