Easing Trauma of Rape Victims

Long Beach and Santa Monica have learned the value of a sensitive, streamlined and centralized approach to the treatment of rape and sexual abuse victims. Los Angeles is lagging but can turn around by following its neighboring cities’ successful models.

Santa Monica’s Stuart House was established in 1988 as the nation’s first child abuse treatment program to bring together medical, law enforcement and child protection services officials, therapists and prosecutors in one location. The goal of Stuart House was many-fold: to reduce the number of times that a victim had to relive the trauma of an incident through interviews; to speed medical treatment; to centralize the process and to build stronger legal cases more quickly.

In Long Beach in 1994, the Community Hospital teamed up with the city’s police and health departments, a nonprofit agency and a company called Forensic Nurse Specialists to create the same sort of center for rape victims. Both facilities rely heavily on effective and aggressive private fund-raising.

It was not until 1995 that a similar program was launched in Los Angeles, at the California Hospital Medical Center downtown. Now, a coalition of doctors, nurses, police officers and social workers is trying to start another such center, at Mission Community Hospital in Panorama City, part of Los Angeles. Its nurses would be specially trained in collecting rape evidence and in giving court testimony, which is another welcome idea. Private funding will be sought for the facility’s operation.

These centers are important. Medical experts say that it is difficult to find physicians in Los Angeles who are willing to conduct rape examinations. Fees are one factor. Hospitals in Orange County are reimbursed by local jurisdictions for such assignments at much higher rates than hospitals in Los Angeles.

It boils down to this: Rape victims are sometimes taken to a rape treatment center in Santa Monica or to California Hospital Medical downtown. One Los Angeles location is hardly sufficient in a city where 1,500 rapes are reported every year and where many more go unreported, in part because victims are reluctant to endure what is widely considered to be a laborious and insensitive interview/investigation process.

The integrated approach adopted in Santa Monica and Long Beach is far more humane toward rape victims and, according to law enforcement officials, effective in prosecuting rape suspects. It ought to be more widely available in Los Angeles; supporting the Panorama City endeavor is one way to help make it happen.