April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Part 3
Friday, April 3rd, 2015 -- 11:28 AM
-April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.I spoke with Melissa Geldernick, the Sexual Assault Advocate for the Personal Development Center.
Melissa explained that her main goal is to try to bring awareness to the fact that sexual assault occurs even in small communities.
She said, "I try to do as much as I can throughout the county. It can get really hard because the topic is so hard to talk about. Domestic violence and sexual assault are hard to talk about in general. But I feel that sexual assault is so intimate. There's so many other barriers that individual victims of that are going through."
"The way to address their needs is different. So the way that we respond as a society is different too. There's all of these myths and misconceptions. And part of my job, that I love doing, is going in and going to the schools and doing a true or false kind of activity with the kids because that really shows them that we've looked at it this way for so long, but really the things that you think it is, is not really what is happening."
"Especially when you look at male victims. People don't think that's a thing. But, their numbers are so under reported because of the societal pressure and the societal influence on the way that they view themselves and people don't think about that. I mean, we look at our numbers and it's one in six women and one in thirty-three men. Those are really significant differences. But, those are only the reported numbers too. I think if we had accurate reported numbers of male victims they'd be a lot closer to what we're seeing in women too."
"Which is sad. It's sad. Because there's all these people that are not receiving services or not getting legal support for what happened to them and that just breaks my heart. I don't want anybody to fall through the cracks."
Coming up on Monday, we'll hear about the many initiatives the PDC does in recognition of the month.
Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.