Crime Victims’ Center Provides Aid for Those Brutalized by Attacks

There is a bald spot on the back of Rose Houston’s head from the time she was struck by a man who also scratched out her contact lenses and fled with her purse.

She was further humiliated, she said, by the hassles of closing her bank account the next day, getting a new driver’s license and seeing a psychologist.

Today Houston works at helping to lessen trauma for others like herself at the California Center on Victimology, an organization formed to help victims of violent crimes deal with personal and legal problems that come after surviving a criminal attack.

The center is designed to aid victims from the time of the police report to the final appeals court. It was founded nine months ago to address the imbalance between offenders’ rights and victims’ rights, said Judith Rowland, a former San Diego deputy district attorney and co-founder of the center.

“We’ve been talking about crime, but not about victims,” Rowland said. “Now is the time to talk about victims’ rights and to let victims talk for themselves.”

Departing from the traditional “clinical” approach to helping victims, “victimology” at the San Diego center is defined by Rowland as the “marriage” of psychological studies of victims with the criminal justice system.

The nonprofit organization is the first of its kind in California and one of a handful of similar ones scattered across the country in a network called The National Organization for Victim Assistance, she said.

Working from a budget of about $64,000, solicited from local businesses and national foundations, Rowland and executive director, Victoria Garcia, offer free legal counseling for victims, seminars for attorneys on maximizing their chances for convictions and training for volunteer counselors.

The five staff members of the center conduct research on the effects of violence on a victim and the legal proceedings that follow a criminal act. They have developed theories, they say, that will result in more convictions.

One of these theories is the “battered woman syndrome,” which describes the effects of recurring violence and threats on the defense instinct of the victim, causing the victim to resort to drastic measures to defend herself or himself against attack, Rowland said.

The center is asking the California Supreme Court to change the jury instruction that has made rape convictions more difficult.

They have also consulted legislators on impending bills concerning child abuse victims in courtrooms.

“We do not want to alter the rights of the defendants,” she said. “Our aim is to make sure that the victims know their rights and exercise them.”

Rowland said she left the district attorney’s office after nine years to start the center, located at Broadway and 24th Street, because she had become infuriated with how victims were left uninformed and confused throughout the judicial process.

“Victims are victimized twice,” she said. “First by the offender and then by the system. Crime is growing in San Diego and victims’ needs go unmet. We are trying to meet them now, but it will take us a lifetime to catch up.”

Clients who need psychological support or assistance with legal paper work are referred to self-help groups that meet three times a month at different locations. Others are directed to shelters or crisis centers.

Co-founder Garcia, a former psychiatric social worker who founded the city’s first battered women’s shelter, said she would like to see the center become more than just an open door to victims.

Garcia said she has written to San Diego Police Chief William Kolender a couple months ago asking that counselors from the center be allowed to meet victims at the scene of crimes. He is still considering the request.

“We would like to implement a crisis intervention system,” Garcia said. “The issue here is the feeling of the loss of control and the loss of safety. The later we reach them, the more compounded the damage becomes and the harder we have to work to bring them out.”

The center has between 30 and 40 clients, ranging in age from 12 to in their 70s, Garcia said. Thirty percent of the clients are men, most of whom have survived multiple stabbings or gunshot wounds. The remaining 70 percent are women and children.

Rowland added that recent television movies on rape and domestic abuse, such as “The Burning Bed,” have resulted in as many as 74 phone calls during a viewing. Among those who called, was a woman in her 70s who was raped 40 years ago and never told anyone, Rowland said.

Victimology also includes the family of the victim, Rowland and Garcia said.

“We’ve had to help the parents of a teen-ager who was killed,” Rowland said. “They were victims, too, and they needed help in pulling their lives together.”