When someone living in Door County experiences sexual or domestic violence and decides to get help, chances are they will meet Sophie Sielen or Moriah Benzow.
Sielen is the Door County coordinator and victim advocate for Family Services of Northeast Wisconsin’s Sexual Assault Center, and Benzow is the executive director of HELP of Door County, the only domestic violence advocacy and services group in the county. Clients are referred to the organizations by law enforcement, as well as 24-hour crisis hotlines staffed by Sexual Assault Center and HELP advocates.
The two women also facilitate Door County’s Coordinated Community Response team, a task force that uses community collaboration to address sexual assault and domestic violence locally.
Every time Sielen has staffed the Sexual Assault Center information booth at events, she said she encountered the perception that Door County does not need the kind of services her organization provides.
“I have had at least one person, if not more than one person, come up to me and ask, ‘are you really needed here?’” she said.
“Sexual assault doesn’t discriminate against anyone or any community, against gender, age, ethnicity. It impacts everybody in every community and most people probably know a sexual assault survivor,” Sielen said.
Benzow encounters misconceptions in the community as well and has heard the refrain “why don’t you just leave?” leveled at domestic violence survivors too many times.
“If somebody could just pack up and leave and not have any problems when they walk out that door, they would,” she said.
One of HELP’s clients has been trying to leave a situation where they are “regularly thrown against a wall” to no avail, Benzow said, because they cannot find an affordable place to live.
Financial barriers are just one of many that domestic violence survivors may face when trying to leave their abuser, she added.
Both the Sexual Assault Center and HELP raise awareness and provide education locally, and offer services directly to survivors and their families. As leaders of the Coordinated Community Response team, they bring together community systems that touch the issues of sexual assault and domestic violence, including the legal system, healthcare, public education and more.
The Coordinated Community Response model, which Wisconsin adopted in the 1980s, is based on the idea that sexual and domestic violence are issues that require engagement from the entire community to address, not just isolated incidents between victims and perpetrators.
The model originated in Duluth, Minn. in the early 1980s, as a criminal justice reform initiative pertaining to domestic violence. The model has expanded and been adopted worldwide to not only address domestic violence, but sexual assault, stalking and similar crimes.
Because sexual and domestic violence overlap so frequently, most Coordinated Community Response teams in the state are geared toward both issues now, according to Benzow.
“There is a lot of intersectionality,” she said, “We both provide advocacy through legal systems, we both provide prevention education. We both are there to support victims of violence, whether it’s sexual violence or physical violence. We can both utilize a lot of the same resources within our community. We both work within the police department, the sheriff’s department and courtroom so we have a lot of commonalities within that, and our survivors or victims of these crimes are also going through a lot of those similar processes.”
Incomplete picture
Statistics can often answer the question “do we really need this here?” but statistics for sexual assault are hard to determine, Sielen said.
Sexual assault cases go unreported to law enforcement for a variety of reasons, she said. Fear of not being believed, convincing themselves it’s not a “big deal,” shame, feeling like the violence was somehow their fault are all reasons someone might not go to the police, according to Sielen.
In 2023 the Sexual Assault Center saw just over 1,300 clients in the four counties it serves–Brown, Door, Marinette and Oconto–and 92 of those clients were in Door County. According to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, Door County had eight arrests for sexual assaults in roughly the same time period, including one from the Sturgeon Bay Police Department. The remainder were reported by the Door County Sheriff’s Office. The towns of Gibraltar and Washington Island police departments did not submit any sexual assault statistics.
It is impossible to determine exactly how many incidents of sexual violence occur because of underreporting, but according to data collection and analysis by RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), on average there are 463,634 victims age 12 or older, of rape and sexual assault each year in the United States.
Only 310 out of 1000 sexual assaults are reported to law enforcement, and 25 of those perpetrators actually see jail time, according to RAINN.
Domestic violence is also an underreported crime, Benzow said, for some of the same reasons sexual assault survivors do not report their incidents. Shame and fear are compounded by financial control, having children involved and other factors in domestic violence cases, she said.
The most recent statistics available from the Wisconsin Department of Justice are for 2018 and show 67 domestic violence incidents reported to law enforcement in Door County. Of those incidents, 62 resulted in arrest.
According to Benzow, HELP provided 1,646 services for 322 individual clients in 2023.
Barriers
Sexual and domestic violence survivors face many barriers to reporting and getting the help they need, according to advocates. The Coordinated Community Response team tries to look at systems through a survivor’s eyes to help eradicate or overcome those barriers, Sielen said.
In the state of Wisconsin, sexual assault victims have the right to have an advocate with them for every part of any civil or criminal proceeding, she explained. From the initial police interviews and medical exams, to potential court dates, an advocate can be involved every step of the way.
Advocate support helps survivors surmount the barrier the very systems themselves may be for some individuals, as they are often complex and unfamiliar, according to Sielen.
The number one focus is on the survivor’s needs and wishes, however, and sometimes that means being only emotional support when someone decides not to navigate the justice system.
“Sometimes talking with an advocate, that’s the first time that somebody is actually hearing them and believing them and listening to them. And so that’s our role. Our role as an advocate isn’t to be fact finders by law enforcement. Our job is to believe them,” Sielen said. “ We’re not making a decision for them of whether they’re reporting or not.”
When pressure is put on a survivor to report their incident, their choice and autonomy are being taken away from them, she said. “Their choice was taken from them when they were assaulted, and they have a choice now on what happens next and what the start of their healing might look like.”
Marginalized populations face more barriers to getting help in both sexual assault and domestic violence cases, according to End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin. Non-native English language speakers are one population in particular that may have difficulty reporting an incident of sexual violence or getting out of an abusive situation. The Coordinated Community Response team has bilingual advocates from both the Sexual Assault Center and HELP, as well as the ability to use translation services for other languages that may be represented.
One of the biggest local barriers to help for domestic violence survivors, according to Benzow, is finding housing. The lack of affordable housing in Door County is a huge issue, she said, with no easy solutions. HELP does have a network of temporary safe housing throughout the county, including on geographically isolated Washington Island, and in Southern Door, she said, but permanent relocation is much more difficult to find.
The affordable housing crisis is not the only systemic issue to overlap with sexual and domestic violence. Mental health, substance use disorder, and economic inequality are also part of the picture, according to advocates. It is this bigger picture that requires holistic community involvement and collaboration, Sielen said, and why Coordinated Community Response is a workable model for addressing these issues.
It is not the survivors’ responsibility to stop sexual and domestic violence, Benzow is clear.
“One of the beautiful things about a good working CCR,” she said, “It should be up to the community to fix these problems. It shouldn’t be up to the survivor.”
Changing the social conditions
The Coordinated Community Response team prioritizes prevention and education as much as they provide advocacy and services to survivors. Prevention demands changing attitudes and norms around these topics from a young age, according to Sielen, who led an educational presentation for Washington Island School District students in early December. Similar presentations have been planned and hosted by Sevastopol, Gibraltar, Sturgeon Bay and Southern Door schools as well, she said.
The Sexual Assault Center has evidence-based and developmentally appropriate curriculums on body safety, boundaries, consent and healthy relationships, Sielen said, and there are presentations for pre-K students all the way through high school.
A common misconception is that these presentations are talking about sex, she added, but that is not the focus.
“It’s about empowering children to know they have a voice and that they know what is safe and not safe,” she said. “If there is something that has ever happened or if there’s some red flags that they’re seeing, empowering them to know that they can talk with safe and trusted adults in their life.”
She also said these conversations should be ongoing ones that parents and caregivers have with their children, similarly to how there are ongoing conversations about seat belts and bicycle helmets.
“If we’re thinking that we just have one big puberty conversation once they hit puberty, that’s not helpful.”
The conversations are important to have even before puberty. Of the 92 clients served by the Sexual Assault Center in 2023, 42 were children, according to Sielen.
Domestic violence advocacy also puts a lot of importance on the act of “moving upstream” and changing cultural attitudes toward relationships and domestic violence that harm survivors and perpetuate the cycle of abuse, Benzow said.
HELP’s youth advocate facilitates a student group through its called FYRE (Forging Youth Relationships and Education). The group had about 20 Door County high school students involved last year, according to Benzow, but most of them graduated and the organization is looking to reestablish meetings in 2025.
The group discusses a wide range of topics related to oppression, power and control within relationships and dating violence. They also have organized awareness activities within their communities.
Expanding domestic violence education in local schools is a priority in 2025 for the Coordinated Community Response team, she said.
Besides educational programing and presentations in schools, the Sexual Assault Center provides one-on-one education for parents and caregivers, businesses and other organizations.
Law enforcement is another area of focus for training and education, Benzow said, and one area where collaboration from the Coordinated Community Response team can really come into play.
Law enforcement officers do receive domestic violence training in the police academy, according to the Wisconsin Department of Justice. HELP of Door County provides additional and more in-depth training on how to respond to survivors, and more nuanced coverage of the often stealthy signs of domestic violence, Benzow said.
She described how recently a career officer with thirty plus years of experience told her after a training session in Door County that he now recognized signs and “red flags” that he had missed in investigations and incidents in the past.
Continuum of harm
One of the reasons first responders and other players in systems that encounter sexual assault and domestic violence need additional training is that these issues exist on a continuum of severity, Sielen said. Warning signs are sometimes missed because situations can incrementally rise in severity when actions viewed as “no big deal” are normalized or implemented by an abuser, according to advocates.
For example, according to Sielen, sexual violence is not just one thing,
“It starts out with sexual harassment, sexual jokes, pictures, inappropriate comments, jokes or comments about people’s gender, people’s body, relationships, and all of those kinds of sexual harassment,” she said. “[They] are not necessarily reaching to the level of charging for a crime, but it’s still not behavior that’s not okay.”
Normalizing and excusing that kind of behavior makes it easier to escalate to touching without consent, assault and things that can be criminally charged, she explained.
Domestic violence is not always straightforward physical violence either, and it usually does not start out with black eyes and broken bones, Benzow said.
“There are so many other ways and types of domestic violence and power and control and abuse that can be well spotted before actual physical violence,” she said, and a lot of times there may never be physical violence, but emotional, verbal and financial abuse can “completely destroy a human being.”
Door County’s Coordinated Community Response team members represent Disability Rights Wisconsin, JAK’s Place, the Door County Health and Human Services Department, Child Protective Services, Legal Action Wisconsin, local law enforcement, the court system and several other entities, including local financial and skill development organizations Lakeshore CAP and Money Management Counselors.
End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin is providing training for Door County’s team in January, to kick off the new year.
For help and resources related to sexual assault, including educational materials and information on how to schedule a training session or presentation, please see the Sexual Assault Center’s website: www.familyservicesnew.org/sexual-assault-center/
For services and 24 hour accessibility to an advocate, call the Center’s hotline: (920)746-8996
For help and resources related to domestic violence, including education materials and information on how to schedule a training session or presentation with HELP of Door County staff, please see their website: www.helpofdoorcounty.org
For services related to domestic violence and 24 hour accessibility to an advocate, call HELP’s hotline: (920) 743-8818
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the county served by the Sexual Assault Center and misnamed an organization. The Sexual Assault Center serves Marinette, not Menominee County, and the organization is Money Management Counselors, not Fisk Money Management Services. The story has been corrected.