Treatment Center for Rape Victims Opens

After years of planning and scrambling for funds, the San Fernando Valley’s first comprehensive treatment center for rape victims opened Friday at Mission Community Hospital in Panorama City.

“This is a bittersweet opening,” said Assemblyman Richard Katz, who in July helped to secure $500,000 in state funds to open the center, dubbed the Sexual Assault Response Team (SART).

“In an ideal world you wouldn’t need something like this, but we don’t live in an ideal world,” Katz said. “This will give women the kind of care they need.”

Supporters said SART will provide timely, top-notch medical aid for rape victims and ensure that treatment and interviews occur in a single location, thereby lessening the waiting time that can make a trying ordeal even worse.

The expertise of 16 nurses specially trained in sexual assault treatment, combined with the center’s state-of-the-art equipment, will also assist prosecutors, said Executive Director Madeline Marini.

“When a woman comes in who’s been assaulted she’s like a walking crime scene,” Marini said. “[SART] will increase the chance of police collecting the evidence that will convict the rapist.”

According to police records, more than 500 rapes were reported in the Valley last year, more than in 45 other state counties.

Victims were often required to travel to downtown Los Angeles to be treated, Katz said, sometimes waiting several hours while other injured patients were treated.

“The main idea of the team is that a victim receives the very best care available as soon as possible and that she only has to tell her story in detail one time,” Marini said.