Meet An NVRDC Advocate

Elisa is a Senior Advocate who has been with NVRDC since June 2019. In 2020, Elisa, along with the rest of our advocacy staff, supported 462 survivors and spent over 1,100 hours in the hospital accompanying them during medical forensic exams.

Read on to learn more about Elisa & how NVRDC advocates help survivors in a variety of ways!

Tell me about the work you do with NVRDC? 

Elisa: I was recently reflecting on just how different every single day is. I do both hospital and community crisis response. I am called out to a scene or go to the hospital following a sexual assault or domestic violence if there is a sexual assault component to it. I support survivors though the medical exam process and all interactions with law enforcement after that. I often support survivors in court as they are going through the criminal legal system or the civil legal system. I help survivors find housing, get access to public benefits that they are entitled to, connect them to a series of services whether it's custody help or emergency relocation, any sort of need that an individual might have. We try to connect them with a full spectrum of wraparound services.  

You mentioned community response.  This is new for NVRDC. Can you tell us about that and why it’s different from the hospital crisis response? 

Elisa: Absolutely. With hospital crisis response, we don’t see a survivor unless they present to the hospital to receive medical care after a sexual assault or a forensic exam or both. The great thing about the community response program is that we can reach survivors outside a hospital setting.  They don’t need to present at the hospital anymore. As soon as something has occurred that requires law enforcement to respond, they have a right to be connected to an advocate. They can decide that they don’t want to go to the hospital and receive an exam and that’s not going to end their ability to receive support and care after a traumatic event. That’s what I would say is the biggest difference. 

Read more about our Community Response Advocates!

When you think about victims’ rights, what comes to mind? 

Elisa: Three words pop into my head: agency, dignity and safety.  Those seem to me to be the most important, as expressed by survivors. Survivors feel that they should be able to maintain agency, dignity and safety throughout the entire process following a violent incident. They want to be able to feel safe and they want the institutions that they interact with to facilitate that safety. They want to go through the process with dignity. They do not want to be treated as if they have done something wrong or have their choices and their entire life brought under a microscope. Agency is a little harder. They want to feel like they have some sort of say in the process. Maybe they don’t want prosecution, or maybe they just don’t agree with the terms of the plea bargain. The case, in the eyes of the criminal legal system, is considered successful if there is incarceration. However, the survivor can end up feeling really hollow and empty because they didn’t really get anything that feels like justice because, by design, the criminal legal system exacerbates an adversarial dynamic where the offender’s only strategy is to evade accountability through denial and minimization and even prosecution indirectly minimizes the harm through plea bargains. Survivors want acknowledgement of the harm done to them and some degree of assurance that it won’t be done to someone else.  The criminal legal system, with its focus on prosecution and incarceration, often does not produce either of those outcomes in a truly meaningful or transformative way.

What gets you excited about work? 

Elisa: What I find most energizing about my work is the extent of human resilience. I encounter people who have experienced really difficult and challenging things in their lives but they are so brave. I never get tired of seeing the level of perseverance that people show. The level of fortitude that people have in difficult moments in their lives. The grace that they are able to show with everyone they are interacting with even in extremely difficult moments. The person is up against so many concurrent challenges that they may never see resolutions for, but they are still fighting, they still have a desire for self-advocacy. They want to protect themselves to the best extent that they can, that sense of self-preservation in people. I just love to see that in people and I find it so motivating.  

If somebody said they were interested in being an advocate, what would you say to them? 

Elisa: As an advocate, you have to be able to sit silently through a trauma narrative and not ask probing questions and only ask for the information you need to know and then resist the urge to give advice. When survivors come and interact with us they are shocked that we don’t just launch into giving them advice. They often say something like “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but this interaction feels very different from talking to my mother or my friend. What is it that feels so different?” 

Why do you think it feels different?  Take safety planning as an example. 

Elisa: By asking a person open-ended non-judgmental questions about their existing life conditions and just giving them the space to hear that they already have the answer. What have you done in the past to help you feel safe? Where are the places in your life where you feel the safest? Who are the people in your life who you can trust to prioritize your interests above anyone else including the person who is causing you harm. People generally have expertise about what their needs are and how to have those needs met, they just need to be given a safe environment to be able to explore those ideas and bounce them off someone. That works 98% of the time. 

So, you aren’t there to fix people. 

Elisa: Exactly! I’m so glad you said that. When a person is most vulnerable and really struggling I’ll hear someone say, “If they really wanted help they wouldn’t be behaving this way. This is not the behavior of someone who wants to stop whatever the situation might be.” I have empathy for that, you want to do more for a person but maybe you can’t. It’s a really hard truth to sit with, to accept reality on reality’s terms. Asking for help looks different for everyone, and trauma responses can often run counter to what we intuitively think a post-traumatic period is supposed to look like. We have to be able to respect and hold space for that without discounting the person’s need for – and right to – support and trust.

If there is one thing you’d like readers to take away about you or NVRDC what would it be? 

Elisa: I would just say that I cannot brag about this organization enough. In my own life, I will pause and ponder NVRDC as an institution and it makes me emotional. It’s just a pillar of satisfaction and energy and hope, which is so rare and precarious in this world, like having hope for the future every single day is a really magical thing. NVRDC is a big part of why I feel hopeful for the future. Seeing how much this organization has the capacity and desire to grow and the humility we see in this organization from the top to the front-line staff. I would say it is an extraordinary place. If you are a person who wants to serve the community and you have an attitude of service, you’ll want to keep an eye on this organization.