Tooele domestic violence advocacy center raising awareness of resources, support


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KEY TAKEAWAYS
  • Tooele's Pathway Survivor Advocacy Center faces challenges raising awareness in rural areas.
  • Residents hesitate to use resources due to fear and privacy concerns.
  • The center offers legal, housing, and employment aid, aiming to expand its reach.

TOOELE — A domestic violence advocacy center in Tooele County said it's facing challenges in the rural area. It said it's seeing a lot of people in the community hesitant to take advantage of its resources. It hopes to change that to save lives.

The Pathway Survivor Advocacy Center opened in 2023. However, the women who run it said a lot of people don't even know it's there.

"One of the biggest obstacles has been helping the community realize we're here," the director of Pathway Survivor Advocacy Center, Wendy Stilson, said.

This office in the heart of Tooele is where many domestic violence victims first ask for help.

"They have a lot of fear," a case manager with Pathway Survivor Advocacy Center, Heather Shoemaker, said.

The center provides legal services, offering housing and employment assistance and offers food and clothes to victims.

"I think that's been the hardest thing for … our ever-growing small county, is to feel safe that I can go and nobody's going to judge me and that my neighbors aren't going to know that I'm getting help," Stilson said.

Stilson said that in a small town, people talk.

"When somebody walks in that door, there's a good chance you probably know who they are," Shoemaker said.

And sometimes that prevents people from getting help.

"I think, for this county, there's been some incidents happen, whether it's, you know, sexual abuse or sexual assault or domestic violence including weapons … that have gotten the county pretty stirred up," Stilson said.

Stilson and her team are trying to educate people about what abuse is.

"So many people don't really realize that what they're experiencing is abuse. It's power and control," she said.

While the center does help people all the way out in Wendover, it is trying to expand its reach to include other rural communities. It wants men, women and children to know they can ask the center questions and meet with its team for help.

"What my passion is driven by is holding somebody until they're strong enough to stand on their own," Stilson said. "Oftentimes, that's going to be a 2-year-old child. That's going to be a 17-year-old girl. That's going to be a 75-year-old woman."

Pathway Survivor Advocacy Center holds 12 beds and is actively looking for more housing to meet the needs of its community.

Click here to learn more about the center and it services.

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The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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FamilyTooele CountyPolice & CourtsUtah
Shelby Lofton, KSL-TVShelby Lofton

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