Antelope Valley : Center Sought to Deal With Surge in Child Abuse

Doctors and community leaders are working to establish a child-abuse treatment center in the Antelope Valley, where they say the isolation of the high desert has helped make the problem worse than in other parts of Los Angeles County.

“The raw numbers keep skyrocketing,” said Gene House, a Palm Springs consultant who heads fund-raising efforts for the proposed Antelope Valley Child Abuse Center. “Current services are fragmented. They are far below the demonstrated need, as the treatment community agrees.”

The characteristics of the area’s population--a mushrooming number of suburban families with jobholders commuting to Los Angeles, as well as a collection of secluded desert denizens--are themselves major factors in the unusually high number of abuse cases, experts say.

‘Buy House, Lose Home’

The commuters driving between affordable homes and faraway jobs suffer from pressures that sometimes contribute to child abuse, said John Beck, a psychiatrist who is vice president of the child-abuse center’s board of directors.

“We call it ‘Buy a house, lose a home,’ ” Beck said. “We’re seeing a lot of tired and tense people.”

And the remote desert and mountain areas, Beck said, “lend themselves to people who want to escape the mainstream, live secluded lives, people who tend to be poorly adjusted and have peculiar family relationships.”

A propensity for isolation and frequent moves to new homes characterize families in which abuse takes place, said Janice Rochelle, who heads a shelter for battered women in the Antelope Valley. She said some families in crisis seek out the remoteness of the high desert thinking that it will help.

“They think the solution to their problems is to move away from people because they think everybody else is the problem,” Rochelle said. “There’s anonymity in the desert. But the problem remains, and the victims grow up to become perpetrators.”

Higher Rate

County, school and law enforcement data show the semi-rural, sparsely populated Antelope Valley with a higher proportionate rate of reported physical and sexual child abuse than several more urban, densely populated areas throughout Los Angeles County. Social service workers caution that these statistics may reflect more thorough reporting as well as a higher incidence of child abuse.

During the past four months, the county’s Department of Children’s Services office in Lancaster has investigated an average of 540 reports of child abuse a month in the Antelope Valley area, which has a population of about 200,000. That equals about 2.7 reports per 1,000 residents.

By comparison:

* The department’s West Los Angeles office investigated an average of 530 monthly reports from an area with a population of about 500,000, including Inglewood, West Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Malibu and parts of the west San Fernando Valley--a rate of about one report per 1,000 residents a month.

* The Pomona, Long Beach and Santa Fe Springs offices, which serve populations ranging from 300,000 to 800,000, handled a combined average of 1.8 referrals per 1,000 residents.

* In 1988, the Antelope Valley sheriff’s station received 814 criminal child-abuse complaints, more than any of the other 18 stations and about one-sixth of the complaints handled by the entire Sheriff’s Department.

Five children died as a result of child abuse in 1988, according to law enforcement statistics cited by House.

“It’s a family tragedy that cuts across the social and class spectrum,” said House, who helped establish the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center for abused children in Rancho Mirage. “The problems are acute in outlying areas. Some people are out there to get away from society. Sometimes there aren’t the proper controls.”

The increase in cases of child abuse over the past several years has outpaced population growth. Palmdale’s population grew 17% last year; Lancaster’s grew 10% in the same period.

The number of child-abuse referrals to the county office in Lancaster rose 20% to 2,500 in 1988. The Antelope Valley Medical Center’s child-abuse program, which examines the victims and refers them to outside treatment services, treated 434 children last year, a 14% jump. The increase the previous year was 43%.

Desperate Need

Helen Myers, a consultant to the hospital program, said the need for a new comprehensive center has become acute. She said it will make the fight against child abuse more effective by coordinating treatment, prevention and education programs for social workers, deputies and the community, placing the services under one roof.

A site has not yet been found for the comprehensive facility, which would be run by a nonprofit foundation that is seeking private contributions and government funding. It would be run by a psychotherapist and would treat victims, abusers and their families, with payment on a sliding scale. The backers hope to begin operation in September.

The board of directors formed last year includes prominent doctors, business executives, hospital administrators and the president of Antelope Valley Community College. Through donations from businesses, hospitals and individuals, the group has raised about $200,000 of the $300,000 that it needs to open.

A recent report by the Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect (ICAN), formed by state, city and county agencies, reveals an especially high concentration of abuse cases in remote parts of the Antelope Valley.

The report on 32 elementary school districts showed that three small school districts in rural Antelope Valley areas with a much higher proportion of cases than the averages in Palmdale and Lancaster, which had rates comparable to or lower than those at other school districts in the county.

The per-capita rate of cases in these remote districts rivaled or surpassed the rates reported by several districts in working-class, urban areas of the county.

The 1,581-student Wilsona School District encompasses a large, sparsely populated territory stretching from Lake Los Angeles to the San Bernardino County line. It reported 41 cases, or 26 cases per 1,000 students. The Keppel Union School District in Littlerock reported 32 cases among 2,142 students, or 15 per 1,000. And the Eastside Union School District on the eastern fringes of Lancaster reported 14 cases in a population of 991.

By comparison, the 4,947-student Lennox Elementary School District reported 20 cases per 1,000 students, and the 5,408-student Hawthorne School District reported 12 cases per 1,000.

Frequent Abuse Reports

Social workers were not surprised. Jean McAndless, director of the Lancaster office of the Department of Children’s Services, said her staff gets frequent calls from the three school districts, where she said counselors and administrators are diligent about reporting suspected abuse. The outlying communities fit the profile that she and others construct when trying to explain the dynamics of the problem in the valley.

“You have pockets of poverty out there,” she said. “We get a lot of neglect cases. You also have working-class families where parents commute all the way to Los Angeles, and that puts strain on the family.”

Experts cite repeatedly the number of Antelope Valley families in which parents spend long hours on the freeway as a factor contributing to abuse. The number of commuters in the valley has been estimated by valley governments at 40,000. Many of those commuters are overworked young parents; some of their children suffer the consequences of short tempers and troubled marriages, experts said.

Another factor that law enforcement officials and social workers mention--all of them on condition of anonymity because they feel that the subject is sensitive--is cultural. They say they believe that there is a strong influence in the area of rigid religious and family values emphasizing corporal punishment.

In addition, several of those interviewed said they have found that some longtime residents migrated originally from the rural South and West, where physical and sexual abuse were problems in families.

Most of those interviewed also said Antelope Valley residents are especially aware and willing to report suspected problems.

“There is awareness and sensitivity to child abuse,” Lancaster Mayor Lynn Harrison said. “We maintain a small-town atmosphere. Not too many people are willing to turn a blind eye.”

Funding Denied

So far, however, Los Angeles County officials and the cities of Lancaster and Palmdale have denied the center’s request for $100,000 in county funds and $50,000 from each city.

A spokeswoman for County Supervisor Mike Antonovich said Antonovich supports the project, but the county has no money for new programs.

The center had planned to house a branch of Parents United, a no-cost, county-sponsored therapy program that works with families affected by incest. Those plans remain in limbo as county officials debate a recent move to end funding for Parents United countywide.

The Lancaster City Council recently purchased $2,500 worth of tickets to a fund-raiser for the Antelope Valley Child Abuse Center after some debate over whether that would be fair to other social service agencies. But as city officials pointed out, the council cannot grant the center’s $50,000 request because that amount is more than the about $40,000 the city gives to all other social services combined.

Other Needs

“It has merit; no one can dispute that,” Harrison said. “But to ask for that amount of funding leaves out all the other folks.”

Some project directors criticize government officials, saying their cause is more pressing than others.

House said child abuse requires special attention because it spawns other social ills: crime, alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness--and a continuing cycle of child abuse.

“This is not just another charity,” House said. “Heart disease doesn’t affect your reputation as a place to live. Cancer doesn’t affect your crime rate.”

Beck said the city governments must do more because child abuse “is a peculiarly endemic problem, a stigma on this community. It’s something the community should organize and fight against because it is a particular hotbed of trouble. When you have such a problem, you’re supposed to focus on it, not trivialize the problem.”

Request Criticized

That kind of fervor has annoyed other leaders. Palmdale Mayor Pete Knight, who is on the board of directors and takes pains to emphasize his support, called the request for $50,000 “rather presumptuous.”

Knight said the city has done a good deal to help secure private donations for the child abuse center. He said proponents of the center “are pushing rather hard. Their response has been that they would take their complaints to the press. That’s not the way to get money, by threatening.”

In spite of the tensions that the issue has produced, Knight and others said the community and financial support that the Antelope Valley Child Abuse Center has generated makes its success likely.

“The valley has committed itself,” he said. “I suspect we’ll get it started.”