Never Going Back

One of the many reasons I like my university and community is the history behind them. Today I am going to take you on a little trip through time and talk about some of the great things that began in this college town.

One of my friends who works with the Champaign County Historical Society told me about this, and my supervisor said that it was true. One of my jobs, the crisis intervention, began here. There was never a crisis intervention program or center anywhere else in the country before. The domestic violence shelter was originally a space that several women of the county rented in order to house the victims of domestic violence until they could find their own homes. It was all-female and closed off to anyone else. The first rape crisis center was my good old RCS. The hotline began as a phone tree called Champaign County Women Against Rape, and it was staffed by seventeen women. They eventually got others interested in their cause and were able to work with their clients to find them medical and legal services. They grew so prominent and got so many new recruits that the county took notice of them and decided to get involved and fund it. Pretty soon, a bunch of other counties in the state (and soon the rest of the nation) saw this and decided to open up their own centers. The method of teaching new recruits to use the phone tree evolved into the hotline training, and the advocacy training was directly adapted from the Champaign County Women's ways of treating the clients. Then it came to be funded nationally with the passage of two laws--the Violence Against Women Act and the Victims Of Crime Act. We were first, and it is very exciting to work at the founding spot of this great movement.

While knowing that our program came out of a simple phone tree, any good advocate (assault, domestic, children's, etc.) will tell you that we must never go back to being kept in the private sector and run entirely by individual donations and amateurs. However, I learned recently that our illustrious President has considered cutting funding for the both VAWA and VOCA, which are the primary sources of funding for the crisis network. Although he always seems to have money to spare to send troops into foreign lands, he claims that VAWA and VOCA are "too expensive" and that the country can't afford to keep funding them.

I think it's more costly to the nation to lose its crisis network. The greatest resource of any country is its citizens, and cutting off such a huge social service is only going to be detrimental. What I don't see is how we have enought money to bomb up some foreign countries but yet it's too expensive to help the people of our own country. And before you say that it only affects women, think again. VOCA covers things like recompensation, bereavement, counseling, medical and legal attention for victims of many kinds of crimes. And the crisis centers are by no means for women only. I myself have worked with both female and male clients, and we have lots of men on the staff or who support us. It's everyone's issue, and it's something we can't afford to lose.

Needless to say, I've already sent a letter to protest this.