Inspiring Voices {Juliana Gonzales}

Senior Director of Sexual Assault Services at SAFE Alliance

Words by Jessi Devenyns Photos by Eric Morales

Everything that happens should be evaluated from within an individual’s context. Who are you? Where are you? With what community do you identify? For Juliana Gonzales, Senior Director of Sexual Assault Services at the SAFE Alliance, these questions become an integral part of care when individuals arrive seeking an avenue to stop the violence cycles in their lives, especially when they identify as female.

Women’s health, in particular, has always been a source of interest for Juliana. From sports to sexual health, nothing that happens in a woman’s body can be addressed independently from the whole person. This inextricable link has led her from working in women’s health services to professional women’s sports to the Austin Tenants Council and, most recently, back to a medical health context at SAFE Place.

“I’ve learned that things don’t happen just to your body,” explains Juliana. “Health is socioeconomic, it’s family support, it’s access to healthcare.” As a consequence, a person’s response to medical issues and the healing process “has to do with a lot of things.”

With individual backgrounds being so diverse, Juliana has worked as a director of sexual assault services on creating an environment within the clinics that are representational of the survivors who walk through their doors. Although the population that SAFE Alliance serves is predominantly women, those who seek services at this non-profit also include men, transgender individuals, non-binary, and those who speak languages other than English.

“It’s important to me that survivors come into the clinic and see all kinds of people here, including people who look like them,” Juliana explains. 

Employing an array of individuals, however, has opened the door to a wider range of conversations that Juliana shares she is exposed to every day. Those conversations are cyclical, like the cycle of violence that she and her team strive to break through their work. “There are cycles and systems that perpetuate themselves on people in which the same person that we see as a victim of abuse may also be the perpetrator of violence in another situation later in their life.” Stopping the momentum that leads individuals to complete the circle is where Juliana finds herself expending her energies. Unfortunately, much like each individual’s context is unique, so too are the requirements for how to address the cycle of violence.

“There’s something comforting about knowing that [we work] on issues that we’re passionate about. It’s good to know that you get to go to work every day and do something about it.”

As a result, Juliana spends her time interacting with survivors inside the clinics and shelters as well as the nurses who care for the patients. Successfully engaging and actually hearing their stories, however, requires a knack for connection, a requirement that Juliana describes as best addressed with the armor of a soft shell crab. Cultivating a translucent exoskeleton allows her to be “vulnerable about [their situation] enough so that you can move through the day with a shell that protects you a little bit without becoming hard to the people who you need to take care of.”

“Retaining her vulnerability,” she clarifies, “also allows her to continue to cultivate her passion to successfully help those who seek help. As someone who has studied women and their relationship to society both in university and professional settings, Juliana says that her goal for over a decade has been to work with Austinites who have survived traumas of sexual assault. “There’s something comforting about knowing that [we work] on issues that we’re passionate about,” she shares. “It’s good to know that I get to go to work every day and do something about it.”