San Angelo Walks To Prevent Sexual Abuse

People in San Angelo gathered Saturday morning to participate in “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes,” a charity event aimed at bringing awareness to stop rape, sexual assault and gender violence.

This event consisted of men, women and children who joined together to walk one mile around the Tom Green County Courthouse.

The men were encouraged to wear women’s high-heeled shoes and support the idea, "You can't really understand another person's experience until you've walked a mile in her or his shoes."

Lt. Mike Hernandez, with the San Angelo Police Department, came to the event as a guest speaker and shared his experience of how sexual abuse affects those involved.

“Victims don’t speak out enough, and the numbers say there are severely underreported cases. When somebody speaks out, and we can put somebody in custody, then maybe we can stop somebody else from being a victim.”

Hernandez also spoke about how a University of Texas in Austin report said that, in many cases, people fear speaking out about being the victim of sexual assault because the authorities, or the people they tell, won’t believe them.

 At the same time, those who do speak out about being assaulted, or knowing someone who has previously been assaulted, is met with “victim blaming.”

Karla Payne, with the Concho Valley Rape Crisis Center (CVRCC), said, “We hear and see a lot of victim blaming, and it’s almost like asking the victim what they did wrong to cause their own assault. We just want to raise awareness and let people know that it’s nothing the victim did that could have caused a sexual assault.”

She went on to say that the perpetrators are at fault, and they made the choice to commit the act.

Hernandez mentioned one of his very first calls on duty was to a domestic violence incident. Upon arriving at the location, it had become an assault in progress. He witnessed the suspect, who held the victim by the hair, punch her in the face despite the pleas for mercy.  

After apprehending the suspect, Hernandez recalled him yelling, “Look what you did to me!”  

Hernandez told the suspect that the victim didn’t don’t anything wrong, and that his own actions led to the arrest.

However, despite all that had happened, the victim went back to the suspect the following day. Hernandez had explained the legal process of filing charges and offered the victim a place to stay at the family shelter, but what he had not done as a young officer was show compassion.

“What I did not do was tell [the victim] a story of a young boy who was a victim and witnessed his mother being beaten and assaulted on several occasions. What I did not do is advise [her] that [she] deserved better than this.”

Hernandez explained, prior to telling the story, that he had been the boy who was abused, and he had to witness his father assaulting his mother at a young age.   

He also went on to note that any form of abuse, whether it be family or not, starts with verbal abuse, then physical, and ends with sexual abuse.

Both Hernandez and Payne encouraged victims to tell their stories and bring awareness that will hopefully prevent future assault cases from happening.

The Concho Valley Rape Crisis Center offers a 24-hour crisis hotline providing assistance, referrals and information. Call (325) 658-8888 for this service.

Individual and Group Support is available to those survivors and their significant others to provide help, hope, and healing, according to CVRCC.org. For more information, contact Heather Hodge at [email protected].