Connecticut victim advocates balance self-care, service in court

When Olivia DeFilippo was a junior in college, she was dedicating her academics to anthropology and studying civilizations long past. 

“I anticipated locking myself into a lab, and I was going to be a forensic anthropologist … I had this wonderful, wonderful physics professor, and she told me that I should really take more opportunities to deal with the living and less with the dead,” DeFilippo said. “So I just, on a whim, started working with the Alliance to End Sexual Violence.” 

Seven years later, DeFilippo, 27, is the manager of criminal court advocacy with the Center for Family Justice in Bridgeport. After volunteering with the Connecticut Alliance to End Sexual Violence through her college career, DeFilippo realized that she valued that work, even if she never planned on making it her career.

“From that moment, I knew that this is where I needed to be, because these are problems that affect all of us,” DeFilippo said. “This isn't a women's issue, this isn't a victim's or survivors' issue. This is all of our issue.”

Two of her high school friends also ended up working with the Alliance to End Sexual Violence. The three friends had gone to college for different majors, but unknowingly came together over a shared cause. When she told them she was working with the alliance, “their jaws dropped to the floor.” 

DeFilippo values the work she does, but she can’t deny that it is grueling. Each advocate with the Center for Family Justice is handling around 500 cases at any given time. 

“It's very fast paced from beginning to end,” DeFilippo said.

The court day starts at 9 a.m., when any domestic violence arrests from the day before end up on the advocates’ desks. 

“It's the law that it has to be the very next business day after the arrest,” DeFilippo said. “For long weekends we'll get easily 20 to 30 reports … Today (Thursday, March 23) we had 2, so it really spans the gamut here.” 

DeFilippo and her team then reach out to all the victims before the cases are heard in the domestic violence courtroom at 11:30 a.m. In Bridgeport, all domestic violence cases are heard in one courtroom, so only one advocate goes to the court to take notes each day while the other four members of DeFilippo’s team give updates to clients, answer their questions and work as a liaison between victims and the court. 

The work load seems great, but the Bridgeport Superior Court has helped the team manage its caseload. For example, Mondays are reserved for arraignments so that cases from the weekend do not overshadow ongoing ones. 

“That's been a huge part of us being successful in this role and us knowing that, you know, we have a place here, and these are our team members that can help us get this done, and make sure that victims have their voices heard,” DeFilippo said.

The Bridgeport Superior Court works to help advocates better do their jobs, but it can’t prevent them from facing secondary, or vicarious, trauma. Vicarious trauma is a group of symptoms that emergency services and other workers can experience when they are frequently exposed to secondary trauma. For example, hearing about the violence clients have faced can lead to vicarious trauma for victim advocates.

Symptoms of vicarious trauma include irritability, excessive worrying and more. Advocates are even more likely to develop vicarious trauma if they lack a support system, proper coping skills or a support system to help them get through tough moments. 

“Any form of contact with the judicial branch is traumatic, and we do our best in order to make the space comfortable for our victims, but then we also have to take our own advice into account,” DeFilippo said. 

The Center for Family Justice places great emphasis on work-life separation, including strict 9-5 work schedules and required self-care activities. They also try to keep the atmosphere light when they are not actively working, laughing together and lifting each other up. 

When DeFilippo sat for photos, she was alone in the Center’s office. A group of five desks stacked high with files, but also featuring photos of family and friends, sticky notes with cute messages and other mementos, fill the room. She has her straight, medium-length hair down and she wears a shirt with flamingos on it underneath her black cardigan. 

During the shoot, two of the other advocates came back from their lunch break. They teasingly ribbed her, causing her to break out into laughter. 

For a moment, it was hard to tell what conversations the walls of that office had heard.

“It's easy to say ‘Leave your work at work.’ You don't take it home with you, leave it at the door, but we know that that's never really possible, and that vicarious trauma can enter any realm of your life,” DeFilippo said. “So we do take it very seriously in hopes that, you know, we can kind of separate ourselves. It's not helpful for our clients if we're the ones that are crying, and they're trying to help us.”

DeFilippo’s method of self-care centers around music. She even works as a percussion tech at a local high school.

“I like to make music,” DeFilippo said. “I like to teach music. I like to listen to music. Music keeps me sane, makes me human.”

While DeFilippo takes great care to prioritize her mental health while working such an emotionally taxing job, she is no stranger to burnout. During DeFilippo’s senior year of college, she was working multiple jobs, volunteering and completing her studies, but her work-life balance came crumbling down when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“I really was burning the candle at both ends,” DeFilippo said. “It got to the point that I was showing up to work on days that I didn't need to be there because I had a really realistic dream at night that they called me in. I was slowly self-destructing … how could I possibly provide the support that my clients are looking for when i'm not all mentally there?”

While DeFilippo is still heavily involved in her community, she is now better aware of her limits. However, not all advocates have that same mentality, and many burn out completely, especially if they have to work multiple jobs. According to Glassdoor, the average salary for a victim advocate is around $44,000 per year. This does constitute a living wage for a single person with no children in Connecticut, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology living wage calculator. 

However, DeFilippo said it’s hard to make ends meet unless you have little financial obligation. 

“A lot of people can't afford to do this kind of work and support a family or be able to live comfortably,” DeFilippo said. “It's so difficult. We see that in a lot of the social services, right, this work is so necessary, but you'll never get paid enough to do just this work.”

To help make extra money, DeFilippo works with the band at her local high school, but she knows other workers at the courthouse hold multiple jobs. 

“We're doing our best, but it doesn’t mean that there's not a lot of folks in the courthouse that need to have second jobs in order to support their families and their loved ones,” DeFilippo said.

DeFilippo handles crushing workloads, emotionally draining work and low pay, but she never forgets the importance of her team’s work. 

“I've always really wanted to see the good in people. and I've always really wanted to be an optimist,” DeFilippo said. “It's hard for a lot of people to keep that mentality. Ultimately I want what our organizations want, and that's to have a world that's free of violence and a world that's free of cruelty and abuse. Our job is to come back every day in the hopes that one day we don't have a job anymore, and I find that attainable, maybe not in our lifetime, but it seems tangible to me that that is our goal.”

ANDREA O’CONNOR

Like DeFilippo, many victim advocates don’t start out planning to have a career in the field. Andrea O’Connor, the family violence victim advocate program manager for The Umbrella Center for Domestic Violence Services in New Haven, dreamed of being a lawyer. 

“I always knew that I didn't want to sit up on a desk and punch numbers into a computer,” O’Connor said. “I wanted to work with people, talk to people, and I feel like I can help make a difference in people's lives.” 

During her freshman year of college, she realized that being a lawyer wasn’t the place for her.

“I couldn't picture myself as a lawyer,” O’Connor said. “I feel like I wasn't fierce enough to be a lawyer.”

Yet, she still wanted to work in the criminal justice system.

“I was thinking about changing my major and my advisor was the one that kind of helped me pick the criminal justice, psychology, combination that I have, and he was trying to find me an internship, and he goes ‘What about victim advocacy?’ And I was like I was like, ‘What's that?’” O’Connor said. 

“He got me an internship working with a restraining order advocate … helping victims apply for these orders of protection, and I fell in love with it. It was only supposed to be a semester long, but I stayed on for the whole year.”

When she graduated college, O’Connor took a job at The Umbrella Center. However, it wasn’t as a victim advocate. The Umbrella Center offers a number of services outside of the court system, including outpatient clinical services and housing. 

Jennifer Devine, a salon owner from Milford and domestic abuse survivor, said that The Umbrella Center’s services were vital to her experience after leaving her abuser, inside the court and out.

“They helped provide a free criminal attorney for the restraining order hearing for me,” Devine said. “They helped provide free counseling with an advocate, weekly. They helped connect me for getting food stamps. They help me get resources to connect for heating assistance, electrical assistance, you know what I mean? All these things.”

As the family violence victim advocate program manager, O’Connor, 30, supervises nine advocates, who cover the Milford, Derby and New Haven courts. She coordinates the advocates in each courthouse while taking on many cases of her own. Milford and Derby are quieter courts, but like Bridgeport, New Haven has its own designated domestic violence courtroom that has 80 to 110 pending cases per day on top of incoming cases. 

“We see a lot of tough stuff all day, you know,” O’Connor said. “I mean, it's all crime. It's horrible. It's the people that you know the victims trusted that's harming them the most, the person that should be your safe person.”

The job is always tough, but it is especially hard when the court doesn’t rule in victims’ favor.

“I am the messenger, and the messenger kind of gets beat up sometimes,” O’Connor said. “It can be tough and frustrating dealing with it, because a lot of frustration can be taken out on you, and, you know, you have to be trained in compassion. You know they're frustrated because of what happened to them and the trauma that they went through, and you’re their voice, and you're the one that is talking to them, and they're opening up to you.”

With all of the emotions advocates experience on the job, self-care has to be a priority for O’Connor when she is working with her advocates. Of course, one has to practice what they preach. O’Connor’s self-care comes in the form of Ryder, her 8-year-old shih tzu. O’Connor often refers to Ryder as her “child” and a “constant toddler.” 

“I live by myself, so sometimes it's hard like coming home to silence. The fact that I have a wagging tail that meets me up the door is … I forget my whole day as soon as I see that happy face.”

No matter how much The Umbrella Center emphasizes self-care and mental health, burnout is still a real issue, particularly with incoming advocates. O’Connor said that it takes a special kind of person to be able to work in the court day-in and day-out.

“You have to have that empathy to work in this field, because if you don't, you won't survive,” O’Connor said. “You will burn out.”

Quick turnover isn’t always a facet of the advocate experience, but even advocates that have what it takes can struggle to stay in the job for a long time. Every once and a while, advocates are in for the long haul. O’Connor’s former boss retired from The Umbrella Center after 32 years. However, she came back to work part-time shortly after.

Eight years into the job, O’Connor has no plans of moving on. 

“If I didn't do this, I don't know what I would do,” O’Connor said. “You know some people (ask) ‘Oh, what's the next step for you?’ I don't know. I still love what I do. I'm still passionate about it.”

Even when the job takes its toll on O’Connor, her desire to work with her clients continues to push her.

“I know that sounds cheesy, but everyone says that in this field, you want to help,” O’Connor said. “You want to make a difference, and that's really kind of the part that keeps you going is the success stories that you have with your clients.”

While DeFilippo and O’Connor strictly work with victims of domestic violence, Ciancola works with families and victims of any violent crime, including homicide, robbery, assault, and more.

“I'm here first and foremost for the victim,” Ciancola said. “ Sometimes people think I work for the prosecutors, or I work for a certain department, but we're our own entity: The Office of Victims Services. We're there specifically to support the victim or the victim’s family.”

Homicides and cases involving children are particularly difficult for Ciancola.

“It's always difficult to see people who are grieving so deeply, who have lost somebody that they love or who have had a really traumatizing thing happen to them,” Ciancola said. “We get a lot of cases involving children here … and those are really, really difficult, because you are hearing about what happened to an innocent child. It's so hard to just wrap your head around how anybody could do these things to any other person, let alone a child.”

She may not have known in what capacity, but Ciancola always knew that she wanted to help people for a living.

“I knew I wanted to be in the helping field,” Ciancola said. “I always sort of gravitated toward helping people in different capacities, and even in high school I was part of the peer counseling group, and when I got to college I worked for the women's center for the four years that I was there”

However, even someone who has always wanted to help others can deal with burnout. Like the Center for Family Justice and The Umbrella Center, Ciancola and her coworkers put a strong emphasis on self-care, including frequent meetings with supervisors to ensure a good work-life balance.

For 16 years, Ciancola thought she took the job in stride, but it was a façade she kept up, even for herself. The wall came down during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, when the courts were shut down and most of Ciancola’s work came to a halt. 

“I felt so much less stress about work-related things,” Ciancola said. “This (work) was impacting me a lot more than I really realized.”

Ciancola joined many people in lockdown when she bought a Peloton bike to exercise. Exercise soon became one of Ciancola’s main ways of practicing self-care.

“It's really been like life changing for me. Which sounds kind of silly, I guess, that an exercise bike can be life changing,” Ciancola said. “But I realized that I was definitely having anxiety about certain things, both work related and some non work related, and once I got this bike and really made exercise a part of my routine. I realized that I just felt a lot better, and it's really a great outlet for me.”

Ciancola also picked up gardening during the spring and summer of 2020. When the days get warm, she comes home from work, pulls up her long brown hair, and spends time taking care of her plants to decompress.

“After seeing the horrible things that people can do sometimes, like, being out in nature is a reminder that there are still good and beautiful things in the world, too, and it's just a place that I kind of enjoy being at,” Ciancola said. “It makes me feel at peace.”

Ciancola also spends her time painting. Behind her chair at her desk, she keeps one of her paintings on display — a landscape painting of evergreen trees and snow-capped mountains under a sunset. It hangs on the side of her filing cabinet by using copious amounts of double-sided tape.