Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Local Exams OKd in Child-Abuse Cases : Services: An Antelope Valley hospital will be utilized instead of L.A. site. The area has had a rising rate of incidents.

Responding to a high rate of reported child abuse in the Antelope Valley, Los Angeles County officials Thursday announced a new program that will allow children to be examined for signs of sexual abuse at a local hospital, instead of at facilities at least 75 miles away.

The program also creates a system under which children will only have to be interviewed once or twice by law enforcement and other officials, instead of the eight times usually necessary to mount criminal prosecutions, said Esther Gillies, executive director of the nonprofit Children’s Center for the Antelope Valley.

“It’s going to make life much, much easier for children out here,” said Gillies, who is coordinating the program.

Dubbed the Antelope Valley Abuse Network Team, the program is the latest in a series of efforts by county officials to respond to an unusual cluster of child slayings and a spiraling abuse rate in the Antelope Valley.

“The Antelope Valley is highly underdeveloped in terms of human services, and this is a nice step forward,” said Pete Digre, director of the county Department of Children’s Services.

County officials have acknowledged taking a closer look at the problem after a series of articles in The Times profiled a cluster of six Antelope Valley child-abuse slayings in just over a year, and disclosed that the region has one of the county’s highest rates of reported child abuse--three victims per 1,000 people, according to the county Children’s Services Department.

In response, the county has assigned a full-time administrator from the Department of Children’s Services to handle child-abuse cases and opened a satellite juvenile court in Lancaster for dependency cases, which typically involve children who have been abused or neglected.

The newest program, scheduled to begin next week, will cost about $100,000 this year, $80,000 of which is funded by the state and $20,000 by county Supervisor Mike Antonovich, Gillies said.

Under the program, children will be examined for signs of sexual abuse at High Desert Hospital in Lancaster. Previously, they had to travel to County-USC Medical Center, where the county’s Center for the Vulnerable Child and its director, Dr. Astrid Heger, are located, Gillies said. That’s because each exam had to be witnessed by Heger, a court-certified child-abuse expert.

But under the new program, Heger will watch the exams on a video monitor at County-USC while they are conducted in Lancaster or review them later on videotape, said Marty Nagel, deputy regional administrator for the Department of Children’s Services in Lancaster.

The program also teams about 25 sheriff’s deputies, social workers and prosecutors together in three- to four-member units. Instead of individually interviewing a child who reports sexual abuse, each team will assign one member to conduct a comprehensive interview.