This is the difference between telling someone about a crisis and letting them feel a way out of it.

“We used to ask survivors, ‘What happened to you?’” says Vasquez. “Now we ask, ‘What do you need us to understand?’ That small shift changes everything. It returns the power. And that’s what awareness should be—not seeing a problem, but seeing a person.”

For the first time in weeks, the young woman doesn’t feel like a statistic.