(Posted 2024 February)
Meet Abby!
Position: Prevention and Education Coordinator in Domestic and Sexual Violence Services
I recently transitioned from my role as the Human Trafficking and Sexual Violence Coordinator. In that role, I was responsible for coordinating the broad community response to human trafficking and sexual violence, that includes running our SART [Sexual Assault Response Team], a multidisciplinary team that includes many partners--law enforcement, schools, mental health professionals, the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office, county agencies, and other divisions within the Department of Family Services. We work on looking at the response to sexual violence and working to improve it so it’s less traumatizing for people who come forward.
I do similar response to human trafficking, even though we don’t have a formalized team. We get together quarterly to talk about what other partners are doing, trends we’re seeing, and training for professionals and the community.
Another big chunk of what I do is education opportunities in the community--which includes nurses, schools, etc.--around sexual violence and human trafficking, so when they work with the public, what they do can be trauma informed.
The last piece is work more internal to DSVS. One of the things we know about programs that focus on both domestic violence and sexual violence, is that domestic violence gets the attention. I make sure to elevate our sexual violence programming and improve the systems that respond to sexual violence.
I’m excited to transition to this new role of Prevention and Education Coordinator, which will shift my focus from working on human trafficking and sexual violence specifically to really focusing on all the things a community can do to prevent violence in the first place.
When we think about sexual and domestic violence, we often think about how we respond after they’ve taken place, but there are a lot of things we can do to prevent violence in our communities from happening in the first place. That looks like primary prevention, which includes teaching people about healthy relationships, consent, healthy communication, and understanding the social factors that impact us in our romantic relationships, in our families, and in our communities.
This education component is relevant so everyone in the community knows if they see something concerning to them in someone they care about, they can identify the resources available in the county to support that person.
My new role is also about educating our professionals. What do our doctors know about violence and how can they educate their patients? What about teachers concerned about students? Mental health professionals and law enforcement? We're training everybody who may come into contact with violence in their professional roles and making sure they have the tools to address that violence.
This is a story about a local girl who stayed local. I grew up here in Fairfax County. I’m from Centreville. I went to Westfield High School. I went to George Mason University for undergrad and left for a year to my MSW at Virginia Commonwealth University. And then came back when I got a job with Fairfax County. I have been here most of my life.
Being in a helping profession is in my blood. I come from a family of teachers and health care professionals. It’s a family joke that any time somebody tries to go into another profession, they’ll end up back in teaching or health care. We all love working with people and providing service to our community. I thought I wanted to go into teaching, specifically special education. Working with students one-on-one was something I really liked. But I realized the classroom wasn’t the right fit for me. I liked going into the community. And I also got involved with a peer program where we talked with students about alcohol and drug use and bystander intervention. All of those things combined made me decide to go into the social work program about midway through Mason.
My path hasn’t been a windy-twisty one. I went to grad school to do what I do now. Many social work programs focus on clinical work, and I realized it was not for me. I wanted to do big, broader macro work where I’d be working in education and outreach. So, my master’s program track focused on administration, policy, and planning. I worked at a teeny tiny program in Ashland (Virginia) to work on that broad outreach work. I really loved it. I was working at Richmond’s YWCA doing crisis response work and learned a lot about that period when someone is going through the initial trauma. I got involved in Fairfax through that as the hospital accompaniment specialist, which I did for two years before transitioning into my current role. I do miss crisis response, though, because you learn so, so much. It is still a love of mine.
But a straight path doesn’t mean boring. A “typical” day for me can look like a lot of things. Generally, the things that come up every day are working on the various projects and initiatives that I and my team handle every day. Outreach and education to the community and allied professionals. These are sort of 101s on key topics. It also looks like talking to partners about what they’re seeing come up in their work. It’s reviewing DSVS’ monthly data around sexual violence services--how many people we’re serving, calls we receive, etc.--meeting with teams about what we’re hearing from the community. It’s working on teams or workgroups I’m a part of, like, our Awareness team, which spreads awareness about the issues year-round. All of this shows up every day, but I can’t tell you when in the day things are going to happen.
I’m a big fan of the a-ha! moments. My favorite people to train are doctors and teachers. Having opportunities to work with passionate community members and allied professionals on better understanding of how to work with someone who has experienced trauma. The thread that goes through my team is how trauma affects people. People think they need to have all the specific skills, but what I like teaching people is you already have the skills to support someone experiencing violence. We want to bring an understanding of how to use those skills to be a supportive person and how to know your resources. When I’m able to communicate that, that’s my favorite part—that lightbulb moment.
When it’s a big pond, it can be difficult to line up all your ducks. As amazing as it is that we have these big multidisciplinary teams in Fairfax County, it can be tricky to prioritize. Getting everybody in a room together to hear what’s going on, hearing from folks where there are breakdowns in our work, problem solving. If someone has just been sexually assaulted you have hospital staff to support them in medical needs, social workers that are from hospital or DSVS, law enforcement that wants to talk about what happened and take a report. We want to do this in the best way. When you scale it up, it’s tricky. When it works, it’s good. It’s hard but good.
It’s cliché, but it really does take a village. I think the biggest thing that surprises me is just how many people it takes to do this work. Fairfax County has an overabundance of resources, which makes sense because we have 1 million people in this county. It’s amazing and great that we can provide this many resources and support. But it’s very different than when you work in a smaller one-stop shop. It has surprised me how different the work can look when you’re in different places but when you come down to actually working with the client, it’s very similar. What feels like the same work can be completely different depending on the resources you have available to you.
When I step away from work, I am a big comic book and movie nerd. My partner and I go to the movies almost once a week when we have the time. I love to cook and eat food and host. Achieving a work-life balance is something I feel really passionate about. People think work-life balance means go to the gym or take a bubble bath. Mine is more community care and spending time with people I love. My social battery is fed by having opportunities to be with other people—hosting people in my home or visiting people. I do my best to close my laptop at the end of the day and take time to be with people.
DFS is a really awesome agency to work for. I had not worked for local government before this job. You are tapped in with all the other DFS programs that can be disjointed when you do the work more siloed. I love that we are part of the larger DFS. It’s not just DSVS that’s my partner and collaborator. I get to work with Children, Youth, and Families. We are really doing some cutting-edge things and forward thinking/looking about improving the lives of people in the county. We have so many opportunities to provide support and ways for families to thrive. In DSVS, we are really focusing on families in immediate need of support. But DFS works on the entirety of supporting families. We are better able to prevent trauma because we’re working within the entire ecosystem of supporting families. That’s something unique.
Join our team to discover why I enjoy working with DFS so much.
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