With in-person outreach and events still not an option, several community partners have teamed up for a monthlong campaign of support and education for survivors of sexual assault across Pima County.
As an increased number of students return to campus and in-person learning and many bars and restaurants reopen amid lifting pandemic restrictions, the timing of April’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month is especially important, said Stephanie Noriega, interim director of the University of Arizona’s Survivor Advocacy Program.
But as the pandemic creeps towards an end, Noriega and partner organizations had to get creative to get the message out, on campus and beyond.
“Looking at where we were at, we couldn’t do tabling on the mall or anything like that,†Noriega said. “A lot of national organizations are already pulling together toolkits to do social media campaigns and awareness activities and engagement, so it seemed feasible to really just take what worked and alter it.â€
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Noriega and her colleague in the advocacy program, Brenda Anderson Wadley, worked together with the UA’s Consortium on Gender-Based Violence to put together a toolkit that was applicable to UA community and beyond, and the end result is a literal calendar full of virtual events in April, posted to the survivor advocacy website. Many are happening on social media and some are as simple as posting a statistic, sharing a relevant account or explaining the term “consent†as it relates to sexual violence.
But there are also virtual trainings and panels in conjunction with the Southern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault (SACASA,) Take Back the Night Tucson, and other local agencies and community groups.
These are especially important as campus reentry progresses, as the survivor advocacy program hasn’t been able to do outreach to the extent they’d like during the past six months.
The program is wrapping up its third academic year, and Noriega said that by spring 2020, as their second year came to a close, they’d really gotten into a good stride when it came to providing survivor services, as well as student, advisor and faculty outreach. Then the pandemic hit.
“Since the university closed down last March, we just did a pivot and slowed our pace down, knowing we knew we were in it for the long haul,†Noriega said. “We have made top priority to not disrupt our availability to students.â€
Noriega said they “never skipped a beat,†transitioning to virtual office hours and Zoom appointments, and staying in close contact with referring partners on campus.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is refusing to detail how his office is protecting two current aides who claim that he sexually harassed or assaulted them in the past year.
Training and presentations have been scant, as Noriega and others have had to prioritize their time and not take on too much.
“Anecdotally, it still felt like people were still coming. It still felt like we were still seeing folks,†Noriega said. “Oftentimes, it was people who did go back home. But we had folks engaged regardless of where they were at.â€
Noriega said she found herself googling state coalitions and resources in other cities on a regular basis. She called the caseload this past year a “mixed bag,†saying she and the program’s other advocate heard from students that began to process abuse that had happened more than a year prior, and spoke to others that were experiencing domestic abuse and intimate partner violence, as activity on campus ground to a halt.
“We’re still 100% here and ready to support (survivors,) despite COVID or being away from campus,†Noriega said. “We don’t ever want folks to feel hesitant to reach out. We always put the needs of survivors and students at the center.â€
When it comes to this year’s alternative awareness campaign, Noriega said it came down to having their hands in several pots, but being careful to not take everything on by themselves.
“Where is the work happening and where can we link up so it can be a collective effort and it doesn’t fall on anyone, has kind of been my approach,†Noriega said.
In the end, they partnered with the consortium and other local agencies to plan events, many that have a focus on the campus community. Others have a larger reach, like April 28th’s Denim Day, an international effort to end victim-blaming, in which community members are encouraged to wear denim or a teal shirt in solidarity with survivors. Several Pima County groups are participating in the effort, and UA students are encouraged to use the hashtag, #UADenimDay and tag campus partners in their photos, Noriega said.
“I feel really proud and happy that there’s been so much collaboration and that it really does feel like a citywide effort,†Noriega said. “Sometimes I know we can get really busy and get in our silos, but this time around, it was almost like we’re all still surviving the pandemic, we’re service providers, we’re overworked. So there was this very natural sentiment that we had to do something, so let’s almost like combine our powers.â€
“It’s so much better for survivorsâ€
Officials with SACASA were still more than happy to partner up with the UA’s campus groups, Take Back the Night Tucson and county and city agencies to get the word out about the campaign. Due to the pandemic, SACASA has been unable to hold its annual “Dine Out for Safety†campaign the past two years.
And while initial numbers suggest that sexual assault might have gone down in Pima County amid the pandemic, it’s still important to get spread awareness to the problem, said SACASA’s Kristine Welter-Hall.
Advocates responding to hospitals at the request of survivors decreased 13% and medical forensic exam requests decreased 29% from July through December 2020, when compared to the same time the previous year, according to Welter-Hall.
Still, SACASA’s crisis advocates responded to hospitals 419 times in 2020, and medical forensic exams were provided in 50% of those situations, demonstrating a continued need for services and outreach, even amidst the pandemic, Welter-Hall said.
SACASA closed its office to walk-ins at the beginning and peak of the pandemic and switched to conducting their non-hospital based advocacy on the phone or via Zoom.
“At the beginning when things were pretty heightened, we’re able to work with TMC to have a tablet in the ER and do some initial Zoom talking with survivors to work through with them what their rights are, listen, support, and let them know the next steps,†Welter-Hall said. “If they decided they wanted a medical forensic exam, advocates would present to hospital and be there in-person to support them.â€
That didn’t last long.
“Our advocates asked if they could just get back on site,†Welter-Hall said. “It’s so much better for survivors.â€
The advocates got their wish, and everything has been business as usual — with the addition of PPE and social distancing — for a while now.
Welter-Hall thinks the drop in services requested is due to a variety of factors, including less acquaintance rapes in early months, with fewer people going out. She also said that they’d heard from police at the peak of Pima County’s caseload that some people did not want to go to the hospital.
They also saw a 55% to 45% drop in survivors who received medical forensic exams during that July through December time period, which could be due to people wanting to spend as little time in the hospital as possible, and not go through a lengthy exam.
“We did our best to educate folks and assure them that we were taking all COVID precautions,†Welter-Hall said.
While services provided changed over the past year, community partners’ commitment to SACASA’s Sexual Assault Response Team did not. Representatives from law enforcement, attorneys, youth groups, the UA, military, consulate and more all met several times a month .
Welter-Hall said that SACASA is especially mindful that April can be an especially triggering month for survivors, with the enhanced public focus on sexual assault awareness and services. In addition to advocates’ usual 24/7 availability, SACASA is expanding its therapy groups for survivors from two to four this month.
“We’re here all the time to listen and provide immediate coping skills with any triggers and trauma, and connect with ongoing services at SACASA and services within the community that may be beneficial to healing,†Welter-Hall said. “Our advocates provide ongoing advocacy, whether the assault occurred in childhood or just occurred, and we’re also here to support loved ones and family members of sexual assault.â€
In addition to SACASA and the UA groups, a handful of other agencies are participating in a social media campaign, using the hashtag #TucSAAM. Throughout the month, social media accounts from the Pima County Attorney’s Office, Tucson Police Department, Pima County Sheriff’s Department and Southern Arizona Children’s Advocacy Center have been sharing statistics, links to services and other related content on their various channels.
“Silence allows sexual violence to growâ€
The county attorney’s victim services division took a major role in the planning of this month’s activities, thanks in part to funding from the Bureau of Justice Assistance Sexual Assault Kit Initiative grant. The grant is meant to address untested sexual assault kits in law enforcement custody and help victims obtain a resolution.
The SAKI grant also allots funding for advocacy and education, part of which has been used for a PSA to alert survivors of the person to talk to — Victim Advocate Colleen Phelan — if they have questions about their rape kits.
The PSA is launching soon, and will provide survivors with Phelan’s direct phone number, so they’ll know in advance who they’re talking to. That’s important, Phelan said, because “this is personal.â€
COVID has dampened the office’s ability to do outreach in these types of cases to the extent they’d like, so the PSA was a way to reach a larger audience. The grant gave the office the push they needed to pull together a whole month of outreach to reach that same larger audience.
“Sexual Assault Awareness Month has never been quite as comprehensive as Domestic Violence Awareness Month,†Phelan said. “There’s been less comfort in general with sharing quite the same way.â€
Representatives from victim services met with people from other groups to talk about making this year’s event a bigger deal, pulling in agencies along the way to ensure that they were addressing current issues and raising awareness of how to prevent sexual violence, Phelan said.
“We always need have conversations about consent,†Phelan said. “Silence allows sexual violence to grow. So the more we talk about it and the more the conversation grows, the more we can start tackling why we live in a rape tolerant culture.â€
The planning for this year’s events was done with the focus of making 2022 even bigger and getting even more people involved, Phelan said, adding that it makes sense to pull together all of the groups who work together to assist survivors.
“We’re creating that path to healing. There’s not one thing, there’s a whole variety of options. That makes much more fruitful experience for survivors,†Phelan said.
With the circumstances of the pandemic, it may have been harder for survivors to seek services, Phelan said.
“Dealing with a sexual assault can be a luxury in some ways sometimes,†Phelan said. “If you’re just trying to put food on the table, that can’t be compromised by going to therapy, say. That’s something some people just don’t have the bandwidth for right now.â€
Phelan said that with so many people in survival mode, she believes there will be a rush for services when the world returns to a more normal state. That’s one of the reason outreach and advocacy are so important: So survivors will know where to turn to when they’re ready for support.
Photos: Growing up female, across the globe
Experts say girls in their first decade are better positioned for success than their mothers and grandmothers were, thanks to advances in health care and nutrition, and wider access to education. But they say more must be done to keep adolescent and teenage girls in school, and to protect them from violence, unintended pregnancies and forced marriage, which remains common in much of the developing world.
PHOTO: In this Sept. 29, 2015, file photo, Luana poses for photos on her roller skates at her home in Merlo, Argentina. Luana says that when one of the girls asked her why she had a penis, a friend jumped in. "She's transsexual," the child explained, nonchalantly. That level of comfort is no doubt in part because Luana herself appears so at ease. In 2013, she became the youngest person to take advantage of a progressive Argentine law that allows people to identify their own gender for legal purposes. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko, File)
"Poverty, violence, and cultural traditions oppress millions of girls in every part of the world," said Stephanie Sinclair, a visual journalist who founded "Too Young To Wed," which campaigns to protect girls' rights and end child marriage, while offering services to survivors. "It is still a global struggle to have girls valued for more than their bodies — for just their sexuality, fertility and labor."
PHOTO:Â - In this Oct. 11, 2013, file photo, a Pakistani girl lines up among boys for their morning assembly where they sing the national anthem at a school in Islamabad, Pakistan. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus, File)
The U.N. children's agency says 12 million girls under the age of 18 will marry this year, and 21 million between the aged of 15 and 19 will get pregnant.
PHOTOS:Â In this April 7, 2013, file photo, an Afghan girl tries to peer through the holes of her burqa as she plays with other children in the old town of Kabul, Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus, File)
"Every girl should have the right to decide for herself, if, when and whom to marry," Sinclair said. "To be allowed to be children and teens, with access to gender specific health care and all levels of education; and free to determine the course of their own lives."
PHOTO:Â In this Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2012 file photo, a young girl in her colorful dress reaches out to greet a Pakistani policeman securing the road outside Kainat Riaz's home in Mingora, Swat Valley, Pakistan. ( AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus, File)
The decision to award this year's Nobel Peace Prize to Nadia Murad, 25, who was among thousands of women and girls kidnapped and enslaved by the Islamic State group in 2014, highlighted a particularly vicious form of sexual assault.
±Ê±á°¿°Õ°¿:ÌýIn this photo taken in 2016, Baby Seibureh, 17, and Claude Seibureh, 48, of Freetown, were married during the Ebola crisis. Because of her small stature, Baby needed a cesarean section to safely give birth to their son, Joseph. While child marriage is a critical issue in both crisis and stable contexts, child marriage is rising at alarming rates in humanitarian settings. (Stephanie Sinclair/Too Young to Wed via AP)
But the #MeToo campaign has shown that less violent forms of sexual abuse and misconduct are all too common, affecting women at all income levels and across multiple industries. Even in wealthy countries, women face persistent pay gaps and other forms of discrimination.
PHOTO:Â In this Saturday, Jan. 2, 2016, file photo, Bedouin children run after a pick up truck in Abu Galoum, South Sinai, Egypt. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty, File)
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PHOTO:Â In this June 27, 2018, file photo, from left, Ranjeda, 9, Rumana, 10, Minajan, 10 and Wisma Bi Bi, 12, smile at each other while waiting in their classroom in Chakmarkul refugee camp, Bangladesh. Amid the misery and mud of Bangladesh's refugee camps, Rohingya girls have found small moments of joy by adorning themselves with flowery headbands and elaborately-drawn makeup. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E, File)
FILE - In this Feb. 9, 2018 file photo, Hagar Yahia holds her daughter Awsaf, a thin 5-year-old who is getting no more than 800 calories a day from bread and tea, half the normal amount for a girl her age, in Abyan, Yemen. Yahia, a mother of eight breaks down in tears talking about her family's deprivation. Late last year, as fighting closed in on Hayis, they fled more than 200 miles, eventually ending up in the village of Red Star on the Arabian Sea coast in the south. Ever since, they've struggled to find enough food. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty, FILE)
FILE - In this Feb. 15, 2018, file photo, ttudents gather to grieve during a vigil at Pine Trails Park for the victims of a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Fla..(AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)
FILE - In this July 21, 2011, file photo, Vanity Mendez, 11, left, Isaiah Rivera, 6, center, and Jonathan Medina, 11, cool off at an open fire hydrant in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
FILE - In this Nov. 2, 2016, file photo, Luis Varela, 17, left, Gabby Reynolds, 18, and Mariah Perry, 15, all of Birmingham, Ala., enjoy the festivities and music during a Day of the Dead celebration, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)
In this Wednesday, June 27, 2018, photo, Ansa Khan and her sister's combs hang on the mud wall of her house in Mardan, Pakistan. (AP Photo/Saba Rehman)
FILE - In this Nov. 8, 2012, file photo, girls turning 15 pose in their gowns for photos inside a pink limousine before their debutante ball, organized by the Peacemaker Police Unit program in the Mangueira favela, or shantytown, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The debutante ball marks girls' transition from childhood to adulthood and is common in Brazil and other Latin American countries. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo, File)
FILE - In this March 14, 2018, file photo, after a rally in front of the White House, students march up Pennsylvania Avenue toward Capitol Hill in Washington. Students walked out of school to protest gun violence in the biggest demonstration yet of the student activism that has emerged in response to last month's massacre of 17 people at Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
FILE - In this Nov. 12, 2013, file photo, a young girl who is a member of the RAF cadets walks between gravestones at Tyne Cot World War One cemetery in Zonnebeke, Belgium. Tyne Cot is now the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the world in terms of burials. There are 11,956 Commonwealth servicemen of the First World War buried or commemorated in the cemetery, 8,369 of those burials are unidentified. Other special memorials commemorate 20 casualties whose graves were destroyed by shell fire and there are 4 German burials, 3 being unidentified. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
FILE - In this Feb. 12, 2018, file photo, a girl pulls water from a well in the home of Ahmed al-Kawkabani, leader of the southern resistance unit in Hodeida, in al-Khoukha, Yemen. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty, File)
ILE - In this May 6, 2016, file photo, Hannah Shraim, 17, left, fixes a scarf around Lana Algamil, 5, after the little girl asked Hannah if she could try one on before evening prayers at the Shraim family home in Germantown, Md. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
FILE - In this Aug. 15, 2018, file photo, Morgan Hurd practices on the balance beam during a training session at the U.S. Gymnastics Championship. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File)
In this Aug. 27, 2012 photo, Janet Jotham braids the hair of her daughter Lucia Jotham, 8, during a visit to see her two children living at the Kabanga Protectorate Center in Kabanga, Tanzania. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
FILE - In this March 14, 2018, file photo, students rally in front of the White House in Washington. Students walked out of school to protest gun violence in the biggest demonstration yet of the student activism that has emerged in response to last month's massacre of 17 people at Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, Filr)
FILE - In this Feb. 25, 2006, file photo, Nysa Loudon, 11, swings in the neighborhood park ravaged by Hurricane Katrina near her home in Gentilly area of New Orleans, La., 2006. She wears her angel wings for the Krewe of Druex Mardi Gras parade that will march through Gentilly. Keeping a tradition alive, the krewe gathered for the 34th year in a row to parade through the hurricane ravaged neighborhood. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
FILE - In this Dec. 14, 2015, file photo, a young clown rides in the back of a car following a procession to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Hundreds belonging to various clown associations made their annual pilgrimage to the Basilica to pay their respects to the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
FILE - In this June 24, 2015, file photo, schoolgirls walk through the rocky yard of Bethesda Evangelical School during a break in class, in Canaan, Haiti. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)
FILE - In this May 13, 2016, file photo, Samantha Bischoff, left, compliments Hannah Shraim on her prom dress during Northwest High School's senior prom at the Fillmore Theater in Silver Spring, Md. Senior class president and an observant Muslim, Shraim prays five times a day and hopes to become an advocate for Muslims in the United States. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
FILE - In this Sunday, Nov. 19, 2017, file photo, Rohingya Muslim girls carry water pots in Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E, File)
