This coalition gives voice to sexual assault survivors

Monika Johnson-Hostler has had one career, and she found it her first year of college. Or, to be more precise, it found her.

In 1993, her dorm room at Fayetteville State University was a social hub. Her mom and grandparents had bought her a large TV to take to college, and her room became the central hangout for two halls. Johnson-Hostler, an only child, loved having so many friends around.

And then one friend confided that she had been sexually assaulted by a football player and had no idea what to do. Johnson-Hostler went to counseling services to ask what support mechanisms there were for her friend.

“I don’t think I understood that it was illegal, I just knew it wasn’t right,” Johnson-Hostler says. “I didn’t get really good help for her. She left college shortly after that, so that sat with me for a long time.”

After graduating, Johnson-Hostler worked at a rape crisis center in Scotland County. And then, in 1999, she came to Raleigh to work with the nonprofit North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault (NCCASA), where she’s been ever since. As executive director, Johnson-Hostler continues in her mission that started more than two decades ago. NCCASA supports direct services like rape crisis centers, drafts public policy and educates colleges, law enforcement and nurses so they can properly help and listen to sexual assault survivors.

“I came to the coalition in 1999 to start working with campuses with how to respond to sexual assault, which I feel is full circle in 2017 given all the work that’s being done on college campuses,” Johnson-Hostler says. “None of that was being done in 1999.”

Indeed, the way young people now talk more openly about sexual assault is something Johnson-Hostler has not previously seen. She mentions the #metoo social media campaign, in which women showed their solidarity with sexual assault survivors in Hollywood by declaring that the same thing had happened to them. But even with all that progress and openness, there’s still plenty of work to be done.

“We still have people who blame victims and we still need the entire culture to change and recognize that until all of us accept the prevalence, then we will still be talking about sexual violence,” Johnson-Hostler says. “How do we engage men and young men so that they don’t just say they see it and hear it but that this is also their work and their work to help us? There is still a huge gender lens attached to sexual violence.”

So NCCASA works behind the curtain, so to speak, on education, advocacy and legislation. While the organization doesn’t provide direct services, it supports the organizations that do, and even sometimes has a hand in creating direct services. Take campuses, for instance. When Johnson-Hostler started with NCCASA in 1999, she visited the campus of every university in the UNC system and 40 private schools as well. Few sexual assaults were being reported, and many colleges didn’t have policies in place or even information in their student handbooks telling students in these situations how to find help.

“I sat down with mostly student affairs and student health services and walked through if a person was sexually assaulted on their campus, what would they do?” Johnson-Hostler recalls. “That project still lives in our coalition today.”

NCCASA’s education work can take the form of going to the North Carolina Justice Academy and ensuring that people in law enforcement know the right things to ask about and listen for when investigating a sexual assault. It also involves a partnership with the North Carolina Association of Social Workers, who they help understand sexual assault and the way it affects people’s lives. The group also works with school systems, teaching staff how to provide services to someone who’s been sexually traumatized.

“We have roughly 76 rape crisis centers that provide services to 100 counties,” says Johnson-Hostler. “Those are the people that help determine how we do policy work, and we provide the education training to them. So our advocacy is directed to those rape crisis centers based on the needs that they have in their community.”

For NCCASA, advocacy can mean standing up for sexual assault survivors who were expected to pay for their own rape kits, which are used as evidence in court cases. Policy change can mean changing the law that made these survivors pay for their own rape kits in the first place. This all originated with simply listening to what victims were telling rape crisis centers, says Johnson-Hostler.

For all NCCASA’s successes and for young people’s openness and awareness of sexual assault in 2017, Johnson-Hostler knows there’s a lot of work still to be done before sexual assault can be discussed in realistic terms and addressed accordingly. Until then, this will remain Johnson-Hostler’s calling.

“I say to people, once we can start talking about this over the dinner table without people freaking, then I have done my work,” she says. 　

This story was originally published November 20, 2017 at 9:08 AM with the headline "This coalition gives voice to sexual assault survivors."