From Outcry to Adjudication

One agency where most counties have five

Abigail's Arms calls itself a victim services agency, and Ginger Johnson's definition of who qualifies is wide. If one person hurts another person, that victim qualifies for services. Most of the agency's grants are written for domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse, and the door is also open to people harmed by human trafficking, elder abuse, harassment and intoxicated assault.

Behind that door is a 24-hour emergency shelter, a sexual assault response team, a Child Advocacy Center that conducts forensic interviews with child victims, and a prevention team that teaches in the county's schools. The agency began in 1983 as a volunteer hotline routed to volunteers' home phones. Everything it provides is free. Ginger explains why any of it exists in terms of systems: someone who has been hurt is dropped into law enforcement, prosecution and the state child protection agency at once, systems most people have never dealt with.

Twenty-three years in law enforcement, then a job description

She did not arrive from the nonprofit sector. She told her father at six or seven that she wanted to be a policeman and was told that little girls grow up to be mommies. She got to criminal justice classes at the local community college later, started as a patrol officer, and finished twenty-three years of policing as a family violence and sexual assault investigator.

Her connection to Abigail's Arms came through her own caseload: she needed somewhere safe to send the victims she worked with, the agency was starting a shelter, and its director reached out. A job description for an opening reached her afterward, meant to be passed along to someone else. She took the job herself, joining in 2013 as a sexual assault advocate. A supervisor noticed she was good at building teams, so she worked with the courts, prosecution, law enforcement and the state child protection agency to create the county's sexual assault response team, then went back to those same people to build a Child Advocacy Center. She became interim director in 2019 and has led the agency since 2020.

“You make that soft handoff to another organization, but then that victim has to retell their story. Every time you make that soft handoff, it's a new intake. It's a new discussion with a new person who now knows your personal information.”

Ginger Johnson · 04:14

What the single roof removes from a handoff

Her case for the model is operational. A child may come in through the state child protection agency or through law enforcement for a forensic interview, and during the intake staff learn that there is domestic violence in the home, or that one or both parents were abused as children. All of that qualifies for services the agency already runs, and staff with different areas of expertise can pick it up without the family being sent anywhere.

The alternative is the soft handoff to another organization. Every handoff means a new intake, a new person holding someone's personal information, and a survivor telling the story again to a stranger. Under one roof there is one basic intake, with additional paperwork for a shelter stay or a Child Advocacy Center case, and no requirement to give the account from the beginning a second time.

“We also tell people that we're going to see you in the community. I'm going to see you at Walmart. I'm not going to acknowledge you unless you acknowledge me because I don't know who you're with and I don't want to have somebody asking you questions about how you know me.”

Ginger Johnson · 09:32

A walk-in door in a county where everyone knows everyone

Cooke County is small. People have walked in, recognized someone else in the building, and said they cannot come here. Ginger's answer is procedural. Information moves between a client and their case manager, or between a client and their counselor, and it is not discussed anywhere else. That confidentiality rests on written policy and on how staff are trained, and clients are told exactly that.

The agency also tells clients in advance how staff will behave outside the building, and when someone still is not comfortable walking in locally, it helps them get connected to an agency outside the community. The same restraint carries into the casework. Staff lay out the options and how the agency can help with each one, then support the decision the client makes. Ginger is direct about the reason: the last thing the agency wants is to resemble the person who was already telling that client what to do.

“I like to say that we'll work with a client from outcry to adjudication.”

Ginger Johnson · 12:40

Intake, the family case advocate and the individual service plan

Two staff members the agency calls victim advocate coordinators handle most intakes, though anyone in the agency can do one when it is needed. The paperwork itself is what the grants require. The questions inside it are what open a conversation about what has been happening and what the client is trying to reach.

Each client is then assigned a family case advocate, the agency's name for a case manager. Children route through the Child Advocacy Center and anyone needing a bed goes to the shelter staff, and the family case advocate stays constant across all of it. Appointments start at about once a week, and every day for residents living in the shelter. The plan is written for one person at a time and called an individual service plan: getting a client into the housing authority for safe housing, food assistance, work, and in a number of cases a return to a certification or degree program at the local college.

Her phrase for the span of that relationship is outcry to adjudication. Adjudication has no single meaning here: it can be a court date and a trial, or it can mean the client has moved on with their life and is all good.

“One of the biggest things for me becoming the executive director is I don't know how to go out and ask for money. And what I found is I don't have to. I just have to talk about Abigail's Arms. And the next question is, how can I help?”

Ginger Johnson · 27:14

A full shelter, and what keeps the staff in the work

One of the agency's own newsletters reported twenty-seven children in the shelter at one time. It was summer, and the team spent it scrambling for activities. The pool, the movie theater and other places in town will let the group come in together and take over for a while, and the Boys and Girls Club takes many of the shelter's children on scholarship or at a reduced rate. Parents are expected to supervise their own children, and Ginger's description of those days is that you wrangle each one as it comes.

Asked what keeps a small team going, she describes attention to the positives and marking the small movements a client makes toward a larger goal. A step that looks minor from the outside can be enormous for the person taking it. She counts walking in the door and saying I need help among the largest of them.

What restricted grants will not buy

Several large state and federal grants pay the salaries, and there is a finite amount of money in them. They are victim focused, written to fund the staff who work with victims, and what is left after salaries goes to direct operating expenses: utilities and internet service.

That money does not reach the material a family needs the week they arrive. A mother comes in with the clothes on her back and needs more clothing. The children have to get to school and she has to get to work. The car needs gas and the tires are bald. Those are the extras the agency covers another way, along with bed sheets and pillows for the shelter beds. Ginger covers them by applying widely for smaller money with fewer conditions attached — she names QuikTrip, whose small grant becomes gas cards that get a client to the next appointment or to a job.

Counseling is where she is most direct. Her grants will pay for some of it, and not enough of it. A child who needs counseling, in her view, needs it now rather than sitting on a waiting list for six months.

Prevention taught as leadership, and what actually helps

The prevention team, which the agency calls victim outreach and community education, is in almost every school across the county's eleven school districts. The team is two people, and Ginger says the work needs six. No single grant pays for it, so it comes out of pieces of others and out of the agency's own fundraising. She names it as the hardest thing she has to fund and the piece that matters most for breaking cycles of generational violence.

The curriculum is built around leadership: standing up for yourself, finding your own voice, being a voice for someone who has not found theirs yet, acting as an active bystander, and knowing the appropriate channels for creating change in your own community. Healthy relationships and consent are covered at whatever level fits the age in the room — for the youngest students, it is about a friend who does not want to do the thing you asked them to do — and Ginger is clear that none of it is sex education. Six or seven curriculums cover the youngest grades through high school, and the team sees the same students year after year.

Getting into the buildings took some work. The team took the psychosocial content schools are already required to teach and built its own lessons alongside it, so a district can cover a requirement and put a trained person in front of the class. Sessions produce outcries, and the follow-up is done with the school counselors.

The first thing Ginger asks the community for is word of mouth. More than four decades in, people still walk into the building and say they did not know the agency was there. Abigail's Arms runs a training about once a month called Agents of Change, open to anyone in the county: find out what we do, then go talk about it. She tells attendees they will never walk through Walmart the same way again, because they will see things they did not previously know how to see.