Fighting for Rape Victims

Gail Abarbanel, director of the Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center.

Claim to Fame: Founded center that combines medical treatment with psychological counseling for rape victims. Since its inception in 1974, the center, based at Santa Monica Hospital, has spearheaded a variety of studies and programs.

Background: Abarbanel, 47, earned her undergraduate degree at UCLA and a master’s in social work at USC. In 1974, she became the first social worker at Santa Monica Hospital, where she pioneered the concept of counseling rape victims in a hospital. In 1988, she founded Stuart House to treat sexually abused children.

Interviewer: Staff writer Petula Dvorak.

Q: How did you get so involved in the issue of rape?

A: It was one of the first issues I became interested in when I started working at Santa Monica Hospital. It was really by chance--it was at that point in history when people were starting to pay more attention to rape.

Within the first month I saw two women who had been raped, who had come here after receiving very bad treatment at other places. I was really affected by their experiences. One victim was a young woman who took a walk on the beach on a Sunday afternoon and was brutally raped by a stranger. She was filled with humiliation.

She had a lot of fears about her family finding out because she felt there was a stigma attached to being a rape victim and she felt that they would blame her. Seven days after the rape, she felt no way out other than making a suicide attempt and she actually came to Santa Monica Hospital in the emergency department having slashed her wrist.

That really had a profound impact on me and I realized there was no place for her to go, there was no special place for rape victims. So that led to the Rape Treatment Center.

Q: What services does the Rape Treatment Center provide?

A: What’s unique about the Rape Treatment Center is it provides all of the services victims need in one facility--all the medical, psychological and legal services the victims need. It saves victims from the stress and the trauma of having to go to different locations and different agencies.

We provide 24-hour emergency medical care and the evidentiary examination for the victim. We also provide long-term professional counseling services. We provide legal assistance and advocacy. We provide accompaniment services--we accompany victims during the medical exam, during police reporting and to the courts. And then we also have extensive education and prevention programs.

We have a large school-based prevention program that reaches about 6,000 teen-agers each year in the public schools. It’s a three-day program that Rape Center instructors teach in high school classes for 10th-graders, because teen-agers are more vulnerable to rape than any other age group.

We have a national campus rape campaign that we’ve developed because we were seeing a lot of victims from college campuses. We produced a film, “Campus Rape,” that’s being used in every state in the country on college campuses. We also wrote a book, “Sexual Assault on Campus--What Colleges Can Do,” that’s being used across the country to change policy and procedures on college campuses so that they’re more responsive.

Q: What have been some of the center’s principal innovations?

A: The center in the mid-’70s pioneered a model for hospital-based treatment of sexual assault victims, and that model has been adopted all over the country at hospitals and other agencies that provide services for rape victims. We incorporated psychological considerations into the medical response; up until that time rape was really not recognized to be a psychological emergency as well as a medical-care issue.

Q: What kinds of cases do you handle? Is there such a thing as a typical rape?

A: We see victims of all ages--small children to the oldest victim we had last year, who was 92. They come from every neighborhood, every walk of life, every socioeconomic and ethnic group. They really reflect the reality of rape in this community and in this society. It can happen to anyone.

We see a mixture of stranger rapes and acquaintance rapes. We see victims who come here immediately following a rape, and we also see victims who were raped a long time ago. We see women who were raped months ago, sometimes as many as 50 years ago, who never told anyone when it happened.

The other thing that’s striking is that rape happens in every possible kind of situation. A lot of stranger rapes happen in the victim’s own home--there are break-ins in the middle of the night. They also happen in parking lots in broad daylight. Sometimes women are kidnaped off the street. They happen in situations that we’re all in and places that we all go.

Q: Is there anything in the Westside that’s particularly conducive to creating an atmosphere where a rape can occur?

A: I don’t think so, but I think in any community there may be locations or situations in which rapes are going to occur.

This is a big beach community so there’s always an increase in rape and other violent crimes in summer. A lot of people come to the beach on very hot nights, take a walk on the beach, and they can be attacked under those circumstances.

We also have a large tourist and vulnerable population, especially in summer. And we have several large college campuses--college students are in the highest-risk group for rape.

We have a large homeless population, and many homeless victims. The myth is that homeless people are committing these crimes, but we actually see more homeless people who are victims. We have had a lot of cases with women who are living on the streets with children who are raped in front of their kids, or cases in which the children are also sexually assaulted.

Q: When homeless people go to the police or to someone else for help, are they believed?

A: Yes, but I think the tragedy is that these people have no alternative but to return to the street and to the circumstances in which they remain vulnerable.

Q: Do your victims come from all over Los Angeles?

A: The Rape Treatment Center has no geographic restrictions or limitations on services, so we get victims from all over Los Angeles County. More come from the Western region of Los Angeles County, but because of the unique services we provide they come from far away as well.

Q: Where does the money come from?

A: All the center’s services are supported by the community. We receive some donations that come into the hospital, as well as private donations through our own fund-raising efforts. We have a broad base of community support, and that enables us to provide services for free, so there’s no obstacle to getting help if you’re a rape victim.

Q: Do you counsel only women?

A: Yes.

Q: What would you tell a victim?

A: I don’t know if I could answer that in a simple way. One issue that some victims come here struggling with is a decision about reporting the rape. Our belief has always been that it’s important to report rapes because that’s the only way that we’re going to be able to stop this violence.

But we also believe that each victim has to make her own decision. We encourage it and we provide the support that helps victims go through that process, but we don’t coerce them.

I think that there is more willingness now than there was 10 years ago to report these assaults, but there are very different reporting patterns in stranger and acquaintance rapes.

Q: When did acquaintance rape come into the forefront and become acknowledged as a problem?

A: The center started dealing with acquaintance rape in the late ‘70s. We began to publicize the issue because we felt there was so much misunderstanding about it.

I think acquaintance rape is the most misunderstood and one of the most prevalent forms of criminal violence in this country. It certainly is the most common form of rape.

If you look at police statistics, stranger rape is more prevalent, but in reality acquaintance rape happens far more often. It’s just underreported, for understandable reasons.

Q: How have the headline cases--the Mike Tyson and the (William) Kennedy Smith trials--affected public perceptions and the atmosphere here at the center?

A: They have opened up public dialogue about acquaintance rapes. I think that’s a positive outcome because it has been a very hidden crime. Until it is out in the open and dealt with we’re not going to stop it or solve it.

Q: Are lawsuits becoming a more popular venue for rape victims?

A: Over the last five to 10 years we’ve seen an increase in civil suits, mainly lawsuits in which the victim sues a third party for some form of negligence that may have resulted in her being raped. There has been, I think, an increase in using lawsuits against landlords dealing with security issues, against colleges and sometimes lawsuits filed against the offender himself.

Q: How about the legal system? Is the victim still on trial when she goes to court?

A: In a lot of rape cases still, the victim is on trial, and the outcome depends more on how the jury views the victim’s behavior than how they evaluate the conduct of the defendant.

People have a lot of misconceptions about rape and those end up influencing decisions jurors make. There are behaviors that are very typical and very common in rape victims that historically have been misinterpreted and used to discredit victims. The most common ones are non-resistance and the absence of physical injuries.

The reality is that in a lot of cases the violence is threatened, not actually inflicted. You can have a gun at your head or a knife at your throat and it doesn’t leave a mark. You’re still terrorized and you’re psychologically traumatized.

But rape trauma doesn’t show on the outside and so a lot of people disbelieve the victim--she doesn’t have any bruises or broken bones to prove she was in a violent assault.

One of the main concerns I have now is that hospitals are increasingly unwilling to provide treatment for rape victims, and are starting to turn victims away. Many physicians do not want to be involved in a rape investigation, or they don’t receive adequate reimbursement, and it’s difficult for them to deal with victims who have been through that kind of trauma.

It’s primarily a problem in Los Angeles County. Other counties throughout California seem to be more responsive. We’re looking at legislation to change this, to increase physicians’ reimbursements, and we’re putting on a major seminar in June for emergency room personnel to teach them to deal with rape victims.

Q: Should women ever be held responsible for being raped?

A: Never. One of the biggest problems we have with acquaintance rape is that in many cases people don’t see it as real rape. They view it as less violent and less damaging.

That’s a misconception because acquaintance rape is the same crime as stranger rape--the only difference is the relationship between the victim and the offender. But there is much more of a tendency to blame the victim in an acquaintance rape. That’s one of the reasons the victims are less willing to report it.

Another difference is the circumstances in which these crimes occur. A stranger rape is likely to involve a lethal weapon, a gun or a knife used to threaten the victim. In acquaintance rape, usually the force and coercion that are used are just physical--the victim is physically held down or pinned down or forced to submit.

The other really significant difference is that a lot of times people look at acquaintance rape situations in retrospect--which is how we always view them in the courtroom--and conclude that the victim used poor judgment, or should have sensed danger sooner, or should have gotten herself out of the situation or shouldn’t have gotten herself into the situation.

I think that we make certain assumptions about people we know, people who go to our schools, people who our friends fixed us up on a date with, people who have a certain status in our society, and we assume those people are safe. We don’t expect criminal violence from those kinds of people.

So the case is not just that the victim was careless or reckless, it’s just that she trusted the person and really she had no reason not to. A lot of times society blames the victim and also the victim blames herself.

One of the after-effects, one of the strong feelings the victims have after an acquaintance rape is that somehow their judgment failed them and they blame themselves. They feel that somehow they should have foreseen that this person was dangerous when the reality is that often there isn’t a signal or a cue before this happens.

Q: Why do men rape?

A: We know a lot more about rapists than we used to. There are many different kinds of sex offenders, and there are differences in the nature of the attack depending on the kind of rapist committing the crime.

The rapes that tend to get the most publicity are the most violent ones, committed by what we call anger rapists or sadistic rapists.

But the most prevalent rapes are the ones that get the least publicity in the media. They are what we call power rapes, where the goal of the offender isn’t to physically brutalize the victim, it’s to dominate her and have a conquest. Those are the kind of rapes we see on college campuses, among teen-agers.

Q: On a societal level, what can be done to prevent rape?

A: Prevention starts with being informed and being educated. As long as we continue to blame the victim we’re never going to solve this problem. When a rape occurs, we ask the wrong questions. In these recent highly publicized cases, people were asking, “Why did she go to his house at 2 in the morning?”

In other cases they may ask, “Why did she have a drink?” and so forth. What we should really be asking is, “Why did the offender invite her to his house at two in the morning? Why did he buy her drinks?” We need to focus on the people committing these crimes.

Q: What do you, personally, bring to the Rape Treatment Center?

A: A strong sense of justice, I think, and maybe an ability to take what we learned from victims and translate it into social action and programs and reforms that have created an environment in which victims receive better treatment.

Q: Are you angry?

A: I’m not angry. I’m not a person who’s driven by anger. But I have a strong sense of justice and I have always felt that if the public knew what I know and what we see in the cases that come here, things would change.

I have tried to take what we know and what we’ve learned and bring it to the public’s attention. We had a lot of support for the changes we’ve advocated, whether it’s been changing the California rape law, or developing Stuart House for child rape victims because they were suffering so much discrimination and bad treatment.

I feel like I’m giving victims a voice through the actions I take, and empowering them to be part of changing the process.