Valley Trauma Center to Open 2nd Facility in Newhall

The Valley Trauma Center, which has provided crisis services for sexual assault victims in Northridge since 1984, said Monday it will open a second center later this month in Newhall.

Trauma center officials said the Newhall branch will be the only facility of its kind in the Santa Clarita Valley and will help to make up for a lack of sexual trauma services in northern Los Angeles County. It is scheduled to open the week of May 18.

“We are going to be serving an area from Santa Clarita to Lancaster,” said Jennifer Griffin, assistant director of the new Valley Trauma Center North.

“Right now there is not much up there. Assault victims often have to come the [San Fernando] Valley for counseling and other services.”

The center will be funded by a $160,000 grant from the state Office of Criminal Justice Planning, which also provides funding for the Northridge center, officials said.

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The nonprofit trauma center is operated by the Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling of Cal State Northridge.

According to Patti Dengler, director of the program, the Valley Trauma Center received more than 3,000 calls to its hotline in 1997. Approximately 1,400 of those calls were made by sexual assault victims. In addition, the center provided counseling for 750 clients last year and delivered more than 400 educational presentations.

Unlike the trauma center’s Northridge location, which works in conjunction with Northridge Medical Center’s Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) to provide medical care for victims and gather forensic evidence that can be used to aid prosecutions of sexual offenders, the Santa Clarita branch will not initially provide medical exams or treatment.

Instead, the new center will focus on providing free and low-cost counseling, advocacy and education to assault victims.

“We are taking about trying to start a SART program at Henry Mayo (Newhall Memorial Hospital]. Hopefully we will have those services up there in the future,” Griffin said.

The Valley Trauma Center is open to men, women and children. Services are available to anyone who has been a victim of a sexual assault, either recently or in the past, Griffin said.

“The counseling can be very beneficial to the healing process,” Griffin said. “When something like this happens it changes your life forever. People need help to deal with the issues and get their lives back to normal.”

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A new hotline number for the Santa Clarita center has not yet been assigned but will be prior to the opening, officials said. The business phone number is (805) 253-1772. The center will be located at 24359 Walnut St., Suite B, Newhall.