On October 1 a 13-year-old girl walking along a residential street in the far-west-side neighborhood of Austin was abducted at gunpoint, dragged into an abandoned building, and raped.
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Using as their guide programs already established at Mount Sinai and Michael Reese hospitals, the activists would like local hospitals to maintain a cadre of trained volunteers who could offer rape victims emergency-room counseling. A voluntary counseling program is a logical and relatively inexpensive service, yet no hospital west of Mount Sinai has one. On February 23 the authority and the council will sponsor a neighborhood meeting with officials from Bethany and Loretto, two west-side hospitals, and Oak Park and West Suburban hospitals, located just west of Austin in Oak Park. The activists hope to persuade these hospitals to create rape-victim programs.
“Austin is the largest community in Chicago,” says Redmond. “Unfortunately, it has one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the city, second only to Englewood’s. And yet there is no program to counsel victims.” Over the last two years there have been 25 cases of sexual assault in Austin, according to police. And those are just the reported cases. “A lot of women won’t report a sexual assault case because it’s a very painful and private issue to discuss,” says Sandra Calvin, a member of the Westside Health Authority. “I was a victim, and I wouldn’t talk to a stranger about it.”
Rape victims sometimes have to spend 12 to 16 hours in the hospital, taking medical tests and answering police questions. The experience in the emergency room only aggravates the trauma of the rape. “What happens to these people is brutal, and you can never predict how anyone is going to handle it–that depends on the victim and the crime,” says Ellis. “Being a Christian woman, I bring my Bible to help give them strength. If they don’t want to hear that, I just listen. Sometimes they just want to vent.
Another reason for the lack of rape-victim counseling is the cutbacks in inner-city health coverage. On the west side three hospitals have closed in the last five years, unable to keep pace with rising health costs. “It’s not just a problem with rape-victim programs, we don’t have any trauma centers west of Mount Sinai, which is on California–and that’s several miles from here,” says Leola Spann, executive director of the Northwest Austin Council. “People may not realize it, but we’re facing a crisis.”
