| About CRCL Colchester Rape Crisis
Line is a confidential telephone help-line counselling service run by
women for women and girls who have suffered any form of sexual violence, past or present.
We also provide face-to-face counselling for rape and child sexual abuse, but we have far
more requests for this service than we can accommodate with our existing resources. We
offer an advocacy service and accompany women to the police, to court or to the GUM clinic
if they request it, but this aspect of the service is dependent upon volunteer
availability. We have also undertaken a pilot outreach project, upon which we should like
to build, but this also requires intensive volunteer commitment, and resources above and
beyond what we currently have.

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Family
and Friends
If you are a friend, supporter or any other relationship apart
from partner, be very clear about boundaries, the person you care about has been abused
enough, boundaries must be very clear to enable the person to heal. Dont ask
them why they didnt fight back or do something to prevent the abuse. This kind of
questioning intimates that they were in some way responsible for what happened to them.
The blame must always lie with the abusers.

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Volunteers
Without the enthusiasm and dedication of our volunteers, we
would not have been able to achieve as much as we have, so they need to be applauded.
What Volunteers can expect.
Formal training covering basic counselling skills and specific information relevant to the
work of the Line.
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Flashbacks
Many women who are survivors of any form of sexual violence experience flashbacks at
one time or another. Flashbacks are temporary
states of remembering something painful or traumatic which has been hidden for quite some
time in the subconscious mind and during a flashback; you may feel as though aspects of
the rape or sexual assault are actually happening to you now. The duration of a flashback differs and could
last from a few seconds to a few hours.

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Ritual Abuse
Most sexual abuse of children is ritualised in some way. Abusers use repetition, routine
and ritual to coerce children into patterns of behaviour in order to instil fear and
ensure silence. Bath-times, nursery rhymes or bedtime stories, gifts, elaborate games,
dressing up, taking photographs or exchanging secrets are all tactics which abusers use to
gain the trust of a new victim.

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