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Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Confidentially speaking

Cassidy Johnson at the Carolina Women’s Center creates a safe space where people can talk about gender violence.

  • A student whose high school boyfriend pressures her to have sex months after they’ve broken up.
  • A housekeeper whose husband hits her every Saturday night when he’s had too much to drink but is sorry about it Sunday morning.
  • A professor who goes on one bad date with a colleague and now gets dozens of increasingly nasty texts, emails and phone calls for not going on a second.

What do these three people have in common? First, they have all experienced a form of gender-based violence. Second, they can all tell their stories to Cassidy Johnson, Carolina’s gender violence services coordinator, and be assured that she will keep their talks confidential and get them to the resources they need.

“I create a safe space where people can come and talk,” said Johnson, who listens to stories from Carolina students, faculty and staff. “They’re not going to be forced into making any decisions. I’m here to help them understand their options as well as possible.”

That safe space is usually her office in the Carolina Women’s Center (on the first floor of the Stone Center), the office whose door has a piece of purple paper with the word “confidential” splashed across it. But she also holds drop-in hours at other locations, like the LGBTQ Center and Koury Residence Hall, or meets people elsewhere, if they are uncomfortable coming to her office.

Johnson said there hasn’t been a dull moment since she began her work as a grant-funded, University-designated confidential resource in June 2014.

“At first, I wasn’t sure if people would come and see me or not,” said Johnson, who has curly brown hair, big tortoiseshell glasses and an even bigger smile. But even before classes started in August 2014, she has been consistently busy. In fact, in their recent review of Carolina’s centers and institutes, Board of Governors members seemed most impressed by number of students coming to talk with Johnson, lines snaking out of the Carolina Women’s Center into the hallway. In its January report, the BOG did not recommend budget cuts for the center.

Gender violence services coordinator seems to be a perfect fit for Johnson’s education and experience. The native of Hendersonville in the rural mountains came to Chapel Hill in 2003 to study psychology and women’s studies.

She also did coursework in APPLES service learning, where she discovered AmeriCorps, a federal agency that employs people to do public service work in thousands of nonprofit and faith-based groups in America. But after taking an AmeriCorps job teaching literacy in an underserved school district in northern California, “I realized being a classroom teacher was not what I wanted to do,” she said.

Instead, she enrolled in graduate school at the University of San Diego to get a master’s degree in marital and family therapy. While working with chronically mentally ill adults during an internship, Johnson realized that most – if not all – of them had experienced some kind of trauma in their lives.

“I was interested in getting involved before people got so sick. I thought that if I did that, maybe I could make a difference,” she said. So she returned to North Carolina and focused on helping those with trauma in their background. She got her therapy license in this state and volunteered at the Orange County Rape Crisis Center. Then she heard about the new job at the women’s center.

“This position felt like it pulled together my background very nicely,” Johnson said.

The job also brought her back to her alma mater. “I’m experiencing the University in a new way. Carolina has grown and changed in the past 10 years,” she said.

Nowhere is the change more evident than in the awareness of sexual assault issues on campus. “When I was a student here, sexual assault wasn’t a hot topic,” she said. “I’m sure that it did happen, but it wasn’t talked about.”

Now the University has a newly revised sexual assault policy, training about sexual assault awareness is required for students, faculty and staff and voluntary training abounds: HAVEN awareness and prevention training, One Act bystander intervention training and Safe Zone training for the LGBTQ community and allies. There’s also the Prevention Task Force, created this year, and other initiatives like the Men’s Project and Heels United for a Safe Carolina. (For more information, see safe.unc.edu.)

“There are a lot more resources that are much more publicly known about,” Johnson said. “I think it’s amazing. It’s
really awesome.”

Even though she is a licensed therapist, Johnson is not doing therapy as the gender violence services coordinator. Instead she offers:

  • Emotional support;
  • Answers to questions about reporting options with the University or police;
  • Assistance in navigating through the reporting process;
  • Links to support options at UNC and in the community.

And she offers confidentiality – a promise that a person’s story won’t be shared without permission unless there’s a legal or compelling safety reason. Confidentiality is important in these situations for many reasons: shame or stigma of being a victim, victim-blaming behavior, fear of the abuser, fear of hurting a loved one who is also an abuser.

A case of gender-based violence is so much more emotionally complicated than a stolen wallet or a smashed window. Sometimes the person just needs to talk about what happened before doing anything about it, with someone who won’t judge or preach. Cassidy Johnson is that someone.

“The point of a confidential resource is making the people in front of you feel safe,” she said. “This is a special place for me in a lot of ways. I want to make sure everyone at Carolina also feels safe here.”