Grand Forks community works together to combat sexual assault

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class Bonnie Grantham
  • 319th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
GRAND FORKS AIR FORCE BASE, N.D. --  Sexual assault awareness is observed across the Department of Defense every year in the month of April. The theme of April 2015 was "Know your part. Do your part." which is something members of Grand Forks AFB and the Grand Forks community know to be an essential part of combating sexual assault.

"We have to be on the same page, between the military and civilian sector," said Sue Grollimund, 319th Air Base Wing Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program assistant. "Sexual assault is not just within the fenceline; it's where people live, and our people live in the community."

The Grand Forks Community Violence Intervention Center (CVIC) started a formal coordinated community response with Family Advocacy on base in 1998, assessing nine different agencies in the community and how they respond to domestic violence, said Kari Kerr, the CVIC director of community innovations.

"They started with domestic violence and with Family Advocacy on base and they created a great system that took out some obstacles in their process that they noticed along the way," said Grollimund. "They created a framework of teamwork with all the players of domestic violence."

Kerr began her career with CVIC in 1992, and has been the lead force behind the collaboration with the base and the greater Grand Forks area from the beginning, according to Grollimund.

"[The base] is a huge community, and it's part of the larger Grand Forks community," said Kerr. "We have victims that we are serving that are active duty as well as civilians who are partners with active duty, so we're providing services to that population just like we are to the University of North Dakota and the greater Grand Forks area."

The greater Grand Forks area is comprised of multiple jurisdictions, including two different states and counties, the University of North Dakota and the base, which makes cross-jurisdictional issues a common barrier faced in domestic violence and sexual assault cases.

In 2009, CVIC formally began expanding their project to include assessing the response to sexual assault cases by forming the Sexual Assault Response Team (SART).

"We collaborated," said Jennifer Albert, the coordinated community response program coordinator of CVIC. Albert has been with CVIC for more than 11 years and is the lead individual for SART. "We had a sexual response committee that met quarterly that had members of the base, civilian law enforcement, advocacy, prosecution, campus officials and medical that looked at how each entity responds to sexual assault and how we could improve it."

The SART is focused on streamlining the response to a sexual assault or domestic violence case by allowing all of the official entities involved a chance to get to know each other.

"[CVIC's] role is to bring us together and to keep us having open communication so when we do sit down and go through a response mechanism, we all know enough about what the other person does so we can build trust for the people we serve," said Grollimund. "Building trust is what's going to make us better at what we do."

The guidelines for SART were completed in the winter of 2014, and the team officially began working together in March 2015. With the implementation of SART, victims are able to receive the care they seek, plus have easy access to additional care as soon as possible.

For example, if a victim reports to medical personnel first, the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) will then call law enforcement and advocacy right away without asking the victim if they want those services, said Albert. However, the victim isn't required to use those services. The idea, Albert said, is to have them ready and available so the victim won't feel like they're bothering somebody. This would also be the time for the SANE nurse to determine whether the individual is military, in which case the nurse would call the SAPR office and Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

"Since it's only been implemented since March," said Albert, "we haven't had a lot of cases that have come through. However, what's been neat is that we've already been seeing those responding officers communicate better with one another and communicate areas of how we could make it more comfortable for the victim."

An additional service CVIC provides for the community and the base is training.

"From 2003 to 2014, we've done 135 trainings on base reaching 2,646 people," said Kerr.

The training is provided for security forces and legal personnel, commanders, first sergeants, victim advocates, AFOSI and several other entities on the base in the hope that everyone can learn to speak the same language when working together. They also ensure that their advocates and liaisons understand the options available to military members on the base, including restricted and unrestricted reporting procedures.

"We can't just work in a bubble," said Grollimund. "We have to be able to open ourselves up a bit. As that process grew, CVIC realized they needed to train all folks. Their advocates and their people need to understand completely what it means and what those choices are."

The relationship between the base and CVIC gives Airmen and their families a larger community to fall back on if they need it.

"I think that it's important for those that we serve to see that we work together... and that we're there to support them with whatever step they take in their processing," said Albert. "I think it speaks volumes to the person who was victimized and seeking the services."

The collaboration between the base and CVIC is a step to eliminating sexual assault not just for Grand Forks AFB members, but for the entire community of the greater Grand Forks area.

"A really great thing about the collaboration between the base and CVIC is we all are one community really," said Allie Canoy Illies, CVIC prevention and education coordinator. "We all are interacting, especially in the professional world, so even if what we are doing isn't exactly the same, we can still have the same idea of how we want to change the culture surrounding how we talk about sexual assault and domestic violence and things like that."