Who Let This Guy In?

Some lessons from a decade as a volunteer victim advocate

Starting this one off with a content warning. This post is about my experiences as a sexual assault volunteer victim advocate. I do not go into detail regarding assaults, but do describe in broad terms what occurs in the ER after reporting.

The phone is a time bomb with no visible clock, but it’s always ticking. It’s an ancient flip phone, the kind that goes for weeks on one charge and could probably be run over by a car or two and still handle a call. That flip phone connects me to two kinds of events: an emergency room visit or someone in crisis who calls the national hotline. It’s my first shift as a sexual assault crisis line volunteer and I’m terrified. By the end of that 48 hour period I would spend approximately 18 of it in three different emergency rooms.

Hundreds of us are on call right now throughout the country. We each cover a distinct geographical area and only talk with locals, though they may be routed to us from the national hotline. We all came to this through different pathways. Many members of my team are students who need a certain amount of volunteer hours in order to get their social work degree. Some want to be therapists. Some just want to make their communities safer. A few found out about the organization the hardest way possible: they were the one in the hospital bed, then in the free therapy services and classes. They have taken their stories and experiences and turned them into a power to help others. These people are often young, and all are smart and driven that it’s hard not to be infected with their optimism and enthusiasm and jealous of how easily they stay awake all night.

But why did I join the team? What made this maybe just a little too tall middle-aged bald man think he was the right person to advocate for and attempt to comfort a teenager in the middle of one of the worst moments she’ll ever face? Would it make me sound a little less noble if I said I had no idea what I was getting into?

A year into volunteering for a couple of hours a week at the domestic violence shelter I was tasked with dropping off some packages at the center for the organization that ran it. There I met the coordinator for the rape crisis team. We chatted about what her job entailed and I asked her if the volunteers were in a phone bank. She laughed and told me that they had the phone for 48 hour shifts but otherwise just lived their normal lives. I asked if men can be on the team and she said they encouraged it. After a year of working with victim/survivors of domestic violence, the once-terrifying specter of sexual assault seemed like something I could confront. Within a day or two I’d been sent the information for the next training and I signed up.

It wasn’t until I was probably 15 hours into a 40 hour training that I found out that we didn’t just answer hotline phone calls. That’s when I found out that the vast majority of the time we’d spend actually working with victims were what we called “code-r’s.” Code-R is a euphemism for what is more commonly called a “rape kit.” This generally encompasses the items in a forensic nurse examiner’s evidence box. This “kit” consists mostly of a series of DNA swabs, some paperwork, and a paper bag because DNA degrades more quickly in plastic. A Code-R visit is much, much more than a kit. It’s a physical examination for the health of the patient, sometimes multiple intensive interviews with hospital and law enforcement staff, medication to help fight sexually-transmitted-infections, a Plan B birth control pill, and—yes—evidence collection.

This was a shock to me. But by that point in the training I had become fully radicalized to what our trainer called “the gospel of rape crisis.” In four-hour chunks every evening and 8-hour marathons on Saturdays, we’d been pumped so full of statistics, case-studies, documentaries, and criminal court horror stories that I would have signed up for just about anything to help. I’m grateful that it worked out that way. I would never have joined the team otherwise and my goodness I don’t know who I’d be today without it.

When I did learn what a Code-R visit consisted of, again I questioned what my role could possibly be in such an invasive and intimate process. That’s when I learned about Secondary Victims. Often a victim of sexual assault will tell a friend or family member, who then volunteers to take them to the police station to file a report, or to the hospital emergency room for their well-being. I’m always astonished at what extraordinary people these are. Once it was a roommate just two months into the school year. She happily spent an entire night with someone she barely knew. Sometimes it’s parents or siblings. They’re there for a loved one in an extraordinary circumstance and often they need someone too.

I saw first-hand what experts mean when they say that the most important person a victim of sexual assault talks to is the first one. I hope a loved one doesn’t have to tell you that they’ve been assaulted, but if they do, that’s an honor. Please don’t let them down. “I’m so sorry that happened,” you can say. “I believe you. Would you like me to take you to the emergency room to make sure you’re OK? I will be there with you the whole time.” Your job isn’t to convince them to press charges, even though you may think it is. Your job is to hold their hand, tell them how brave they’re being, and take them to eat somewhere they love afterward.

My first call I spent in a waiting room with the mother and father of an 18-year-old girl. Part of the reason my team works in pairs, and why two men are never on call together, is because victims have complete control of their surroundings and can choose who stays during the exam. I was understandably asked to leave. While the nurse worked and my volunteer partner advocated, I sat in a separate room with two distraught and loving parents and discussed the long-term health of their daughter. I had paperwork to share with them about PTSD, our group and individual therapy options, and the hotline. Because two of us are on call at any given time, one answers phone calls for direct survivors of sexual assault, but the other phone is dedicated to people who know someone who was assaulted. I try to make this so clear. If I’m filling someone else’s bucket with mine, it sure helps to have someone behind me refilling my bucket, you know?

I’m a dad. I can relate to moms and dads. And because we live in a patriarchal society, I look like the kind of person who dispenses important information. And I had good resources. But like the frog in the slowly-heating pan, I was pushed just a little beyond my comfort zone at every step. Each time I realized wow, I can handle this, I had just experienced a fraction of what I would eventually do. The next shift I had, I had to interrupt a police officer who was being too aggressive in his questioning and tell him to stop. You all. This is not my personality. It was like watching myself from the outside and the part of me that was watching was hissing in a whisper-shout to the part that was talking that this was a police officer and they are scary.

What I was not prepared for was when a patient specifically ask that I stay. Here’s something that surprised then 38-year old me: a lot of teenage girls love Marvel movies. They know the lore and a lot of them know the comics and you’d be amazed at how fast two people from vastly different generations can bond when it comes to speculating about which classic villain is going to show up in the next Dr. Strange movie.

There has been no aspect of my background or personality that hasn’t somehow been the key fulcrum upon which a trust-building relationship has been built. No matter how niche. Once I talked at length with a patient about classic video games I’d played as a kid that had come out before she was even born. Another time I spent much of the downtime of the visit giving advice on how to prepare a resume to apply for a federal biologist job.

We have a lot of media about victims/survivors of sexual assault. I’m glad it’s being addressed but also I don’t like how sexual assault is used as a character-defining moment. That a victim/survivor will from that point on define their lives as before and after the assault. These plotlines, usually written by men, imagine rape as a piece of character development. Then they show their audiences how they think a survivor should behave. This is insidious to me. It gives juries and law enforcement and legal counsel a fictional perfect victim against whom they can judge a living, breathing person.

Survivors are not immune to this narrative, either. One of the jobs I’ve assigned myself when we’re spending what can sometimes be upwards of eight hours with someone is to remind them that they are still the person they were before. I want to see pictures of their kids and hear what they’re up to. I love getting into the behind-the-scenes details about whatever job they have. One of my favorite questions is “what’s your breakroom like?” And because we’re there for so long and often nobody has eaten in at least a meal’s worth of time, we talk a lot about food. One of the true small talk shortcuts is the age old query: “Where’s the best place to get real tacos around here?”

One lesson I learned early on is that, perhaps unbelievably, there can be a lot of laughter in that room. We spend quite a bit of time together and talk about so much and humor is a way a lot of people deal with terrible things while in the midst of them. When Professor Grant and the kids are making dinosaur puns while facing constant fear, it may come across as disingenuous, or too Hollywood. I hear constant complaints about how quippy superheroes get in the movies. But that’s really how people deal with crisis.

A tough lesson for me, though, was realizing that when every new person came on site, we needed to reset the room. Once, several hours into a call, the patient and I discovered that we both like some of the same true crime podcasts and while we were waiting for prescriptions to arrive, were having a pretty boisterous conversation about serial killers. A very distraught grandmother, who had driven hours to be with her granddaughter in this moment, came into a room wildly different that what she expected. She was picturing a crying granddaughter who needed a grandma’s hug and advice. Instead she came into what felt like an episode of My Favorite Murder, and a borderline rowdy one.

Grandma wasn’t the victim and she wasn’t the person we were there for, but her emotions mattered too; one assault has many victims. Years later, I still regret not pulling things back and resetting long enough for her to process the situation and be caught up on what had happened so far, what resources we’d provided, and what we could do for her. Luckily, as is the case with every woman over 60 in Utah, she had a Ted Bundy close call story to share.

Since that first shift, things have changed a lot. We now have smartphones, though I miss the old flip phone sometimes. I like that it was built just for phone calls, though the new phones offer a lot of features for communicating with teammates and coordinators. Shifts are just 24 hours now. We now work with a team of dedicated sexual assault nurse examiners (SANEs) right in the ER, whereas at the time I began examinations were performed by residents at a central clinic. And the data set we’ve created based on the narrative forms we create has built one of the most robust data sets of sexual assault narratives in the world. Perhaps hardest of all, we just started responding to pediatric assault cases.

Some things haven’t changed since the team started, back in the 1970s. The patient has always been in charge. If they don’t want to do something, we ensure that they don’t have to. On a Code-R, everyone has a job. SANEs collect evidence, police interview and ensure a chain of evidence, hospital staff ensures physical health. Each of these tasks means that their focus will necessarily shift from the person they’re there to help. As advocates, ours never does.

Given the overwhelming fight ahead, it sometimes feels like we didn’t accomplish much. I never know how people think about us afterward. In her book, Know my Name, Chanel Miller provided an insight I’ve read over and over since, both as a motivation and a guide. I’ll leave you with it.

“I understood their hands were keeping me from falling into an abyss. Whatever was crawling into the corridors of my insides would be dragged out by the ankles. They were a force barricading me, even making me laugh. They could not undo what was done, but they could record it, photograph every millimeter of it, seal it into bags, force someone to look. Not once did they sigh or pity or “poor thing” me. They did not mistake my submission for weakness, so I did not feel a need to prove myself, to show them I was more than this. They knew. Shame could not breathe here, would be shooed away. So I made my body soft and gave it over to them while my mind bobbed in the light stream of conversation. Which is why, thinking back on the memory with them the discomfort and fear are secondary. The primary feeling was warmth.”