Week 2 with CrossRoads (blog 3)

CrossRoads is a sexual assault crisis center which advocates for both children and adults through counseling services, medical treatment, and legal resources. A crisis center can be used to report an assault you know is occurring to you or someone else and can be used to report something that has happened today or anytime in the past. For example, you could come in for an assault you experienced the previous evening or you can come in for resources of something that happened to you as a child and you need resources to help you cope with it now. CrossRoads provides the resources to conduct forensic interviews with a police officer and helps train these police officers on how to respect and handle the different needs of a survivor. A large part of CrossRoads is their child advocacy, this organization takes in over 350 new child cases a year. This organization provides the young children with resources to have long-term or short-term counseling services. The organization works to educate the community on not just the resources CrossRoads offers but on recognizing what sexual assault or harassment is.
CrossRoads has three advocates who work with the clients and will go to the hospital or to court with them if needed. One of our advocates is specialized to work with adults and the other two are specialized with children, although they work with any client that needs their services. One of these advocates is also a bilingual advocate, speaking Spanish and English due to our large population of Spanish speakers in Alamance county. We also have a couple of therapists that work in the office as well. CrossRoads has two women who work more on the administrative side of the office, one of which is the Executive Director and the other is the Managing Director. Also, there is an outreach coordinator, who is my supervisor and then the office administrator, who officially runs the front desk but also handles so many other things throughout the office.
I have two exciting things that happened this week! I got to attend a training on responding to elder abuse victims who come into our organization and how to provide them with resources which may be different from younger victims. I learned a great deal in this day long training event and have a much better understanding of how to help not just elder abuse victims, but any abuse victim. This training was really enlightening and I got the chance to meet and talk with people from the Department of Social Services, Adult Protective Services, Victim-Advocates in the District Attorney’s office, and people from our ElderCare facilities in Alamance County. Not only was I able to make connections with people outside of my organization I was able to have a greater understanding of what these other facilities do for people. My other exciting event, was being able to attend a Social Justice book club which this month they read Kate Harding’s book Asking For It, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the perpetuations of rape culture in our society and how to diminish them. I was excited to read this book because Kate Harding came to Wake Forest my freshman year to talk about this book and I was intrigued by her story. I was able to go to this book club as a representative of CrossRoads and it was great getting to hear about what people outside of this line of work thought about the different things Harding had to say and their enthusiasm to hear about my experiences with this work at CrossRoads and at Wake Forest. I am excited to continue my work next week and tell everyone about the new things I have learned by then!