Week 3 with CrossRoads (blog 4)

CrossRoads was started by a small group of 15 women who advocated for a woman over 40 years ago who was raped by a police officer in Burlington, this group was then called the Rape Crisis Alliance of Alamance County. The woman who had been sexually assaulted went to these women who she knew would help her and they gathered and formed this group to provide her with the supportive resources she would need as a survivor. The group sent one of them to go to court with her, the Rape Crisis Alliance member was Kathy Hykes, who is now the Mayor Pro Tem of Burlington. The judge asked Ms. Hykes her reason for coming to the court that day, because her appearance did not match the rest of the family for the victim. She replied that she was there to be an advocate for this woman and she was asked to wait outside the courtroom on a radiator. From this moment on this alliance only grew to what is now known as CrossRoads Sexual Assault Response and Resource Center. In the 1980s the Rape Crisis Alliance became a United Way Agency, allowing the group to begin paying the people who worked for the organization and expanded its staff to include the official positions of crisis intervention coordinator, community educator, and victim advocate. In 1996 the Rape Crisis Alliance decided to change its name so as to better reflect the organization’s resources and their inclusion of their Children Advocacy Center which was added in the same year and nationally certified by the National Children’s Alliance.
As was said before the first visit to the court house with a victim was not really accepted and the court house was not ready for this new advocate person for the victim. Since then CrossRoads has become extremely well connected with the Police Department, the District Attorney’s office, as well as many other departments in the community and is more accepted in the court room.
My highlight from this week was having my supervisor ask me to compile information to hand out regarding the consent laws in North Carolina specifically and a federal problem of a sexual harassment loophole which unpaid interns face. This past semester I had the opportunity to take a class in the Wake Forest law school on gender and the law. For my semester paper I wrote on sexual assault laws in three states, including North Carolina in this research. I was excited to write more about this topic because it intrigues me quite a bit. I was also really shocked by the unpaid intern’s sexual harassment loophole that my supervisor told me about. There was an unpaid intern on Capitol Hill the summer of 2013 and she was sexually harassed and assault by her supervisor. The young woman tried to file a claim under Title VII which is an act under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which protects employees from certain discriminatory practices such as sexual harassment. A federal judge shot down her claim saying that since she was an intern and not an employee her lawsuit was outside the scope of federal anti-discrimination laws. To me this was a shocking and disturbing thing to learn, especially since so many people my age are unpaid interns at this point in their life. There have been moves made to try and change this by creating a bill which says all interns are covered by Title VII as well. This bill died in the House of Representatives during the 114th Congress, the previous Congress. I have really appreciated getting the chance to learn more about this and more about the NC Consent law I previously studied.