Crisis Center Opens at CSUN, Offering a Port in the Storm

It has been more than five years since the intruder entered her first-story apartment window and attacked her in the 4 a.m. stillness, but Cheryl still has nightmares.

She remembers vividly the terror she felt as the powerful man lunged toward her, the ensuing fight when she kicked and screamed furiously, breaking furniture in the violent tussle, and then the interminable quiet when he had her by the neck and whispered, “shut up or I’ll kill you.”

Finally the sound of her neighbors pounding on her door scared him off. But the damage had just begun.

The police arrived to interrogate her--hurried and seemingly uninterested in her plight. They appeared disgusted when she burst into tears while recounting the events, the 28-year-old actress recalled as she smoked a cigarette nervously, in quick drags.

They took her statement, suggested she go to the hospital to have the cuts on her face looked at and left. The nurses at the hospital the next day were nice enough, but didn’t seem particularly sympathetic either. They took X-rays and left her alone.

Couldn’t Afford Counseling

She spent the next several nights sleeping at different friends’ apartments because she didn’t want to feel like a burden on any one person. She went to a counselor, but was too broke to continue and too numb for it to be of any help. She spent the next few days dazed, nursing a shiner.

A short, intense woman, Cheryl, who asked that her name be changed, still gets angry when she thinks about how she was treated. “I felt so alone,” she said bitterly. “And guess why? Because I was alone.”

Unfortunately, say rape crisis counselors, stories like this aren’t that unusual. But, until last Friday, Valley residents like Cheryl had no local program to help them through their trauma. Los Angeles’ rape-crisis centers were a toll call and many miles away.

The newly christened Trauma Center, a full-service facility at California State University, Northridge with a 24-hour hot line, in-person short-term counseling and trained advocate teams to accompany victims to the hospital, will change all that.

“This is the first time the Valley is being served,” said director Johanna Gallers, a psychologist and part-time instructor at CSUN.

No Place to Turn

“There was no place in the Valley specifically set up to help survivors get over the psychological distress caused by violent crimes. I was getting calls all the time from other social service agencies and sometimes private therapists who had rape victims and didn’t know what to do with them.”

According to the Los Angeles Commission on Assault Against Woman, one of every 2.2 women living in Los Angeles over the age of 14 will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime; and, among children, one out of seven boys and one out of four girls will sexually assaulted before they turn 18. During 1986, the number of rapes in the Valley increased slightly over the previous year (the Valley accounted for about 20% of the city of Los Angeles’ 2,331 reported rapes).

Although the new facility has been hailed by Los Angeles’ feminist community as a sorely needed and welcome addition, Gallers wants the Trauma Center, which is funded through a two-year grant from the Office of Criminal Justice Planning, to be considered more than a women’s place.

“The problem with rape crisis centers is they concentrate solely on women. Male survivors are overlooked. Men’s issues need to be looked at as well,” said Gallers.

“There’s a commonality in all trauma situations,” she said.

Gallers sees the Trauma Center as a central hub for trauma in the Valley. “We provide no-cost treatment for survivors of any kind of trauma--rape, assault, child abuse, robbery.”

Increase in Cases

The center’s opening couldn’t have come at a better time. Many hospitals that previously had city contracts to treat rape victims at no cost to the patient have dropped out of the program because of a new, more time-consuming evidence-gathering procedure mandated by the state that went into effect July 1. The remaining hospitals in the program are experiencing dramatic increases in the number of rape cases treated.

Furthermore, with hospital social-worker staffs already cut back to bare minimums, services like the Trauma Center’s 24-hour rape advocate teams are that much more valuable. Hospital social workers aren’t available nights or weekends.

Before Gallers’ program began, “you had to get raped during business hours if you were going to get any psychological counseling at a hospital,” she said.

“We’ve tried to sensitize our nurses,” said Natalie Heyman, social-service director at Olive View Medical Center, a county hospital in Sylmar that still treats rape victims free.

Life and Death

“But, in an emergency room, when you have gunshot wounds, motorcycle accidents and heart attacks--life and death situations--they’re going to take precedence.” Since many rape victims don’t appear to be physically hurt, “in an emergency room it doesn’t look like they need any attention,” she added.

The problem is, explained Rochelle Coffey, director of Pasadena’s rape crisis hot line, “for the rape survivor to have an exam at the hospital is often like a second assault.”

That’s where hot lines can be of assistance. While the doctors and nurses are busy tending to the patient’s medical needs, Coffey said, “we’re trained to be more sensitive to her emotional needs and to demystify the procedure. To walk her through it and explain her options.”

Several years ago, Joan went to a party at friends of her boyfriend, had too much to drink and asked the host and hostess if she could spend the night in the guest room. They readily agreed, but in the middle of the night the host slipped into her room and raped her.

Joan, now in her early 30s, didn’t report it because, she said, she didn’t receive any support from her friends. They said things like, “well, you were drunk. Maybe you led him on. What were you doing sleeping there anyway? You should have known better.”

Later, when she found out he was going on trial for raping other women, some at gunpoint, she decided to testify. Throughout her time on the stand, Joan said, she had to defend herself and her actions and was asked questions about her sex life. She felt as if she was being blamed. Even a subsequent drunk-driving charge was brought up for character assassination, she said.

‘They Feel So Dirty’

It’s stories like these that makes women involved in rape crisis fume. “It’s not the woman’s fault. That’s one of first things we have to tell them,” said Gallers. ‘Women need to hear that. They’re always so relieved to hear that they’re not responsible. They already feel so dirty. They need someone to hold them and tell them they’re OK.”

“A lot of people feel guilty,” Gallers said, “as if they should have known better. They think, ‘I shouldn’t have walked there or worn that dress.’ And, if it’s an acquaintance or date rape, it’s worse because then they’re dealing with their judgment--they thought they could trust this person and it turned out they couldn’t.”

Gallers believes her own past gives her credibility with her patients. She grew up in a household where she was physically abused by her father, then raped when she was 4 or 5 years old by a gang of neighborhood boys.

Problems Surface

As she grew older, problems started cropping up. She was on the verge of becoming an alcoholic, had trouble staying focused on a single career and was uncomfortable in intimate relationships.

“They were all the classic symptoms of someone suffering from delayed stress,” she says now. But at the time she didn’t recognize that they were pieces to a larger puzzle.

It was through working as a psychologist with Vietnam veterans that she realized the connection between her own repressed experience and the vets and was able to work through the trauma. For the first time, she was able to cry, and, with a new-found passion for her work, she began volunteering at a rape crisis center.

In all her years of analysis no one had been able to help her. But now she could help other rape victims by using a technique called “flooding.” Flooding is an intensive type of therapy in which the patient relives the trauma in detail.

She quickly become a guru of sorts in the Los Angeles rape crisis community, able to get fast results--usually within 12 weeks--for women with deep-seated problems.

“It’s very exciting to watch people shed years of bitterness and despair,” she said.

In the immediate fallout of a trauma, however, the center will use different counseling techniques. Galler believes that people need to work through the after-effects of trauma.

‘We’re just there to validate the terror and pain they’ve gone through and tell them that what they’re experiencing is normal,” she said. ‘We want to help people get their lives back to normal again.”