Community Solutions celebrates a quarter-century of service
helping sexual assault survivors
Gilroy – Sandra Jones describes her rape in halting speech. Sometimes she strains to be understood; sometimes her tears interrupt her.
Jones is a disabled woman, a Mormon with silver hair and a wedding ring. Her story belies the common nonsense that a woman asks to be raped.
She didn’t ask the repairman to enter her trailer, where he claimed he wanted to fix a warped vent. She didn’t ask him to put his hands on her neck. She told him to stop.
No – she didn’t ask to be raped.
“I was so scared,” she says, her voice rising. Months after it happened, “I couldn’t even give my husband a hug – or anybody. I was so scared, because of this rape.”
Sadly, it wasn’t the first time that Jones was violated, she said. It wasn’t even the second. Perla Flores, director of Community Solutions’ domestic violence and sexual assault program, said that three-fourths of the disabled are raped during their lives, and Jones wasn’t an exception.
It was only by reporting her assault that Jones became an exception. Most such crimes go unreported, but Jones saved the evidence. Even as her attacker waited outside the shower, she made sure that she didn’t wash his crime away.
“The man that raped me thought that I was dumb,” Jones said. “I’m not dumb.”
Jones did everything right: kept the evidence and reported the crime. Yet two weeks after she reported the assault, her attacker was still living in her trailer park, watching as her husband Roger left for work. Neighbors blamed her, and said she should have kept it quiet. When she opened her door, she could see the rapist mouth to her, ‘I’m going to get you.’
That’s where Community Solutions stepped in. Case manager Debbie Ruiz contacted police to get the man away from Jones, and into custody. She talked Jones through the fear, gladly answering 3am calls. Eventually, Ruiz accompanied her to court.
“If ever I get raped again,” Jones said, “I’d call the rape crisis center, and they’d come running.”
Celebrating 25 years
Twenty-five years ago, Community Solutions’ sexual assault services was a handful of Gavilan College students, a group of women with no money, no office, and a problem nobody wanted to acknowledge. Rape wasn’t a problem here, Gilroy police argued: that year, recalled DeSilva, only one rape was reported in Morgan Hill. Three were reported in Gilroy.
But the low numbers didn’t reflect a happy reality. The shame and blame hurled at those who survived muted rape victims, said DeSilva.
“It was difficult for women to talk about it,” DeSilva said. “There was a climate of victim-blaming: how she was dressed, where she was.”
“Things like date rape – we didn’t even have the language for it back then,” recalled Nancy Casey, a founder. “It was swept under the rug. Ignored.”
As they discussed the problem in living rooms and Gilroy coffee shops, they began to piece together their own vision. At first, it was a grandiose dream: a women’s center, named Annapurna after a Himalayan mountain first scaled by women climbers in 1978.
But limited funding forced them to narrow their focus. La Isla Pacifica aided battered women in Gilroy, but no agency dealt specifically with victims of sexual assault.
“We wanted to create a place where women felt safe, where they’d be believed, rather than blamed,” said DeSilva.
Together, they formed the South County Rape Crisis Service: a crisis line and support service. They were adopted by the Bridge Counseling Center, and opened the phones Oct. 20, 1981. There were no manuals then to guide them, so they did what they could, drawing on the advice of emergency room doctors, police and the San Jose YWCA.
“It took us almost a year before we thought we were competent enough to go on line,” said Casey. She was among the first to answer the crisis line, a late-night call that she wasn’t prepared for: A mother called after finding out that her husband had been sexually assaulting her son. She wanted to know how she could find him. And kill him.
“We didn’t have anything like that in our training!” Casey said. Eventually, she convinced the woman to call the police, instead of taking justice into her own hands. “I told her, you can’t kill your husband, because you’ll go to jail – and you have to be there for your son.”
In the era before cell phones, staffing the crisis line meant staying at home for 24 hours, and with only eight women on staff, many did it once or twice a week. Perverse prank calls intermingled with real, rattling calls for help. The volunteers accompanied assault survivors to the hospital, spending six or seven hours at a person’s side, just listening. At that time, rape survivors sometimes waited all night at the emergency room; today, said DeSilva, Santa Clara Valley Medical Center’s South Valley Clinic has a separate waiting area for survivors of sexual assault.
“Some people wouldn’t even call the police,” said Casey. “Now, [the police] have a sexual assault unit, and they know exactly what to do. Things really have changed.”
In 1996, The Bridge Counseling Center merged with Discover Alternatives and South Valley Counseling Center to form Community Solutions, which offers services for mental health, substance abuse, homelessness and other issues in addition to sexual assault. Since the rape crisis line’s founding, the number of reported rapes in Gilroy has gone up: in 2005, according to the FBI, 13 forcible rapes were reported in Gilroy, 11 in Morgan Hill, and eight in Hollister. Twenty-five were reported to Santa Clara County sheriffs.
Those numbers signal not an increase in violence, but the breaking of long-held silence, DeSilva said.
Years ago, Casey was standing in line at a San Jose department store, wearing a Rape Crisis Services button, when a saleswoman pulled her aside.
“She said, ‘I was raped 50 years ago, and I’ve never told anybody,'” Casey recalled.
Slowly, she related her own story, buried a half-century since she was a teen.
“When she finished, she said, ‘I feel so much better, talking to you.’ ”
Sharing stories
At Mama Mia’s restaurant in Morgan Hill, staff mingle with volunteers, survivors and law enforcement, at the agency’s 25-year celebration of providing sexual assault services. Sandra Jones sits alongside her husband, Roger, beaming. Debbie Ruiz is seated nearby.
By now, Jones has told her story dozens of times, to dozens of groups: Gavilan college students, church groups, and youth. She cries, and so do they. But the story is no longer just a sad tale. No survivor needs to struggle alone, she tells her audiences, and no one is powerless.
Challenges remain for Community Solutions. Funding cuts carved $130,000 out of Community Solutions’ budget a few years ago, when the Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health branch of California’s Department of Health Services redistributed prevention funds across 97 shelters in California.
“We’re doing the same amount of work with less staffing,” said Perla Flores, director of the agency’s Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Services program. “And when funding is cut, the first thing that goes is prevention work.”
Flores said myths about rape still abound: that it’s about sex, not power, and that it’s a woman’s fault.
Even today, added DeSilva, some rape victims are smeared when they come forward. Whether or not Kobe Bryant was guilty of rape, she said, his accuser shouldn’t face ridicule and threats.
But at the reception, as Flores and DeSilva gaze at their supporters, applauding and smiling, it seems possible to imagine – in another 25 years, maybe less – an era without rape.
