New Facility Offers Rape Victims a Quiet Space

Kathy Adams works in a cramped part of the Northridge Hospital Medical Center emergency room where she interviews victims and collects evidence of sexual assault.

Outside the examination room, police officers sit at a small desk to type reports and telephone witnesses. A few feet away are two chairs for the victim’s family.

That’s all the space there is for the half-dozen or more people who accompany sexual assault victims to the hospital. But on Wednesday, the Children’s Assault Treatment Services/Sexual Assault Response Team is set to move from the noisy emergency room into a secluded building on the hospital’s Van Nuys campus, a space designed to give victims more privacy and a calmer setting.

“They won’t have all the sights, sounds and smells of an emergency room,” said Adams, the program’s clinical director and a registered nurse who conducts some of the interviews and medical exams.

The new facility will have a private entrance so police can quietly escort victims into the building all hours of the day and night without having to walk through the emergency room, Adams said.

Inside, there will be two fully equipped examination rooms--one for adults and another for children--a separate interview room and a reception area for families, Adams said. Private offices will be available for police and prosecutors, if they want them, and for a crisis intervention program.

Northridge is one of three hospitals in the San Fernando Valley where police can bring victims for forensic exams. It is the only one open to children around the clock.

Since its inception in 1997, the program has grown from about 12 cases a month to a record 95 last May, said Bonnie Bailer, its administrative director.

Last fiscal year, the five-nurse staff examined 785 alleged victims--more than 550 of them minors--brought to the hospital by law enforcement or county social workers, program statistics show.

Nurses conduct physical examinations of the alleged victims, collecting DNA samples and using a colposcope, a special microscope that photographs tiny internal injuries.

“Their body actually becomes a crime scene,” said Adams, who has testified as a witness in about 15 sexual assault cases since 1995.

Police and prosecutors credit Adams and her staff with helping to solve crimes and win convictions by collecting critical DNA and other physical evidence.

They say the new facility should improve the atmosphere where traumatized victims, especially children, complete the medical exam, which can take anywhere from two to seven hours.

“Now we can take them to a calmer place,” said Det. Corinne Malinka, head of the sexual assault unit in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Foothill Division. “We don’t want to give them any more trauma than has to occur” with the examination.

Eventually, Northridge would like to be the first L.A. County hospital to videotape interviews with crime victims for law enforcement use, Adams said.

Hospitals in other California counties, such as Orange and Santa Barbara, already videotape interviews, she said. In Los Angeles, a protocol is being developed.

Two video cameras would be hidden in the ceiling of the interview room and hooked to a monitor in an office across the hall so police could watch as nurses ask patients to recall every detail of their sexual assault, Adams said.

Interviews are now audio taped; the recordings have proved valuable in the court system.

Once, to help them convict her father, jurors heard the hospital’s tape recording of a 13-year-old victim recounting the sexual assault she endured, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Eduards R. Abele. It was played in court after the girl’s mother fled to Mexico with the child, making her unavailable to testify.

The tape “brought the victim to life in front of the jury,” said Abele, a veteran sex crimes prosecutor in Van Nuys, crediting the expert medical staff. “A conviction would not have been possible without the audio tape and the medical evidence.”

The father was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison, he said.

As part of the program, victims also are introduced to specially trained advocates from the Valley Trauma Center, who suggest counseling and guide them through the criminal justice process.

Earlier this month, a counselor accompanied a 16-year-old Birmingham High School student who was gang raped by at least four teenagers to court in Van Nuys to face her attackers. The counselor also was present when the girl testified in court earlier this year.

That was another case in which the nursing staff made a difference.

“They provided us with the first set of clues of the likelihood that the victim [who passed out drunk] was sexually assaulted multiple times,” Abele said.

Most of the $200,000 for building renovations and new equipment for the new facility came in donations from nonprofits such as the California Endowment and UniHealth Foundation, Bailer said.

Carolyn McNary, a veteran sex crimes prosecutor in San Fernando, is so impressed with the new facility that she’s leading a fund-raising drive to decorate it.