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Cynthia Dragun’s career has taken her in directions she didn’t plan and couldn’t have foreseen. But as the Diocese of Stockton’s new victim assistance coordinator looks back on 20 years in law enforcement and another decade as a spiritual director, she sees she was being pulled in a consistent direction.
“I guess God wanted me to be where I could help people who needed what I had to offer,” Dragun said. “No matter where I was assigned or what job I took, I somehow kept finding my way back to help people who were victims of assault.”
Dragun didn’t know why she was drawn to law enforcement. She doesn’t come from a family of cops, and the move was not one family or friends saw coming. Nevertheless, she joined the Los Angeles Police Department in 1989 and rose through the ranks, retiring in 2008 as a supervising detective.
In that time, she compiled considerable experience investigating sexual assault and aiding the victim-surivors of these crimes of betrayal. She excelled in the department’s training programs and was named “top investigator” in her class. In law enforcement, excellent performance often means promotion and transfer, and Dragun was sent to work in a gang unit as the crack cocaine epidemic embroiled Los Angeles. Even in this assignment, her skills and compassion led to her being brought in to help on sexual abuse cases.
In 2006 she returned full-time to her area of greatest expertise, called on to run a special sexual assault unit responsible for all sexual assault and child molestation investigations in the San Fernando Valley.
In 2008, Dragun retired and moved with her husband and three children to Sonora. She began a second career as a spiritual director, completing a three-year spiritual direction program and furthering her skills at listening and supporting those searching for healing.
If this winding career path was a mystery to Dragun at the time, it’s clearer today. She now believes it was a way for her to provide for others what she herself didn’t have when she needed it. As a teenager, she was a victim of sexual assault, and the people whose support she needed most didn’t believe her.
“I know the pain this causes,” Dragun said. “I know how abuse can lead to so many other kinds of suffering such as addictions and so many other things. Victims so often end up blaming themselves, feeling that ‘if I’d just done this, or hadn’t done that.’ …I learned I couldn’t fix everything for victims, but I could listen, and I could help them stop blaming themselves.”
In her new position as the Diocese of Stockton’s victim assistance coordinator, Dragun wants to be a resource for victims of sexual abuse and a guide through a process that can be confusing and intimidating. She feels her office has the ability to listen to victims, to help them file reports and begin the search for justice and healing, and to direct them to sources of outside support, such as counseling, that may help them heal.
“I’m here to listen, and to learn,” Dragun said. “I have a lot to learn, but I believe I’m where God wants me to be.”