BoomerGirl Diary

Hurst, Texas — When Shari Julian opened her counseling practice, in the mid-1980s, she thought she would talk to depressed housewives twice a week and raise her three sons the rest of the time. But it didn't turn out that way.

"It seemed like I got a franchise on sex offenders," she said. "It must be nobody wanted these guys."

But Julian grew to like cases involving society's outcasts. She also specializes in mass trauma.

Julian, of Hurst, Texas, has testified in numerous court cases and has appeared on NBC, MSNBC and other networks. She teaches victimology at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas.

Her work, obviously, is not for the weak. But she enjoys tackling controversial subjects that few others want to.

"What's exciting for me is looking at things completely differently," she said.

Growing up, Julian wanted to be a diplomat, so she took many arcane courses while earning her bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.After she got her doctorate in public administration, she traveled the world writing policies for large corporations.

She moved to Texas after she had her first baby and after her then-husband, a military officer, had been transferred here.

In the early 1980s, she got a clinical degree in counseling and marriage therapy from the University of North Texas in Denton and started a new career.

Julian became fascinated by sex offenders. She took courses anywhere she could on a subject that few other people studied.

During her sessions, she used words that would prompt her subjects to talk more openly about social taboos. She wouldn't say "victim." Instead, she would ask them, "Tell me about the first time you had sex."

She helped make a training film on the sexual assault of males and designed treatment for sex offenders.

By the 1990s, she had created a niche for herself with cases involving rape, assault, sex slavery, entrapment, harassment and discrimination. Attorneys called on her expertise for court cases.

Fort Worth attorney Elizabeth Parmer hired Julian a year ago to testify in a female-on-female sexual harassment case.

Julian provided the psychological framework that showed how a woman would harass another woman, Parmer said. Julian showed that the harassment was not sexually motivated but a power play and cited numerous studies.

"I wouldn't have the case without her," Parmer said. "She was very good."

Julian's other specialty is mass trauma.

After an event such as a natural disaster or train crash, she talks to survivors about what they need in the short and long term. In many cases, she starts a grief recovery group.

"It's not one size fits all," she said. "It's a different mix."

She talked to Hurricane Katrina survivors who had been housed at the Dallas Convention Center, Reunion Arena and other shelters in the North Texas area. She looked for the people who seemed most distressed_those who wouldn't raise their heads.

During her time there, she sent her friends and colleagues e-mails about the situation, including one about how so many people were displaced and how that created stress and overwhelmed the agencies there to help.

"Wow, who is this person?" said Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, theology and women's studies professor at Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., as she read Julian's essay. "She was able to get to the long-term issues as well as the deep vulnerabilities that we have."

One of Julian's essays ended up in an anthology that Kirk-Duggan edited, "The Sky is Crying: Race, Class and Natural Disaster."Although the work sounds intense, Julian said counseling both offenders and victims is "a very necessary job."

The cases can be challenging because each is different and many involve more than one crime.

But one place got to her_Death Row. She listened to murderers gleefully recount the horrible things they did.

"The aura of a lot of people is so evil," she said. "I had to get away from that."

She has many goals. She's in the midst of writing several books and would eventually like to host a radio show.

"I'd like to do all kinds of things," she said. "There's just not enough years."