More Hospitals Now Treating Victims of Rape, Survey Shows

A survey by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office shows that more than half the hospitals in the county are offering services to rape victims, an improvement since last summer when stringent new state-mandated examining procedures prompted many hospitals to stop admitting such patients.

But, the survey said, it remains an “unacceptable situation” to those advocating on behalf of rape victims.

“It’s an improvement, no question about it,” Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner said Tuesday, referring to the survey, in which 53% of the county’s 138 hospitals said they offer the service. “But 53% is still not nearly enough.”

There are still reports of rape victims being refused treatment at local hospitals and of police being forced to shuttle them from one hospital to another in search of care.

As recently as last week, a 17-year-old raped in Inglewood was reportedly transferred four times to various hospitals before she received treatment for her injuries, according to a spokesman for state Sen. David Roberti (D-Hollywood.)

And Gail Abarbanel, director of the Rape Treatment Center at Santa Monica Hospital, which ultimately admitted the 17-year-old victim, said the center routinely receives several patients each week from outside its area who have been denied service elsewhere.

“How can these things continue to happen?” Abarbanel asked.

She said that in her 13 years in the rape treatment field, the current crisis is the first time that she has seen hospitals turn away rape victims.

Last fall, after hospitals began refusing to treat rape victims, partly because of the added expense of the new and more stringent examination procedures, city and Sheriff’s Department officials agreed to reimburse hospitals at the rate of $200 per victim toward the cost of the medical exams. (The actual cost to hospitals is about $400, according to health care officials.)

A majority of Los Angeles hospitals have responded “very favorably” to the offer, said Bill Russell of the city’s Department of General Services.

And he predicted that as many as 75% of them would ultimately sign contracts with the city agreeing to offer the service, which includes evidence-gathering procedures for criminal prosecution.

Russell maintains that the district attorney’s survey shows a “dramatic improvement” in service. He estimated that at the height of the rape treatment crisis, no more than 20% of the hospitals in the county were offering the service.

Nevertheless, Abarbanel insists that “there are still not enough hospitals currently doing the (rape) exams as evidenced by the fact that victims are being driven in police cars far away from the communities where they live or have been raped,” she said. “This is an unacceptable situation for medical, psychological and legal reasons.”

Steve Glazer, an aide to Roberti, agreed that a “major problem” persists, despite the findings of the district attorney’s survey. “If you’ve been raped and you can’t go into a hospital to be fully treated, you have a problem, period,” he said.

First Such Tally

The telephone survey, conducted over the last week and a half, is the first countywide tally of hospitals on the issue. Hospital officials were simply asked whether their hospitals offered the more stringent rape medical exams.

It was conducted in an attempt to provide a “missing piece of the puzzle” in the rape treatment debate, said Assistant Dist. Atty. Gregory Thompson. Despite various estimates, no one really knew “precisely the situation,” he said.

Thompson said the survey results will be made available to the Legislature in the hope that it will win support for a bill that Roberti plans to introduce to provide state funding for improved treatment of rape victims.

“It’s going to take a real (financial) commitment from the state” to solve the problem, Reiner said.