April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Part 4
Monday, April 6th, 2015 -- 11:24 AM
-April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.I spoke with Melissa Geldernick, the Sexual Assault Advocate for the Personal Development Center.
Melissa explained some of the initiatives the department does in recognition of the month.
She said, "I go out and I'm actually doing, I for sure have 1, a big presentation that I'm doing. And I just talk about what it is, what are services you can get, what you can even do with it and what does all that legal wordy stuff mean. So, just trying to educate them about the whole thing in general and about how we can change that. How can we really support victims and not point our fingers at them. That's my main goal with that."
"But I also go in and do an informational table type of thing. We've got the rubber bracelets that say 'no means no' and on the inside they have our phone number. So, that's something they can take and it's kind of a creative way for them to get our phone number without it being really direct. We don't want to out people intentionally. And then we have pens and candy and stuff because otherwise they wouldn't come to our table!"
"A nice thing with the informational tables is that we do surveys and the surveys can give us a feel for where they're at and where we can improve on and what we can bring into the schools the next year or maybe something that needs to be more immediate. And it's really nice. I do that for presentations as well to see if they're actually gaining something from what we're doing because we want to evaluate ourselves and make sure we're covering the basis we need to.
Coming up on Tuesday, we'll hear about more of the initiatives the PDC does in recognition of the month.
Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.