When University of Wisconsin-Madison student Mia Marcy describes her life from age 6 to 14, she often compares it to the Barbie dolls she used to play with as a kid.
“My stepfather would dress me and touch me, kind of like I was his, um, puppet,” Marcy said. “He would do whatever. I was never raped by him, but he would be there when I got out of the shower.”
Marcy said she has only just begun to tell people she was abused, after years of losing friendships from cageyness and avoiding intimate relationships with men. The biology and criminal justice double-major wants to one day work in sexual assault forensics to help victims receive justice.
But advocates at anti-sexual violence organizations across Madison are facing rocky futures, as funding for their services gets slashed while the need only continues to increase.
Funding challenges and the Trump era
Most of the funding sexual assault centers in Madison traditionally receive is from the Victim of Crime Act (VOCA), which provides grants for state and local programming supporting victims of violent crime. One of these agencies is Madison’s Rape Crisis Center (RCC), one of the oldest sexual assault centers in the country.
According to Executive Director Dana Pellebon and Assistant Director of Outreach & Prevention Bri Breunig, VOCA funds to the RCC were slashed by $250,000 in the last year of the Biden administration, but supplemented through state grants. Due to uncertainty on whether Gov. Tony Evers’ VOCA fix will pass again this year, the center is not rehiring a bilingual advocate and an educator position.
“In many small areas, there is maybe one rape crisis center for four counties,” Pellebon said. “They’ve already seen the impact of the cuts. Now, those of us in the larger areas are getting an influx of their clients, at the same time I’m having to cut positions.”
UNIDOS and Freedom Inc have also had to restructure their services due to funding cuts, with Freedom Inc laying off multiple staff members. Beyond funding, both agencies are also worried about anti-immigration policies preventing survivors from accessing care.
“There’s a lot of fear. Our numbers of people using our services are already a bit down, and I think we’ll see it even more months later,” Escudero said.
To many survivors, Trump’s presidency marks a danger to progress, not just because of his policies, but because he was found liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll.
Spencer Runde, a survivor and peer facilitator at UW-Madison student organization Promoting Awareness Victim Empowerment (PAVE), said Trump is a painful reminder of how sexual offenders can occupy societal positions of power.
“To see someone in the highest office in our country be a rapist, an abuser, and to see so many people write it off or say E. Jean Carroll made it up and stuff, is very hurtful,” Runde said.
Madison’s sexual assault agencies
Madison is a hub of sexual assault organizations and resources serving all of Dane County, which encompasses 1,238 square miles and more than 60 municipalities.
Breunig said the center is the only “full service sexual assault provider” in the county, focusing not only on medical, legal and therapy services after an assault, but also prevention.
“One of the most crucial things you can do is, ideally, prevent sexual violence before it happens,” Breunig said. “It’s one thing to respond to a crisis, but to prevent it, you need culture change.”
Through funding received after the 1990s, RCC has created a seven-person outreach department dedicated to sexual assault prevention, offering safer bar trainings, middle and high school educational programming, self-defense classes and more.
Pellebon said this outreach has also shifted to include a more “multicultural, anti-oppression” approach to sexual violence in Dane County. Her work today consists of coordinating with different communities and culturally specific agencies, including UNIDOS, which was formed in 1996 to mainly serve Madison’s Spanish-speaking community.
“When I first started at RCC, it was an organization that primarily served middle-class white women, because what we did was meet people here once a month,” Pellebon said. “Now, the back work has really changed. We don’t let anyone walk out of our office without resources.”
Having worked in bilingual sexual assault services for more than ten years, Executive Director Virginia Gittens Escudero said the “trauma-informed, culturally responsive” legal, emotional and judicial services UNIDOS provides are important in helping Madison Latinos respond to sexual violence.
“When we are talking about things that hurt, that we cannot process or understand, it is so important that you’re able to do so in your own language,” Escudero said. “Otherwise, you risk delaying the healing process and the understanding by the victim that it’s not their fault.”
Freedom Inc, a Black and Southeast Asian non-profit in Madison, also works mainly in low-income communities of color to address the root causes of sexual violence. The organization’s operations manager, Houa Yang, said the organization helps bring awareness to the alarming rates of violence against girls and women in her community.
“People exploit Hmong women through sex trafficking, abusive international marriages and murder-suicides, but it’s not even really talked about,” Yang said. “If anything, a lot of the time the court systems here just end up further victimizing our survivors.”
Survivors at UW-Madison
According to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, there were 315 reported cases of sexual assault in Dane County two years ago, with 180 of these cases taking place in Madison.
In 2023, there were 18 reported incidents of sexual assault on campus and 46 reported incidents of domestic/dating violence and stalking.
Among the UW-Madison student body, roughly 26.1% of undergraduate women and 6.8% of undergraduate men say they have been sexually assaulted since entering university, according to the most recent Association of American Universities (AAU) Campus Climate Survey.
“Every one of my friends here has either endured being sexually harassed, from the basic cat calls on State Street, to like, my friend being forced by her situationship to give him a blow job,” Marcy said.
Marcy said the man who assaulted her friend, like many of the men she has interacted with in college, said they think of women and girls as “objects” and were misogynistic toward women.
She and Runde both said they think the university should take further steps to educate students on sexual violence, with Runde criticizing the university’s prior removal of a safe and consensual sex module in 2024 due to conservative backlash.
“UW-Madison has not prioritized marginalized students, including survivors,” Runde said. “At the end of the day, our school could help us have in-person, peer-led conversations about consent. But they don’t.”
Sreejita Patra is a senior staff writer and the former summer ad sales manager for The Daily Cardinal. She has written for breaking news, campus news and arts. She also covered the Oregon Village Board for the Oregon Observer.
