VICTIMS OF RAPE: WHERE CAN THEY TURN?
Shuchman, Miriam
Victims of rape: Where can they turn? Crisis centers falter as the money runs out Miriam Shuchman Ioanne B. is a light sleeper. One Saturday morning last spring she awoke early, while it was...
...whose organization represents 200 rape crisis centers throughout the country, explains that programs generally close "because of their inability to secure any kind of consistent funding...
...At the heyday of the volunteer rape service movement, in 1976, there were about 400 groups operating," says -Mary Ann Largen, co-chairwoman of the legislative committee of the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault...
...Six years ago, the Government officially recognized the problem of sexual assault with the establishment of the National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape, under the auspices of the National Institute of Mental Health...
...Years earlier, as a child, Joanne B. had been raped by a distant relative and had dared not discuss the crime...
...That strategy failed, according to Mary Ann Largen...
...Now she phoned Fisher for reassurance and advice...
...Each day in her work as director of women's services for the Chicago YWCA, Barbara Engel grows more acutely aware of the unfulfilled legal, mental, and social needs of rape victims...
...Between those books and Sherry Fisher," Joanne said, "I realized I wasn't losing my mind, that what was going on with me was normal...
...Joanne B. (whose name has been changed) is not unique...
...However, they admit that the Center is permitted to fund certain projects at crisis centers, and recently Center directors stated their intention to orient future grants more towards "services demonstrations, planning, and implementation...
...In a recent issue of the journal Signs, Wesleyan University sociologist Allan Johnson wrote, "The average American woman is just as likely to suffer a sexual attack as she is to be diagnosed as having cancer, or to experience a divorce...
...On the day of the rape, the police had taken Joanne to Chicago's Billings Hospital, where Sherry Fisher, then an assistant to the hospital chaplains, had stayed with her throughout the arduous physical examination and told her to call back if any problems arose or she wanted to talk...
...On the Monday after the rape, she went as usual to her job as a secretary at the University of Chicago, but she was not having an easy time of it...
...As might be expected, those connected with community-based rape crisis services have serious reservations about the Center's control of the money...
...she doesn't really remember...
...At the heart of the tension lies the conflict between research and application...
...And more and more women may expect to be included in that group of one-time victims: As sociologist Allan Johnson interprets the statistics, "Nationally, a conservative estimate is that under current conditions, 20 to 30 per cent of girls now twelve years old will suffer a violent sexual attack during the remainder of their lives...
...We'll go to the police stations, and sometimes go to court with the women, but we don't have the time or the staff to do more than this...
...Yes, it happens," she says, sounding exasperated at her inability to help...
...Some of the research they've done was totally irrelevant...
...Research was chosen over services only out of political necessity...
...Now, many existing centers offer only the hotline service...
...Often, there is a "delayed reaction"—for several days the victim may follow her normal routine as if the rape had never occurred...
...On the other hand, the National Center has received money for research, at least for the next three years...
...On Wednesday, she was unable to complete a task due that afternoon...
...Meanwhile, such women as Joanne B. are coping with the aftereffects of rape—the slow-healing emotional and psychological wounds, the damaged marriages and strained family relationships, the terrible feelings of distrust and fear...
...The police told Joanne B. they did not know how the rapist had entered her apartment but speculated that he lived in the neighborhood and had obtained a key from a previous tenant...
...How can we benefit from the Center's research if we don't even know what they've found...
...But we just don't have the resources...
...Unsure where to turn for help, she phoned first the .YWCA, but discovered a long waiting list for its counseling sessions for rape victims...
...She estimates that one-third of all the rape crisis centers that existed in the mid-1970s had folded by 1980...
...nor has it sought input from members of community-based rape services groups...
...Changing the lock assuaged but did not eliminate her paralyzing fear that the rapist might appear again at any time...
...After watching it for six years, they are convinced that the Center is heavily biased against grass-root service groups...
...The movement and its needs, even if these have to do with services for rape victims, have been forgotten...
...Activists in the crisis center movement believe the National Center is "a child of the women's movement" and would do well to remember that...
...the other woman asked...
...Among women who have been raped and those who counsel them, Joanne B.'s story is all too common—the story of a woman trying to recover from the trauma of rape and finding few people to turn to for help...
...He could have picked any number and I would have kept counting till I reached it...
...During the Carter years, Maryland Senator Charles McC...
...Last year's passage of the Act served as a catalyst in the growing dispute between the rape services providers and the Center...
...But while her fears about her safety and mental health subsided...
...According to the FBI, a woman is raped every nine minutes in the United States...
...At the time, many viewed the Center as a triumph of the women's movement: Women's groups had lobbied extensively for its authorization by Congress, winning enough votes to override a veto by President Gerald Ford...
...Afterwards, he took her wallet, and ordered her to stay in bed and count aloud to 100...
...Rape crisis and counseling centers have fallen on hard times in the past few years, and many have been compelled to curtail services or close their doors...
...Today, more and more women must cope alone with these lingering effects...
...But the Center takes the position that "it would be logical" for it to do so, according to Dr...
...A local black community organization had no suggestions...
...On the contrary, Feather Davis speaks of the feminists' "vitriolic attacks on the Center" and suggests that it is precisely because of their more radical stance—the "we're-gonna-overthrow-the-entire-male-patri-archy" rhetoric, as Davis put it—that the crisis centers "aren't ever going to see Federal funds," either through the Center or otherwise...
...she said softly, thinking she heard her daughter...
...The university's personnel office responded coolly to her inquiries, and the clerical union which had represented her in her old job, while willing to handle her case as a grievance action, was preoccupied with broader power struggles...
...The bill called for $48 million for rape-related programs over the next four years, with $9 million allocated to research and the rest earmarked for direct services for rape victims...
...Yes, I'm quitting," she replied, and she went home...
...Tuesday was her fortieth birthday...
...Emotionally, I was so upset, and so many things were happening...
...She does remember that at one point she reached for a heavy object that she keeps near her bed...
...Cora...
...One Saturday morning last spring she awoke early, while it was still pitch black outside...
...A man's voice answered her in a hoarse whisper: "Shut up and stay quiet...
...At whatever point in time it became feasible, you'd go back and get it through to get services...
...This would appear to be an effort to regain the support of the crisis centers, but in the eyes of many rape services providers, it is too little, too late...
...But over the years, relations between the Center and women in the rape services movement have degenerated to the point of outright hostility...
...help at the time of the rape and long-term counseling...
...Despite the passage of the Mental Health Systems Act, no money has been appropriated for services to date, nor are funds requested in President Reagan's 1982 budget...
...The law does not state that the Center must distribute the money for services (as it must for research...
...Indeed, so certain is the Center of its logic that Davis was hired in February to administer the distribution of the services allocation...
...With only one small long-term counseling program to turn to, Chicago women are worse off than the women of San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., and other cities where rape crisis centers exist to provide ongoing counseling and assistance...
...Feather Davis, who worked this spring as a social analyst with the Center...
...who chaired the National Organization for Women's Task Force on Rape while the Center was being established, and who served as a consultant during its first two years...
...Through the scholarly work of Ann W. Burgess and Lynda L. Holmstrom and a few others, it became clear that rape victims do share an aftershock syndrome, termed "rape trauma syndrome" by researchers...
...she says...
...The crisis centers' complaints about the National Center are specific, and the Center defends itself on specific grounds...
...And then he raped her...
...I sat there and counted," she said later, "just like I was in a dream...
...But at the Center, memories are short...
...Results of the first major study on rape victims, done by Menachem Amir, appeared in 1971 in his book, Patterns in Forcible Rape...
...Yet often these centers rely heavily on volunteers and subsist on shoestring budgets...
...Why...
...Fisher assured her that what she was experiencing was normal and suggested she look at some books describing women's reactions to rape...
...In this literature, Joanne B. found muchneeded proof that others had experienced the horrors that she felt, and that these aftereffects were only temporary...
...Don't say a word and do as I say...
...Largen...
...But he grabbed her arm and held something sharp—perhaps a knife— against her throat...
...I feel like my life's falling apart...
...Mathias did, in fact, introduce rape services legislation as part of the Mental Health Systems Act...
...o'clock in the morning...
...Then I got up and called the police...
...Loretta Ross, director of the nineyear-old District of Columbia Rape Crisis Center, said of the National Center, "It hasn't helped us a goddamned bit," while Pam Klein, president of the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault, characterized the National Center's performance as "inept...
...It happens all the time...
...What's the matter with me...
...What the FBI does not say is that all of these women are likely to experience predictable psychological reactions to rape—reactions that may have immediate effects on their relations with people, their ability to function day to day, and their performance at work...
...Had she been raped ten years ago, none of the books Fisher suggested would have been available...
...Her wait continued...
...she felt nervous and distraught...
...training programs for police officers, hospital staff, and volunteers, and community education on rape prevention...
...All of the rest went to universities and research groups...
...In the dark and without her glasses, she could not see him or anything else...
...I think it's a classic example of citizens looking for benefits by working through the system and then getting screwed by that very system," she said...
...Women's groups initially supported the Center as a research body in hopes that funding for services would become available later...
...While Largen condemns the Center for what it has not done, Pam Klein is equally angry about the research it has funded...
...Largen explained that "there was extreme resistance by the [Nixon] Administration to services...
...Traditionally, the most complete rape crisis centers sponsored twenty-four-hour hotlines...
...It was over quickly, maybe...
...If she is an adult, she is likely to be attacked in her home, on the weekend, between eight o'clock in the evening and five Miriam Shuchman is a research assistant in health policy at the Urban Institute in Washington, D. C. This article is based in part on research conducted for the Chicago Journal...
...they were very open to research, but not at all to services...
...She discovered that many other women had left their jobs or moved out of their apartments after a rape, and realized that her own actions were not wild or bizarre...
...I was afraid to go home, afraid to be at home alone...
...Over the next few years, a handful of academic researchers began to explore the behavioral and psychological effects of rape...
...In some ways I thought I was losing my mind," she said...
...Most of the funds it has distributed have gone to universities and research groups, with rape services providers and community mental health centers receiving a slim sliver of the pie...
...There's an incredible dearth of services in this city," she says...
...Yet these events receive considerably more attention than does sexual assault...
...Still half asleep, she had forgotten that her daughter had moved out just one week before...
...Two months passed before a settlement was reached, awarding Joanne B. two weeks of back pay and the chance to work for the university when another position opened up...
...Because of a shortage of staff and resources, these women are turned away from counseling programs and crisis centers that simply cannot provide long-term assistance...
...People are scared about rape," she said...
...The lack of funding has taken its toll...
...But Barbara Engel thinks the lack of assistance for rape victims cannot be explained entirely on economic grounds...
...She runs a greater risk of being raped if, like Joanne B., she is black...
...Then the world cracks open," said one victim, "and you're scrambling just to keep the threads together...
...The Center was mandated to be a research agency, and in its five-year existence, it has focused its attention and budget primarily on academic research...
...She told Fisher about her nervousness and insomnia, and her difficulties in doing simple tasks...
...And the delayed reaction that can explode days or weeks later...
...I feel so crazy...
...There's still a lot of fear about getting involved...
...But that time never arrived...
...Perhaps the greatest potential source of funding, and in fact the greatest disappointment, has been the Federal Government...
...The feeling that rape is simply a "woman's problem" may also keep assistance away...
...And as things now stand, Federal funding for rape crisis centers seems unlikely...
...They've given money to people with no expertise in the field, and they've made no effort to disseminate any of the information which they've collected...
...In her own bed, in her apartment where she lives alone on the south side of Chicago...
...This time, she was no longer ashamed to talk about her experience, but she found few agencies prepared to listen and help...
...What are you, quitting...
...Of course, money is tight across the board for human services these days...
...Currently, we are the only group doing specific counseling for rape victims, and we have all of three paid staff persons...
...Of thirteen grants awarded by the Center during fiscal 1979 and 1980, none went to rape crisis centers, and only one went to a mental health center...
...At the same time, the victims themselves began to speak out in print: W. Ware Lynch's Rape: One Victim's Story appeared in 1974, and in 1978 Janet Bode wrote a resource guide for victims entitled Fighting Back...
...Staff at the National Center defend their funding policies, claiming that the Center is fulfilling its mandate to finance basic rape-related research...
...Unlike many of the Government's research agencies, the Center has no newsletter...
...And their conviction appears to be well-founded: Even the woman hired specifically to oversee the distribution of the Mental Health Systems Act appropriations has no background in victims' services...
...Joanne B. began to worry about money and work...
...Largen added that "the strategy was to get some legislation through on research...
...But it seems the origins of the hostility are political...
...she asked...
...Feeling that she had to leave, to straighten out her life, she put on her coat and handed her office keys to another employe...
...In addition, Largen reports, half of the services still in operation have been cut back over the past few years...
...Says Klein: "They've already Federal funding for crisis centers seems unlikely shown they don't want to hear from us...
Vol. 45 • June 1991 • No. 7
