A commitment was made on the day in May 2014 that ground was broken in Santa Monica for a new, enlarged Stuart House “that those children who have endured the worst imaginable crimes deserve the best care that our society can provide.”
The philanthropist and children’s advocate Cheryl Saban went on: “Nowhere else in the entire country is providing better care for child victims of rape and sexual abuse than Stuart House.”
That has been so since Stuart House was established in 1988 as a pioneering, multiagency program and project of the Rape Treatment Center. From the beginning, it has worked relentlessly to improve care of child victims of sexual abuse and remedy problems in the child-protection system that often re-traumatizes the very children it is trying to help, in some cases leaving them vulnerable to subsequent abuse.
“The traditional child-protection system in place at that time was fragmented and ineffective,” said Gail Abarbanel, LCSW, who co-founded Stuart House when she was executive director of the Rape Treatment Center, of which she was the founder. “It needed to be changed.”
Thirty-six years since its inception, Stuart House continues to be a safe haven for youths who have been sexually abused, offering them a first step on the road to receiving appropriate medical care, justice, therapy and long-term healing. It is a space where every detail has been mindfully chosen to make a child or teen comfortable and at ease.
For the future, Harriet Kerr, LCSW, who became director of Stuart House in 2017 after nearly 14 years as director of prevention education for the Rape Treatment Center, would like to see expansion to provide broader preventive services, as well as acute-care services closer to home, to underserved communities in Los Angeles.
“We see a lot of children, but we have room to grow and the capacity to see more,” she says. “And I would like very much to see us develop a program to establish direct partnerships with youth and families to more effectively meet the ever-evolving needs of the families we serve.”
Stuart House arose during an era of increasing awareness of sexual abuse of children. Fueled by news coverage of high-profile cases in the 1980s, reported cases of child sexual abuse mushroomed, and the number of children referred to the Rape Treatment Center increased significantly.
“The issue of sexual abuse of children started to emerge more prominently, but there were few resources and no expert care, and families couldn’t find out what was happening with their children’s cases,” Abarbanel said.
“We kept hearing the same experiences from victims and their families: Children were being taken to multiple agencies in different locations, where they would be re-interviewed in cold, institutional environments like a police station, often by individuals with no training in child development or in treating traumatized children. So, we decided to develop a different model that would bring all of the involved agencies and professionals together under one roof.”
A first-of-its-kind public/private partnership was created that included staff from the Rape Treatment Center, law-enforcement agencies including the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office and the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) — all working together as a multidisciplinary team in a single location.
It was a revolutionary way of interacting with child victims of sexual abuse. The Stuart Foundation, established by family members of the Carnation Company founder, provided funding for a facility near the hospital. In tribute to the seed funding, the program was named Stuart House, after its benefactors.
"We decided to develop a different model that would bring all of the involved agencies and professionals together under one roof"
- Gail Abarbanel, RTC founder
Such an alignment of separate agencies is “incredibly rare,” says Bradley McCartt, the deputy-in-charge of the Stuart House district attorneys, a five-person unit of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office Sex Crimes Division that is dedicated exclusively to prosecuting cases that originate from Stuart House. (Over the nearly nine years that he has been involved with Stuart House, the unit has reviewed more than 2,000 cases, McCartt says.)
“Often, agencies are not sharing information,” he says, “and that sharing of information can be the difference between stopping abuse early or not knowing about it at all until the child’s either been further traumatized or, in some instances, the child hasn’t survived.”
In one case of McCartt’s, it was such a cooperative effort among agencies within Stuart House that proved instrumental in the conviction of a perpetrator known as the “Mid-City Molester” in 2011. Daniel Merino was sentenced to 83-years-to-life in prison for kidnapping and molesting four girls, ages 8 to 10, over a two-year period in 2008 and 2009.
The children were cared for at Stuart House, where therapists counseled them for a year and eased their parents’ concerns about re-traumatizing their daughters in the legal system. Each of the girls testified at Merino’s trial.
“If it weren’t for Stuart House, the case would not have gone to trial,” McCartt says.
The team was further bolstered in 2010, when the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office joined the mix, greatly expanding capacity to investigate and prosecute cases “and find justice for families,” Kerr says.
Children and adolescents who are brought to Stuart House receive immediate care in a state-of-the-art clinic on site, eliminating the need for a child victim to be referred to local hospital ERs, where they may have to endure long waiting periods that, in addition to being stressful in their own right, contribute to the erosion of DNA and other evidence.
Throughout, they are accompanied by a therapist, and a police detective and DCFS worker are on hand to ensure that the child will be released to a safe environment. The law-enforcement officers and social workers assigned to the child remain on the case for the duration of any criminal or judicial proceedings.
“Child sexual abuse is a uniquely horrific crime, and it is imperative that all of us who work in this field understand the huge, generational impact that it has on the life of a child,” Kerr says. “What makes it possible to do this work every day is being able to see the healing and the positive outcomes that we can deliver to these children and their families.”
Former Los Angeles Chief of Police Charlie Beck, who during his career had been involved in pursuing more than 1,000 sexual-assault cases involving both children and adults, has been an ardent supporter of Stuart House, and he recalled the days when he was a first responder.
“Invariably, you show up on the scene in the worst moment of their lives, and the desperate hope coming out of the despair when they look at you is palpable,” he said during the Stuart House groundbreaking. “You come in as a knight in shining armor, so to speak, and you see that in their eyes. That’s the good part. The sad part is that you know that it’s not true. You know that the hope that you’re going to fix this somehow is false. No matter how successful we are at what we do, it doesn’t fix the tragedy,” Chief Beck said. “It doesn’t restore the soul of the victim. That’s what Stuart House does.”
That sentiment is heard in the voices of victims who have received care there. As one young woman who survived childhood sexual abuse said of her experience at Stuart House: “It gave me what all children should have: security, love, support and protection. It gives you back the life that you dreamed of, the life that you should have. I learned I can count on people and that I am not alone.”
Marina Dundjerski is a freelance writer in Los Angeles. Mary-Rose Abraham is senior science writer for UCLA Health.
This article is adapted and updated from a feature published in the Summer 2015 issue of U Magazine.
