Victims of a Cruel System

Los Angeles negotiators have taken a critical step in offering to increase the city’s payment to hospitals for examining sexual-assault victim and collecting potential evidence against rapists. Los Angeles County should follow suit, but is keeping a cruelly low profile as rape victims continue to be turned away from some hospitals in the area.

The next move is up to the area’s hospitals and doctors, who have a valid point that the examinations cost more than the $200 that Los Angeles is offering. But they should turn the force of their lobbying efforts on the state, not the cities and counties. The medical community would make a perfectly legitimate request if it asked the state to pick up the $115 that makes up the doctors’ usual share of the examination fee plus the cost of venereal-disease tests. Those tests form a baseline to indicate whether victims were free of diseases or contracted them from their assailants.

The politicians in Sacramento have fallen curiously silent about this emergency situation. Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) was out in front urging hospitals to return to the system until a solution was found, and that helped. Where is he when it comes to carrying a bill to pay the state’s share? Where are the Republican women in the Legislature who both understand the issue and might get the governor’s ear? And where is Gov. George Deukmejian? Surely he and anyone else must respond from the heart on hearing about a 16-year-old handicapped girl who was sexually assaulted while visiting a museum, told her story only when she got home to Calabasas, was turned away from a hospital there and finally transported to Santa Monica’s Rape Treatment Center miles away.

There are 11,000 rapes a year in California. If the state picked up the remaining $250 of the evidentiary examinations’ costs, California’s share of the bill would be $2.75 million. And women and children who are victims would not again be victimized by a system that today still turns them away when they most need help.