|
Counselor Embraces Mission to End Sexual Assaults
by Joe Ayers
Bill Dycus
|
Bill Dycus was just your average college guy until he dated a girl who would forever change his life. She was a rape survivor, and she enlightened him on the seriousness of sexual assault.
"I was completely oblivious to the issue, and I started reading on it and saw it as something unacceptable." Dycus says he learned how devastating sexual assault is and how much it can affect the lives of victims and their relationships with those around them. He wanted to get involved and make a difference.
Dycus is the director of counseling here at Mars Hill College and is working on a new policy for sexual misconduct. He is also a former rape crisis advocate. His former job was to help rape survivors restore lost trust.
Dycus's journey began in 1995 in New York, where he was trained to be a volunteer rape crisis advocate at one of the first rape crisis centers ever started in the United States. He was on call a couple of times a month to support and comfort survivors, and he also trained other advocates.
After his seven year stint in New York he moved back to his hometown, Asheville, where he spent a year working as a counselor and community educator for Our Voice, the sexual assault services agency for Buncombe County.
Then he heard about the job opening at Mars Hill College and was hired. Dycus says he has always had the desire to work with college students because it's such an exciting yet confusing time in people's lives.
Dycus tries to help victims become aware of the way the rape is affecting them so they can then rebuild their lives. "What it actually affects more is peoples' relationship with other people. These survivors have a very difficult time dealing with relationships with other people…. Ninety percent of the time a survivor is assaulted by someone they know. That's an enormous violation of trust."
Victims, he says, start to ask themselves the question, "Who can I trust?"
"They basically get to a point where they have trouble trusting anybody… They're afraid to get into new relationships or new friendships, or afraid to get too emotionally close to people, but not really having that understanding of why that is taking place."
Rape crisis counselors, he said, usually work with a survivor for about 16 sessions over five to eight months. They stress to survivors that this is not their fault. They teach survivors to "relearn how to trust."
Dycus talks of two types of survivors: a primary survivor and a secondary survivor. The primary survivor is the person directly affected by the assault, and the secondary survivor is anyone who comes in contact with that survivor.
It's going to affect the person's relationship with parents, parents-in-law, co-workers, husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend, says Dycus. "I mean the consequences of this happening to one person ripple out. It's like throwing a stone in a pond. It's not just affecting the one person. It's affecting everybody around them." Secondary survivors need help learning how to deal with their loved ones. "Sometimes we just have counseling sessions with secondary survivors."
Dycus tries to avoid taking these problems home, but it is hard sometimes to not get too emotionally attached. "Sometimes we cry with the people that we are working with," Dycus says. "I think dealing with these survivors has made me a better person." . He encourages people to get involved at local crisis centers such as Our Voice and My Sisters' Place.
One of Dycus' happier moments as a counselor involved a fifteen-year-old girl he was working with. "She was an emotional wreck, as most of the victims are, but her spirit was so resilient." He tried to help her understand that it was not her fault, in any way, shape, or form.
He worked with her and didn't know how much good he did. It was about a year later that he got a call from the survivor and her mother, telling him the great news. "She had been able to get back and be successful in her school work, and she was applying for college, and she had developed these great friendships and relationships, and she was in a dating situation that was very supportive and happy for her."
It showed him that "people can recover, that they can pick up the pieces of their lives after a traumatic experience."
Give us your feedback. We value your opinions.
The Hilltop reserves the right not to post anonymous comments or any that could be judged slanderous, that make unverifiable allegations of fact, or use language we consider in bad taste.
All fields must be filled in.
HOME
| 
