It’s been 12 years since that night we sat out on the deck of her Los Angeles home sharing a bottle of wine. That was the night she told me she had been molested. She said she had been about four years old when it happened. She stared straight at me as she talked, more announcing it than anything. She looked invincible, not sad. Like nothing could hurt her. Ever. And then she cried. I wanted to say the right thing, to reach out to her with the perfect answer, to be the best me for her that I could be. But I couldn’t.

It was about a year later that I came across the ad. The Monterey Rape Crisis Center was looking for volunteers to staff their 24-hour crisis line. I called and then later went in. What I found there was a group of people so unique, so profoundly unselfish, that I wanted to be part of them.

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By day, Natasha works for a nonprofit in animal welfare. She’s a bit vague on purpose, not to protect her own identity but to protect the privacy of the people she comes in contact with after hours. She may go home at 5pm, but her work doesn’t stop. That’s because in her down time, Natasha is part of a group of 40 men and women who volunteer for the Monterey Rape Crisis Center. (Because anonymity plays an essential role in volunteers’ work, Natasha’s last name will not be published in this story.)

The majority of the center’s volunteers staff the 24-hour crisis line. For one six-hour shift per week, they keep their home phones clear and stay within earshot of the ringer, waiting.

Sometimes these volunteers will wait weeks for the phone to ring on their shift. Then, one night, it may ring once, or three times. It’s never consistent.

When someone calls, the call goes from an answering service to the volunteer’s home. That’s where the certified sexual assault counselors do most of the work: a lot of listening, a little bit of talking, and even more guidance. They talk to the caller about how to relax, how to offer support to a friend, who to call, what happens next, and how to get the help.

Natasha has still more to contend with during her after-work hours. She’s part of the center’s Sexual Assault Response Team (SART). Her volunteer shift spans three days a week, from the time the center closes at 5pm until it reopens again at 9am. On weekends, it’s all day and all night.

When her phone rings, Natasha goes out to a hospital, usually Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula (CHOMP), to accompany a survivor through a SART exam. A specially trained nurse will be there, too.

In 1997, Monterey County tapped into tobacco tax money to set up the team.

“The exam takes anywhere from four hours to eight hours,” Natasha explains. “I’m there to be with the survivor from the very beginning to the very end.”

Her presence offers more than just comfort and support, however. Natasha is there to walk the survivor through the entire exam at the outset, so there are no surprises.

“I tell them about the police interview and why they’re asking such personal questions,” she says. “I tell them they’ll have to disrobe and that their clothing will probably be taken as evidence. I tell them about the Woods Lamp,” a black light that is shined on the survivor in an otherwise dark room to look for other evidence on the survivor’s body, she explains.

“Most importantly, though, is I remind them that they have the power over what happens in that room: that if anything is uncomfortable or painful or if they want to stop for any reason at all, they’re the ones in charge.

“I do a little bit of everything: get them a glass of water, call their mother, hold their hand, anything.”

She also brings them a change of clothes the center has provided.

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“I can’t imagine how different it would have been if I’d had something like that,” Rachel Crawford says of the days before SART teams and volunteers like Natasha.

Her stepfather molested Crawford for several years. She was eight.

When Crawford was in the sixth grade, a school counselor found out, and Crawford spent hours being interrogated by detectives and social workers. Then her mother came to the police department and her life changed forever.

“The police told her what I’d said, and she said, ‘No, that it was impossible,’ and that I was a liar,” Crawford says.

And then, Crawford’s mother left her there, alone. Her mother went home to the man who had been forcing her daughter to give him oral sex for years. The authorities placed Crawford in foster care.

Crawford jumped from foster home to foster home, just wanting her mother back.

“I so desperately wanted to have a relationship with my mother, I would have done anything,” she says.

And she did.

“I rebelled,” she says. “I was drinking heavily, and doing drugs and was overly promiscuous.”

Crawford’s only 21 now, but her past seems like a lifetime ago.

She’s been in group therapy with MRCC for years, and she’s working to reclaim her life. Crawford’s stepfather was convicted, with her mother standing by his side. When she turned 18, she sued him in civil court and got a large settlement. She’s using the money to get an education. She’ll soon receive an associate’s degree from Monterey Peninsula College, and then she’ll be off to Cal State Sacramento to earn a bachelor’s degree.

“Someday, after I have my master’s degree, I want to open a center just like MRCC,” she says. “Before I went there, I had no idea that my dream career existed.”

In the meantime, Crawford speaks on a panel with other survivors to the volunteers who are going through the mandatory 43-hour training.

“Once they graduate [from the training as sexual assault counselors] they’ll be part of a group of people who serve an amazing role,” she says.

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MRCC’s Executive Director Clare Mounteer agrees with Crawford.

“The volunteers are the heart of this agency,” Mounteer says. “I’m the management, the nuts and bolts that backs them up. But they’re the front-line person the survivor meets when they reach out in the middle of the night and someone’s there to take their call. They’re caring, heartfelt people, and that comes across in their very first contact.”

And, she adds, confidentiality is key.

“I’ve been here for 18 years,” Mounteer says. “I would love to say that somehow over that time, the stigma of rape and sexual assault has changed. But it hasn’t. Society has never embraced it. The old myths of ‘What was she drinking? What was she wearing?’ All that crap still exists.”

This brings out a bit of the lion in Crawford. She’s unwilling to be quiet.

“Everyone has their own way to deal with their own circumstances,” she says. “I respect that. But I don’t want to be quiet about it. When we’re not saying our names, the one in three of us who are abused are saying, ‘You keep doing this to us, and we’ll keep hiding it for you.’”

Over 200 men and women use the crisis center’s 24-hour crisis line every month. Some are in therapy; some aren’t. Some survivors have told the whole world. Others never told a soul.

Still others use the crisis line because they know someone who has been abused. These callers don’t know how to help their partner or spouse or child.

“Everyone knows someone it’s happened to,” Mounteer says.

Some, like Crawford, still aren’t ready to call.

“It makes me too vulnerable,” she says. “It’s hard to reach out to family or friends and say I need help,” she says. “To reach out to a stranger when I’m having a tough moment or day or night is 10 times harder.”

But when she does—or when any of the countless survivors in the county do—there will be someone to answer the call, just because they want to.

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She brings it up from time to time. And I still struggle for the right words. But I’ve learned a lot since that first night, solely from the women who keep the office open and the volunteers who keep it alive. They inspire me, teach me.

And so it is from them that I know better now. And while there isn’t a single time that she mentions it that I don’t still want to fill the silence and fix it for her, to give her back everything he tried to take, I’ve learned that the best I can give her is just to listen.