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We are joined by Tasha Sullivan to talk about what to do if you find yourself in an abusive relationship and how the Wake County organization, InterAct is set up to save lives, rebuild lives, and secure safer futures.
Your no bullsh$t guide to divorce with experienced attorneys from New Direction Family Law and guests and professionals who have been there. Unfiltered discussions to help you move from victim to victorious and from bitter to better.
Hello, I'm Sarah. I'm one of the experienced attorneys from new direction, family law. And one of the partners, typically Elizabeth Stephenson would be joining us today, but she is unfortunately caught up in court as we often are, but we have reliable Jennifer Bordeaux here, student that's right. And a an amazing guest today from interact Tasha Sullivan.
She is a senior director. Of domestic violence services there. And she's going to be speaking to us about if you're in a relationship with domestic violence and particularly in wake county. Cause that's what interact is, what services they offer and how that can help you. So Tasha, go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself and we'll start there with it, with learning about interact.
Thank you so much
for having me today. Yes. My name is Tasha Sullivan and as you said, I'm the senior director of programming
. and. I have been there for about 15 years now, started off as a volunteer with their holiday event one year, while I was on a break from school and have been there ever since
I've had a variety of positions, such as case manager and counselor, and now am overseeing the majority of our programs that operate out of our agency.
And we can.
Yeah. Great. We're happy
to have you here today. And I learned from a very young age about interact. My sister she's older. She volunteered there when she was at NC state. And I remember hearing her, tell me about stories of her having to go help women in the middle of the. Get their kids out of the house and relocate them somewhere safe.
And she would tell me the stories about how the victims can be, anywhere from someone you think is, you know, low poverty to people who are married to you, doctors and have very what we would think is privileged life, but everyone can be affected by domestic violence.
Unfortunately this is something that covers all age groups, all races, all genders.
And, it is a 24 hour operation that we do. We have multiple programs that are accessible to our community 24 hours a day, such as our hospital responder program
and our crisis lens.
Oftentimes our busiest time is in the middle of the night. Cause that might be the only time that someone can reach out.
I have that time to receive that type of support. So we want to make sure that we are staffed 24 hours a day to meet the needs of our
community. Great.
So tell us a little bit more about the hospital. What did you call
it? Hospital responders. One of the things that we do, we provide services to survivors of both domestic and sexual violence.
And one of the things that we can do is respond to the hospital when someone has been sexually assaulted and be there to support them through what we call the forensic.
We actually do those on
site as well, and something called our solace center.
So we have the
first standalone community-based forensic examination center in North Carolina.
And that is staffed by specially trained nurses and advocates to keep up. To provide like kind of trauma informed services to survivors so that they don't have to go to the emergency room.
Yeah. And that's
a great service. I'm sure that is a terrifying moment for someone looking at having to do that. I Just being assaulted and then having someone else come into your personal space and do all that.
So that's great to offer that. So who are the people that they would be meeting with either at the hospital who responds
to them?
It's a variety. It's either our staff or our volunteers or interns that we have and a specially trained sexual assault, nurse examiner. That we contract with to provide that 24 hour support.
So you have this kind of multidisciplinary team that comes together to provide the medical support, the forensic support, and also just the support of being there for them. The things that they may need during that time.
Making sure that they know who we are so that we can introduce ourselves to them and follow them through
whatever that healing process looks like for
them, for some of it involves interacting with law enforcement and some that it doesn't.
And we want to make sure that they have that healing support that they need regardless. So if there's law
enforcement involved and there's charges filed to do your services extend to, to that phase, yes,
we can be we can accompany them to interviews that they have with law enforcement. We can also be there during the court process.
If it does go to court, we can provide that court
support and, any kind of follow-up support or aftercare that they might.
Yeah, and that is great. Cause first talk to cops or law enforcement and then having to possibly face your abuser in court is always really scary for people.
So I know that having an advocate there, someone that's strained is really helpful for people. Absolutely. We work with a lot of people that come in for the domestic violence sexual abuse, criminal charges, that's not something we deal with. Later refer that out. And obviously we refer pretty much everyone that comes in for any kind of abuse or domestic violence to interact because of all the many services that are offered there.
So tell us about some of the other services as well.
Absolutely. So we have multiple,
Different access points that people can reach out to us on the primary one that we see the most survivors reaching out to us, which is typically about six to 8,000.
Is our crisis
lines. And those are staffed with counselors 24 7, 365 days a week.
So they are available particularly during the pandemic. We had to transition a lot of our supports to remote services. So we have counselors who are on the lines and we have counselors available in our office in certain situations for you to come in and meet with a counselor. And we also have staff that operate in the court for people
who are filing protective orders.
We have core advocates that are in the, both the civil and criminal. To
provide any sort of services or support that they may need. There answer questions about
the protective order paperwork.
Maybe they need someone
to watch their kids while they go into the courtroom. We've often stepped in, in a variety of ways, depending upon what the situation is.
Sometimes survivors go directly to court and we want to make sure that they know that we're
out there. They might not have a safe place to go after
they get this protective order. So we can provide some of that emergency shelter resources. We do operate in an emergency shelter. We're pretty much always full.
So right now we can house about 22 to 28 people in our shelter before COVID it
was a little bit more, but we've tried to keep it. So people have individual rooms now.
And so we also have our case management program so that people who have gotten out of situations and then maybe need supports finding employment or educational resources or long-term housing and stability.
They have case
managers that can work with them for usually up to around three months to try
to overcome some of those challenges and barriers to achieving stability outside of the relationship, because we know that can be the hardest time is, exiting these relationships and then all of the
challenges and getting yourself, stable and secure in a new environment, they may be coming out with no employment.
No really friends or family who can support them. So we tried to wrap our arms around as many different services as we can offer as possible to make that transition easier. Yeah.
And keeping records is super helpful. I've known people to, stay in the relationship and they will go seek help.
They continue to stay in the relationship for years. And eventually when they do leave, there's doubt, okay. So bad. Why didn't you leave before. And just, going somewhere where there can be a record of you having gone and sought and help really help support your case. If you're in court to say, yeah, I did go seek help.
I stayed, here's documentation that these things really were going on. If you're out there, seek support, make sure it's recorded in some fashion that we can go back and get it so they can help validate your case later because it's still hard to prove domestic violence sometimes when it's, he said, she said situation.
Yeah, I think absolutely. One of the main things that
we try to do, what, wherever someone is in the relationship, whether they're trying to learn more about, if this relationship is violent and abusive, or if they are ready to leave right that minute, or if they're planning
to leave in the future.
One of the most important things we can do with them is safety plan, which is where we help them think through all of the things that they might need if they leave or how to protect themselves in the home before they leave. Because as you said, sometimes it's not that people often ask, like, why didn't they leave the first time that this happened?
Or why did they stay for and I think one of the most important things to know about the dynamics of abuse is that leaving is actually the most dangerous time. That's when we see the most escalated behavior. And oftentimes when we're in the relationship, even though it's bad, we know what it's going to look like in that badness.
And it's when we leave
that the unknown starts to happen and you start to see things really start to escalate and kick ups.
That is not meant to discourage people from leaving. It's meant to say, make sure you have a really good plan, because that can be the most dangerous time. And in fact, I'm on something called a domestic violence fatality review, and we go back as a community and look at the domestic violence homicides that have happened.
And in nearly every one of the ones that we
have reviewed the victim was killed as she was trying to leave the relationship or within 48 hours of
leaving the relationship. So it's very important to them. With a lot of those support network and safety
measures in place. For sure. And that's, always really upsetting for people to hear and I've worked with people and they always said they stayed when there's children involved because they felt if they were there.
And the abuse wouldn't be passed onto the kids. Like they would be there to take it. So they think about court going to court and having to go through custody that he might have the kids without them there, then who's going to be there to protect them. When you have a domestic violence protective order, you can ask for custody through that.
And then of course seek an attorney to help you through that custody portion. There's a lot of reasons why people stay in those
relationships.
Absolutely. And child custody can be a huge one and the children can be a huge one as well. Just the unknown about having to share custodial time, what that exchange is going to look like.
Oftentimes, we know abuse is about power and control. And so oftentimes once somebody has. The ways that people still have to control people might be their children or some other factors like family and friends and finances.
Yeah, for sure. And I know that your organization works with legal aid a lot on referring to that organization and providing them with legal services.
So tell us
a
little bit about that. Yes, we do. We've had a longstanding partnership with legal aid and so value their partnership because one of the things that they specifically. Is, when you go to apply for a protective order is typically a two hearing process. The first you can go to by yourself with your paperwork packet, that
we can guide you through and tell you
which parts to fill out.
But the second is going to be a hearing generally where both parties are present and that can be an, a really intimidating experience for victims. And we want to make sure, particularly for people who don't have finances to support that, that, that. Representation as illegal egg has longstanding been a partnership of ours that where we get as many people attorneys that may need them for that second hearing, if they qualify so we can do a direct referral and then they can represent people at that second protective order hearing where it's decided if.
DVPO is going to be put into place for a year. Yeah. And
I love legal aid. It's huge. I always recommend people when they come in for a consultation with us. If I see that they're going to qualify for those services because of their income, I immediately recommend they go to interact first and continue on to legal aid to take advantage of.
It, there's going to be other issues if you're married and you're going to separate after that, and you can come to us for the custody, the distribution of assets, all of that, but take advantage of any time you have of legal aid services. So they're great attorneys and they do this all the
time.
Yes. And that one of the other things that they do is they offer general clinics where people can ask some of those just basic questions about divorce and. And they're typically not able to represent people in some of those long term hearings, because we know that this can, just getting a custody hearing can be a pretty long-term
process.
They're often calendared in after you apply for them. So math, I think that handoff is good to have that free consultation where you can get some of those babies. Things answered and questions sorted out, and then that kind of longer-term support. Yeah.
So if anyone's listening today and they want to know how they can support interact, what ways can anyone out in the community give back to this organization?
We
love our volunteers. We couldn't do this work without volunteers, and we have all kinds of volunteer opportunities available from anything from, just helping with events, to fundraising, to actually working directly with clients. A lot of times crisis lens is staffed by very well-trained volunteers that can help triage some of those initial
concerns.
And then,
Transitioned that to a counselor if need be. So all of our volunteer opportunities and trainings are available on our website. We also have something coming up on Wednesday, June 20 seconds called a day to give hope. And that's where community members, survivors, and businesses come together in a one day giving campaign to raise 50,000.
So the individuals and families impacted by domestic and sexual violence now that they are not alone. And that would be a great
as well. Yes. Everyone marked the calendar for that. It sounds like this episode is going to come out the day before, so tomorrow. And if you can't give tomorrow, just, reach out and give any time that you can give to interact.
This is a great organization here in wake county. And I know. There's other victims, obviously, outside of wake county. Are there any other services out there that you're aware of, that people that are listening, who are not in wake county could reach out to?
And also just, we see our crisis lines. We get calls from people all over the country.
So you know, our crisis lines is a great place to start. If you have questions, typically each county in North Carolina has its own domestic violence service agency, and we act together as loosely collaborating sister agencies supporting each other, if our shelters are full but each county has its own.
But you're welcome to call us to is particularly for, just to talk through your situation, if it gets down to specific things about court processes and things like that, sometimes we refer them to call their specific county. Cause they may know a little bit more about the particular services available there.
And also I think it's just important for anyone listening to know, if you do call us, all of anything you tell us is competent. We are a safe place. We're not going to tell you what to do. Our philosophy is to give you a safe place to figure out what your options are. And if you decide to pursue any of those options, we support you through those steps.
But you don't have to give us any information when you call it. You can absolutely cause it, like you said, sometimes it helps with documenting cases and things like that. If you need record of services and, but you're not required to, we just want to be a place where you feel like you are not alone.
This can feel very isolating. Oftentimes the dynamics of abuse involve isolating people from friends and from. Yeah. So we just feel like it's our mission to be there, to let you know that you're not alone and that you do have someplace it can help.
And what's the best way for people to reach out, to, or find information about interact?
Probably just Google. Yep. We can go to our website. Our website has a lot of great resources on it, and it also has our crisis line numbers on there.
Awesome. I wanted
to ask quickly. We were talking about custody and kids and stuff, being part of this. And obviously that goes into the cycle of abuse and, witnessing things as children and everything.
And I saw one of the services you guys offer on your website is youth education services. So can you speak a little bit to what that is or,
you
know,
What kind of program that is? We believe that, this work wouldn't be complete without prevention work as well. You know what? We need to be there to respond to it and to be able to do our part, to prevent this for future generations.
So we have a lot of great initiatives for children who have experienced domestic violence. We often go out in schools to teach, teen dating violence awareness month and red flags to look for in teen relationships or know what you can do in your home. If you're experiencing domestic violence in the home.
And we also have specific children's counselors for our children who are in our shelter. And in fact, if you look at our shelter numbers, it's primarily children because it's. Families bringing their kids. So we want to make sure that we have those supports for kids as well. And we have a great new thing that we've been doing over the past couple of years, which is.
Our camp hope, which is for children who have been in our shelter or her children in the community that have been impacted by domestic violence. We have, it's a holistic program throughout the year, but it culminates in a one week sleep away camp for kids. That's meant to help them create
community and be around other children who maybe haven't had
similar experiences.
And all of our counselors are specially trained to
deal with that trauma that they might've experienced. And we've seen some really amazing results from that
for kids. That's
great. That's awesome. I know we were talking about before we started recording that you provide services to men and women. It's just any victim of domestic violence children, obviously.
So if you're listening out there, don't feel like you can't reach out to interact. If you're a man. Help anyone that comes to their door. Absolutely.
I appreciate you having me on here today. And hope you guys have a wonderful,
oh, thanks for joining us.