Victims' trauma continues at sex-crimes unit, advocates testify

Survivors, already vulnerable, encounter a forbidding location and often-hostile investigators, Council is told.

By Michael Matza,
Mark Fazlollah
and Craig R. McCoy
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

Twenty years after it helped goad the Philadelphia Police Department into creating a separate sex-crimes unit, Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR) spoke out again yesterday about the department's handling of sexual assault.

The group's executive director and staff members who shepherd victims through the system described the police Special Victims Unit as a place where insensitive officers follow inflexible procedures in a forbidding physical setting.

The result, they told a City Council hearing, was that many victims are traumatized again at a moment of extreme vulnerability. While applauding certain sex-crimes officers who they said showed compassion and professionalism, the three WOAR witnesses generally lambasted the unit.

"This is a place where brutally traumatized women and kids, many of whom have just been in terror of losing their lives, are brought for questioning," Carole Johnson, the group's executive director, said of the Special Victims Unit, which is housed in the former Frankford Arsenal, a onetime military complex surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and high stone walls.

"While they sit in a tiny, windowless waiting area, they must listen to the hollering and swearing of recently arrested perpetrators kept in holding cells across the hall from the interview room," Johnson said.

While victims did not testify yesterday, advocates spoke on their behalf.

Deborah Callahan, who supervises 10 WOAR counselors, said she had observed "a pattern of poor, insensitive treatment of victims by many police officers." She cited instances in which officers made accusatory statements to victims or suggested they were to blame for what had happened to them.

"When a survivor goes through a degrading sexual-assault experience, is able to get up the courage to report the story to police, and then is met with a negative or skeptical response," she is crushed, Callahan said.

Earlier in the hearing, Police Commissioner John F. Timoney said the department was "moving in the right direction" to make needed changes. He cited training to improve sex-crimes investigators' interviewing techniques and the addition last week of an executive captain to monitor case management.

Timoney acknowledged that the unit's headquarters, in a brick building within the Arsenal Business Center, could be better situated. But he was noncommittal on WOAR's proposal to find a more central and modern location.

Stacey Walsh, a WOAR crisis-intervention counselor, spoke of the multiple traumas that a victim experiences, starting at the hospital where she is examined and continuing during her police interview.

Walsh, who was hired eight months ago, said she was speaking from recent observation. She described the harsh treatment she said was given to one woman who had been examined at a hospital after a sexual assault. Police wanted to take her to the Special Victims Unit immediately. The woman wanted to go home and sleep for a few hours first, Walsh said.

She "was told by a Special Victims Unit detective, 'Get going, missy,' or she would not be able to press charges if she didn't go that night," Walsh said.

Sex-crimes investigators exhibit a "judgmental attitude" that "deepens the survivors' sense of shame and guilt," Walsh said. "Some detectives in this unit have told survivors that they better not be lying or they will suffer the consequences, implying that a rape never occurred.

"Some survivors have stated that they were told they they would be unable to leave the unit until they admitted that it was consensual sex."

Women in crisis, she said, need a police response that does not re-traumatize them.