Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Rape Crisis Center expands to meet increased need

Counseling Center

Jackie Valley

Chairs line a wall of a main meeting room at the Rape Crisis Center’s Signs of Hope Counseling Center. The center, which opened Feb. 16, 2011, serves victims of sexual assault age 12 and older. Behind the chairs is a private, smaller room for discussions with victims and their family and friends.

To better meet the needs of victims of sexual assault across the valley, the Rape Crisis Center has expanded its office space and services. The organization, which supports and advocates for victims of rape and their families, saw a 12 percent increase in calls to its hotline and a 23 percent increase in victims requesting assistance at hospitals in the first half of 2015, as compared to the same time period last year.

Over the past several months, the center has provided 80 percent more counseling hours, trained its largest class of advocates and expanded its teen volunteer program. The center added about 1,000 square feet of office space to accommodate the increased activity.

The increase in demand for services could reflect an increasing number of victims seeking support following a sexual assault, said Daniele Dreitzer, the center’s executive director, but it could also reflect an increase in the actual number of sexual assaults. It’s hard to tell because not all clients the center serves choose to report the crimes to police. “We look at that in two ways,” said Dreitzer. “We don’t want one more person to be assaulted, but sexual assaults are one of the most underreported crimes.”

The additional office space includes a second conference room, which will allow the center to train victim advocates and offer support groups at the same time. The space includes meeting space for the center’s teen advocate volunteers, who work with the center to develop educational resources to distribute to the community. “We really appreciate our volunteers,” Dreitzer said. “The love, the caring is what our volunteers are all about.”

The expansion will also help the center prepare for increased demand for services as Metro plans to clear a backlog of about 6,300 untested rape kits across Southern Nevada over the next three years. Metro was awarded $2 million from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, $1 million from the U.S. Department of Justice and $1.7 million from the Nevada Attorney General’s Office last month for the tests.

Other jurisdictions that have started to test their backlogged rape kits have seen 20 to 30 percent come back with DNA matches, so the center is preparing for at least that much of an increase in requests for assistance, Dreitzer said. Some of the money from the Justice Department grant will also go toward funding an additional part-time victim advocate at the Rape Crisis Center, she said, and they plan to hold specific support groups for victims whose rape kits come back with a match.

Dreitzer said she was encouraged by the work that was being done in the community and hoped that testing the rape kit backlog will draw more attention to the issue of sexual assault. “I was meeting with someone at the hospital a few weeks ago who said, ‘I don’t want to take up any more of your time,’” Dreitzer said. “And I said, ‘No, no, no. You’re the reason we’re here!’”

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