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January is Stalking Awareness Month

Stalking is a serious, yet often misunderstood, form of abuse that affects millions of people each year. This January, NCCASA invites you to learn more about the dynamics of stalking, its devastating impacts, and how we can collectively work to support survivors and prevent this pervasive issue.

Understanding Stalking

Stalking is defined as a pattern of behavior directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to feel fear. These behaviors can include repeated, unwanted contact such as phone calls, text messages, or emails, as well as actions like following, monitoring, or tracking someone without their consent. With the rise of technology, perpetrators increasingly use tools like GPS tracking, social media monitoring, and spyware to intimidate and control victims.

The statistics are telling:

Stalking is not just invasive—it can escalate into physical violence and other forms of abuse, making early intervention crucial for violence prevention.

The Impact of Stalking

The emotional and psychological toll of stalking is profound. Victims often report anxiety, depression, and a constant sense of fear. The disruptions to daily life, such as changing jobs, relocating, or altering routines to avoid the stalker, can be overwhelming. Stalking also impacts survivors financially, with costs for increased security, legal fees, and missed work.

More specifically,

How to Respond

Understanding how to respond to stalking is vital in supporting survivors and preventing harm:

  1. Recognize the signs: Take threats and behaviors seriously, even if they initially seem minor. Stalking is often dismissed or minimized, but early recognition is key.
  2. Document everything: Encourage survivors to keep records of stalking behaviors, including screenshots, voicemails, and detailed notes of incidents.
  3. Develop a safety plan: Connect survivors with local advocacy organizations to create a personalized safety plan.
  4. Know the law: Stalking is a crime in all 50 states, but legal definitions and protections vary. Familiarize yourself with state-specific resources to provide the best support. Here is North Carolina’s statute on stalking.

Resources for Survivors and Advocates

There are many resources available for those experiencing stalking and for advocates working to address it:

This year, we’ve made incredible strides in the fight to end sexual violence—and with your support, we can do even more.

2024 marks another remarkable year of policy advancements, bringing positive, lasting change to the lives of survivors across NC. In recent years, we have seen a rise in technology-facilitated sexual violence, including the use of ‘deepfakes.’ This involves using AI to superimpose another person’s face onto explicit images without their consent, often with the intent to harm their reputation. Before House Bill 591, individuals could distribute such images without facing adequate legal consequences. This harmful trend, particularly prevalent among youth in North Carolina, prompted NCCASA to take swift action. We worked tirelessly with lawmakers to pass critical legislation, giving survivors more options for both criminal justice and civil remedies. These policy changes continue to empower survivors to reclaim their autonomy, reputation, and privacy. 

In addition to creating lasting policy change, NCCASA has received valuable feedback directly from survivors on the impact of our advocacy and legal services: 

 “‘Thank you’ cannot do justice for the support and guidance you have given me over the past few months. I’m forever grateful that you took on faith and courage to believe me and represent me when it felt like nobody else would.”

Without the monetary support of our community, our capacity to represent survivors, advocate for survivor protections, and educate to prevent sexual violence would not be possible. As we look forward to the future, we are committed to continue meeting the needs of survivors, making sure they feel safe, heard and seen in their healing journey. 

Will you join our commitment to create even greater impact in 2025? We have a goal of raising $10,000 in unrestricted dollars this year to continue to provide legal services and policy change. Every dollar you give helps build a future where survivors are empowered and safe spaces are the norm, not the exception.

 

Please note that you can choose to make your gift recurring, ensuring sustainable support for our mission year-round.

With your partnership, we can continue to stand with survivors and work toward ending sexual violence for all people. It is up to us to continue to create and sustain safer, healthier, and more equitable communities–the ones we deserve and can thrive in collectively and joyfully. 

Thank you for being an essential member of our community. 

In Solidarity,

NC Coalition Against Sexual Assault (NCCASA) Team

Today is Giving Tuesday, a global celebration of radical generosity, where communities come together to create meaningful change. This year, we hope that you will support our work at the North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault (NCCASA) to end sexual violence and create safer and more equitable communities.
NCCASA serves dozens of member organizations and advocates across North Carolina, including 94 rape crisis centers, by providing training and technical assistance, creating and curating resources, and offering funding opportunities for member organizations and advocates across North Carolina. NCCASA also directly supports survivors through our educational programming, training, and advocacy efforts.
Your generosity helps to make our programming sustainable and enables us to support our programs and direct representation of survivors who have shared testimonials about their experience with NCCASA’s legal services. The testimonials below reflect the heart of our work—to empower survivors and build meaningful and sustainable prevention and advocacy programs.
In this work, every dollar counts. Whether you choose to donate $5 or $500, any amount furthers our capacity to address sexual violence across our State. Thank you for supporting NCCASA’s mission to end sexual violence and for amplifying our work.

NCCASA now provides a new service that helps survivors with one of the steps to repair their credit. As part of the Debt Bondage Repair Act, survivors can remove adverse information from their credit report that is related to events that took place during and after their human trafficking experience. Poor credit bars survivors from things like housing, employment, or car purchases.

Survivors of human trafficking can have specific information blocked from their credit reports. Some examples provided by Polaris Project include: “prior evictions, late rental payments, credit card or loan defaults, unpaid bills that went to a collection agency, criminal convictions that were the result of a trafficking experience, and bankruptcy filings.”

Survivors must provide the following information for eligibility:
1. Proof of identity
2. Victim Determination Documentation
3. A list of what needs to be blocked that was a result of a survivor’s trafficking experience

NCCASA is an NGO authorized by the NC Department of Justice that can provide a Victim Determination Document (VDD): a signed document stating/attesting a person is a victim of human trafficking, as it is defined by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000:

● Sex trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining,patronizing, or soliciting of a person for the purposes of a commercial sex act, in which the commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the personinduced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age (22 USC § 7102).

● Labor trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purposes of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery, (22 USC §7102).

To request information about obtaining from NCCASA a signed Victim Determination Document for credit repair as specified under the Debt Bondage Relief Act, please email [email protected] or call 919-871-1015.