Someplace for Victims to Go : Mental health: The nonprofit Valley Trauma Center offers free treatment to survivors of violent crime. It stays open through a novel business arrangement.

For Lorretta Woodbury, the Valley Trauma Center was the last resort before suicide.

Despite thousands of dollars and many years of private therapy, the 39-year-old incest survivor couldn’t escape the nightmares and the flashbacks of being a terrified 10-year-old girl on an isolated Wyoming range, being raped by her father in his pickup truck. Or the smell of his taxidermy lab, where she said she tolerated his abuse from the age of 7, when she was sent to live with him and her stepmother, until a social worker removed her from the home at 14.

Although she’d managed to suppress any recollection of the molestations for years, they came flooding back when she was in her 30s, wreaking havoc with her life. She began to suffer from symptoms many sexual assault victims experience years later: nightmares, tremendous anxiety, memory lapses and absent-mindedness. Being in one place too long made her nervous. Building intimacy in a relationship was impossible. And holding on to a job was extremely difficult.

“I was one sick puppy when the trauma center got ahold of me,” said Woodbury, a free-lance commercial artist who moved to the San Fernando Valley three years ago. “I was fully contemplating killing myself if the therapy didn’t work.”

Instead, she worked intensively for six months with therapists who specialized in incest issues. “In private therapy, they skirted around the incest issue,” Woodbury said. “At the trauma center, they made me confront it. They gave me a lot of inner strength--enough to go on and successfully prosecute my father last year for what he did to me.”

In what has become a celebrated case, Woodbury’s father, Lloyd Calvin Woodbury, 74, was charged in Wyoming with five felony sexual abuse counts more than 28 years after the fact in connection with the assaults on his daughter and two nieces. He pleaded guilty in November, 1990, in Carbon County, Wyo., to having raped his then-10-year-old daughter in 1962 and his then-13-year-old niece in 1958. As part of a plea bargain, prosecutors dropped three additional charges, one of them involving another 8-year-old niece.

Lloyd Woodbury was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to undergo counseling, to avoid contact with the victims and to avoid being around children without another adult present.

Authorities say they believe that this is one of the oldest cases not involving murder to be prosecuted in Wyoming, and perhaps in the nation. Although the incidents occurred so long ago, Wyoming, unlike most other states, has no statute of limitations. In California, the statute of limitations ranges from two to six years for all crimes except murder, which has no time limit.

The nonprofit Valley Trauma Center offers a 24-hour hot line, free short- and long-term counseling, and trained advocate teams who accompany victims to hospital emergency rooms after assaults.

The Valley’s only facility offering free treatment to victims of sexual assault, it opened four years ago at Cal State Northridge. Since then, it has served about 2,500 people.

Despite its success, it almost closed in September. The center was facing a rent increase of 50% at the same time its $80,000 grant from the state Office of Criminal Justice Planning was being slashed by $6,700, said center director Johanna Gallers, Ph.D., a part-time psychology instructor at CSUN.

Gallers, who says she routinely gets referrals from other social service agencies and private therapists in the Valley, said sexual assault victims would have had to drive to Los Angeles or Pasadena centers instead.

However, the center remained open by forging an innovative partnership with Pine Grove Hospital, a for-profit psychiatric facility in Canoga Park. Under the agreement, Pine Grove will contribute $700 a month toward the center’s rent, Gallers said. In return, the staffs at the two facilities will share the latest research and information in dealing with victims of violent crimes.

“It would have been a disaster to lose our only no-cost trauma center in the Valley,” said Assemblywoman Paula Boland (R-Granada Hills), who is sponsoring legislation that would eliminate the state statute of limitations on child abuse. “I don’t care how much legislation we might pass in Sacramento, if there’s no place to go, it’s all for nothing.”

Boland noted that, in an era when state and federal money for nonprofit facilities is drying up, the unusual collaboration, if successful, could become a model for other institutions.

“I’m thrilled that a profit-making venture is joining forces with a nonprofit to keep the doors open for this critical service. It’s an ideal partnership.”

Some leaders in the women’s services movement were more guarded.

“The current fiscal crisis among women’s services is certainly causing us to look at creative solutions like partnerships with nonprofits,” said Ellen Ledley, director of the Family Violence Project of Jewish Family Services in Van Nuys.

“There’s no doubt some women will benefit from the facilities at Pine Grove. But traditionally, women’s services have been a grass-roots movement of and for survivors. We need to be cautious not to be co-opted--to ensure that profit doesn’t become the motive rather than concern for the clients.”

The Valley Trauma Center, which moved Labor Day weekend to new offices a few blocks from campus, is staffed by 26 CSUN graduate student interns seeking their master’s degrees in psychological counseling, Gallers said. The bulk of the center’s clients are adult victims of sexual assault or incest, and about 25% of the caseload involves children.

The center handles about 70 new calls each month, up 15% from last year. According to statistics from the Los Angeles Police Department, 472 rapes were reported last year in the Valley; in the first three quarters of 1991, the number of reported rapes has risen 15% over the same period last year.

Gallers believes that “there are probably 10 to 20 times that many that are never reported.” According to the FBI, rape is the fastest-growing violent crime in the United States.

Unlike other rape crisis centers, the Valley Trauma Center always offered long-term individual therapy. “We’ve been seeing some clients once a week for two years, all for free,” Gallers said.

The new partnership will allow the center to offer clients more options: Victims who need it will now be able to get inpatient care through Pine Grove Hospital.

Cost for the hospital care will be paid either by a patient’s medical insurance or the state Victims-Witness Assistance Fund.

Gallers had heard about Pine Grove’s plans for an in-house 13-bed trauma ward for victims of violent crimes through a student who also worked at the hospital. Gallers, who has worked with victims of all types of trauma, said there’s a commonality in these kinds of cases. “I realized we were doing the same thing,” she said, referring to Pine Grove and the trauma center. “We could do the long-term follow-up care, and they could help us stay alive.”

Gallers contacted Pine Grove administrators, and the two facilities forged the collaborative effort.

“We see it as a great match,” said Elliot Goldstein, Pine Grove’s administrator. “It’s an opportunity for two complementary programs to provide better services for patients. In addition, the interns can do part of their training at our facility.”

A program specializing in the acute problems experienced by victims of violent crimes, Goldstein said, was really needed in Los Angeles. There was no place to go for people who had witnessed murders, or who had been the victims of sexual assault or battery.

Pine Grove’s 13-bed Breakthrough Program opened in mid-September. The 10- to 14-day program is followed by six months of outpatient care.

“It’s a safe setting for patients who need intensive, inpatient care,” said Dr. Gale Cooper, a consulting psychiatrist for Pine Grove and a specialist in the aftereffects of violent crimes. “We had one woman banging her head and cutting herself.

“These people are in tremendous crisis. Some exhibit suicidal behavior. They’re trying to escape the pain or the panic and guilt of flashbacks. We have a specially trained staff who can deal with the special needs, the emotional numbing and the heightened arousal of these patients.”

Gallers said the new program at Pine Grove will serve the 10% to 15% of her clients who required more care than her center could offer. For example, last year, Gallers accompanied a rape victim from out of town to a hospital emergency room.

“She had no money or family, and we had no place to send her,” Gallers said. “She could have used a facility like this. Cases like this aren’t that unusual. Now we have a place to send clients who need more structure and focus and more concentrated help than we can offer on a once-a-week outpatient basis.”

Gallers has already referred two patients to the new Breakthrough Program. Both were teen-age incest survivors, she said. One had tried to commit suicide; the other had mutilated herself.

“They both needed to be away from their families and be in a supportive environment,” she said. “They needed more than we could offer. They’ll come back to us when they’re ready for follow-up.”

Lorretta Woodbury still worries about the fate of the trauma center. And despite its temporary respite, in this age of government cutbacks, “they’re not out of the woods yet,” Boland warned.

This month, the center, along with 135 other victim-assistance programs in California, received warning of potential budget cuts of as much as 25% starting in January. (The penalties paid by convicted offenders that finance California’s victim programs have dropped dramatically.) Slashing another 25% from its already lean budget would be the center’s death knell, Gallers said.

But Boland promised to back emergency legislation to counteract the cuts and keep the trauma center operating.

“We have to do everything in our power to not let this center go,” she said.